Tic-Tac-Mistletoe - N.R. Walker Page 0,36
the chocolate-peppermint and the plain ones, we’ll make double the recipe and halve the dough. We’ll need to do the peanut butter one on its own. How about we start with the plain sugar cookies first. They’re the easiest.”
“Excellent. Just show me what you need me to do.”
We fell into a rhythm of mixing and kneading, all while Mariah Carey sang Christmas songs and a light dusting of snow fell outside. Hamish would ask if what he was doing was right, then he’d happily keep going. We used the cutters and made stars and Christmas trees and candy canes and set them in the oven to bake.
He did that cute bouncy-clap thing, all excited to have finished his first-ever batch of cookies. Then with the other half of dough, we halved it again and added cocoa to one half, then sprinkled crushed peppermint candy into the plain half. We flattened them out into somewhat even sheets and laid the peppermint dough onto the chocolate one, and I showed him how to roll them to make pinwheels.
It was kind of tricky and these weren’t going to win any awards but it was fun, and Hamish was duly impressed. “It needs to go into the fridge for a bit,” I explained, then took the first batch of cookies out of the oven. “But we can start on the peanut butter ones if you want?”
“Yes, I want.”
He was all smiles as he hummed away to the music, and as we were mixing the dough together, he bumped his hip to mine. “So . . . You said yesterday that you never get to talk about gay things. What did you want to talk about?”
I could feel a blush burning from my scalp down to my toes. “Ah, nothing, really. I don’t know . . . I just . . . Ugh.”
I thought he might laugh at me, but of course he didn’t. He turned and put his hand on my arm. “Hey, don’t be embarrassed. I didn’t mean to make you feel uncomfortable. I just thought you might have had pent-up opinions on things you can’t really discuss with the Hartbridge folks.”
I wasn’t sure which direction he was heading with this conversation and I didn’t want to jump in with both feet in the wrong one. “Like what?”
“Liiiiike . . .” He made a thinking face. “Every drama and scandal on Drag Race. Such as why Chanteal would pair that pink taffeta with brown. What was she thinking? And that orange plaid skirt, girl, no.”
I laughed. “Not one thing you just said made sense to me.”
“You didn’t watch it?”
“I’ve seen some episodes, but I never followed it.”
“What kind of TV shows do you watch?”
“I don’t love reality shows, sorry. I don’t mind the home renovations shows, like the Property Brothers.”
“Cute brothers. I see how that gets a mention.”
I laughed. “And the treehouse show.”
He frowned. “I don’t know that one.”
“They build amazing treehouses. But they’re not a playhouse for kids. They’re like a studio, only in a tree.”
“They build tiny houses in trees?”
“Yep.”
“Sounds cool. But you’re definitely into the building and renovating shows. I should have guessed, given you’re a third-generation hardware store man.”
“Is that lame? Do I get my gay membership revoked?”
He burst out laughing. “Oh, hell no. A man who works with his hands and wears a tool belt. You just got upgraded to gold membership.”
I snorted out a laugh and ignored how my cheeks burned. “I don’t wear a tool belt, sorry to disappoint you. Though I could talk about Sense 8 and Schitt’s Creek if that helps.”
He grinned at me. “Sense 8? Loved it. But Schitt’s Creek . . . I’ve rewatched it so many times I can quote it.”
“I noticed.”
He put his hand to his chest and gasped and did a perfect impersonation of Moira. “‘Be careful, John, lest you suffer vertigo from the dizzying heights of your moral ground.’”
I burst out laughing, but God . . . Sweet mercy, he did crazy things to me. So funny and cute, I could just kiss him.
Whether he was suddenly as nervous as me or if he was horrified by the look on my concentrating face—his thinking face was cute, mine probably looked more like constipation—but he turned abruptly to the mess on the kitchen counter. “Cookies,” he said. “We were making cookies.”
Right. Cookies.
We rolled the peanut butter cookie dough into little balls and popped them on the tray, crisscrossed a fork pattern on the top, then slid them into the