Missing Christmas - Kate Clayborn Page 0,23
shower, or . . . ?”
She’s quiet behind me, and when I look over at her, she’s tugged the sheet up over her skin, turned onto her back. After a few seconds she shifts, keeping the sheet pressed to her chest while she sits up, her other arm reaching for her own phone. She clears her throat delicately. “You can go ahead,” she says. I open my mouth to clarify that I meant it as an invitation, something we could do together. But she speaks before I can. “I should look at flights for later, see what’s going on there.”
I don’t like the way her face has shuttered, the way she’s tapping away at the phone. I reach back to set a hand on her leg. “You okay?”
Tell me you don’t regret it.
She looks up at me, the light in her eyes dimmed but her smile in place.
“I’m good.” She leans forward to kiss me again, quick like before. It doesn’t feel so happily ever after this time but I try to trust her, to trust this. I can make this work with her. I can show her how good it’ll be.
When I come out of the shower she’s pulling clothes from her suitcase, holding them to her while she walks toward the bathroom. She smiles as she passes but also tells me she’s on standby for a flight out tonight. I tell her I’m happy, and I am—but tension ratchets up inside me. If she goes tonight, and we don’t have this job settled, what’s she going to think about this, about us? About how we’ll be able to do the job and do this, when this has only just started? What happens when Christmas is over and we’re back in Houston, the place where we set all those boundaries that have kept us apart?
While she showers I open my laptop, which starts up where we left it, credits rolling over a version of “Here Comes Santa Claus”—annoyingly on the nose. I read over everything I’ve got on GreenCorp, on Gil’s patent. I’m deep in it when she comes out, dressed in a pair of jeans and a heavy cream sweater, her hair down, no makeup. She looks over at where I sit on the bed in nothing but my boxer briefs, and I set the computer aside. I’d like to go over to her, or have her come over to me, feel the texture of that sweater all over my skin—
“Don’t put on your work clothes,” she says. “It’s a family meal. We don’t want to make them uncomfortable.”
Her tone is so different than it was just a half hour ago. But maybe she’s just feeling the way I’m feeling. This is a good tip about the job, one I probably wouldn’t think of myself, and isn’t that what’s always made us such a good team?
“Yeah, of course,” I say, and stand to get dressed.
I’m still uneasy when we pull the door closed behind us twenty minutes later. I’ve got the cookies we made yesterday, and Kris is clutching a small gift bag in one hand, a set of note cards she’d been planning to give to an aunt she’ll be seeing the day after Christmas. The sun is blinding, the snow so white it feels like there’s nowhere comfortable to look, and we mostly squint our way across the expanse of yard that takes us to the ranch house. I hold the tray of cookies tightly in one hand, keep my other at the ready as we trudge through the snow, in case Kris slips.
But she knows snow better than I do, and she doesn’t need me at all.
On the porch we both stamp our feet, knocking off excess powder. As I watch her, eyes cast down and mouth free of her easy smile, I decide I don’t want to ignore that uneasy feeling. Something’s gone wrong enough that it’s got me missing her again. And I’ve already decided: I can’t go back to that.
So when she lifts her hand to knock, I say her name.
She turns to look at me, her eyes flat and her mouth in a line.
“What are we doing here?” she asks.
I slide my eyes to the door. “The lunch?”
“Is this for the job, or is it for Christmas?”
“I . . .” I swallow, not sure what to say. Isn’t it both? Isn’t part of what I’m trying to give her for this Christmas some assurance about the job? I realize, with a