My True Love Gave to Me: Twelve Holiday Stories
Page 10Their eyes meet. Courage, Miranda. Daniel tilts his head, looks gleeful.
“In which case, I should do this,” he says. He leans forward, puts his hand on Miranda’s chin, tilts it up. “We should do this.”
He kisses her. His lips are soft and dry. Miranda sucks on the bottom one experimentally. She arranges her arms around his neck, and his hands go down, cup her bum. He opens his mouth and does things with his tongue until she opens her mouth, too. He seems to know how this goes; he and the girl with the ferrets probably did this a lot.
Miranda wonders if the ferrets were in the cage at the time, or out. How unsettling is it, she wonders, to fool around with ferrets watching you? Their beady button eyes.
She can feel Daniel’s erection. Oh, God. How embarrassing. She pushes him away. “Sorry,” she groans. “Sorry! Yeah, no, I don’t think we should be doing this. Any of this!”
“Probably not,” Daniel says. “Probably definitely not. It’s weird, right?”
“It’s weird,” Miranda says.
“But perhaps it wouldn’t be so weird if we smoked a joint first,” Daniel says. His hair is messy. Apparently she did that.
“Or,” Miranda says, “maybe we could just smoke a joint. And, you know, not complicate things.”
Halfway through the joint, Daniel says, “It wouldn’t have to complicate everything.” His head is in her lap. She’s curling pieces of his hair around her finger.
“Yes, it would,” Miranda says. “It really, really would.”
Later on she says, “I wish it would snow. That would be nice. If it snowed. I thought that’s why you lot came here at Christmas. The whole white Christmas thing.”
“Or in a snow globe.”
“Stuck,” Miranda says. “Trapped.”
“Stuck,” Daniel says.
They’re lying, tangled together, on a sofa across from the Christmas tree. Occasionally Miranda has to remove Daniel’s hand from somewhere it shouldn’t be. She doesn’t think he’s doing it intentionally. She kisses him behind the ear now and then. “That’s nice,” he says. Pats her bum. She wriggles out from under his hand. Kisses him again. There’s a movie on television, lots of explosions. Zombies. Cameron Diaz unloading groceries in a cottage, all by herself.
No, that’s another movie entirely, Miranda thinks. Apparently she’s been asleep. Daniel is still sleeping. Why does he have to be so irritatingly good-looking, even in his sleep? Miranda hates to think what she looks like asleep. No wonder the ferret girl dumped him.
Elspeth must have come back from the pub, because there’s a heap of blankets over the both of them.
Outside, it’s snowing.
Miranda puts her hand in the pocket of her dress, feels the piece of damask she has had there all day long. It’s a big pocket. Plenty of room for all kinds of things. Miranda doesn’t want to be one of those designers who only makes pretty things. She wants them to be useful, too. And provoking. She takes the prettiest blanket from the sofa for herself, distributes the other blankets over Daniel so that all of him is covered.
She goes by a mirror, stops to smooth her hair down, collect it into a ponytail. Wraps the blanket around herself like a shawl, goes out into the snow.
He’s there, under the hawthorn tree. She shivers, tells herself it’s because of the cold. There isn’t much snow on the ground yet. She tells herself she hasn’t been asleep too long. He hasn’t been waiting long.
He wears the same coat. His face is the same. He isn’t as old as she thought he was, that first time. Only a few years older than she. Than Daniel. He hasn’t aged. She has. Where is he, when he isn’t here?
“No,” he says. “I’m not a ghost.”
“Then you’re a real person? A Honeywell?”
“Fenwick Septimus Honeywell.” He bows. It looks better than it should, probably because of the coat. People don’t really do that sort of thing anymore. No one has names like that. How old is he?
“You only come when it snows,” she says.
“I am only allowed to come when it’s snowing,” he says. “And only on Christmas Day.”
“Right,” she says. “Okay, no. No, I don’t understand. Allowed by whom?”
He shrugs. Doesn’t answer. Maybe it isn’t allowed.
“You gave me something,” Miranda says.
He nods again. She puts out her hand, touches the place on the justacorps where he tore away the fox. So he could give it to her.
“Oh,” Miranda said. “The poor old thing. You didn’t even use scissors, did you? Let me fix it.”
She takes the piece of damask out of her pocket, along with her sewing kit, the one she always keeps with her. She’s had exactly the right thread in there for over a year. Just in case.
He takes it from her, turns it over in his hand. “You did this?”
“You gave me a present last year. This is my present for you,” she says. “I’ll sew it back in. It will be a little untidy, but at least you won’t have a hole in your lovely coat.”
He says, “I told her I tore it on a branch. It’s fine just as it is.”
“It isn’t fine,” she says. “Let me fix it, please.”
He smiles. It’s a real smile, maybe even a flirtatious smile. He and Daniel could be brothers. They’re that much alike. So why did she stop Daniel from kissing her? Why does she have to bite her tongue, sometimes, when Daniel is being kind to her? At Honeywell Hall, she is only as real as Elspeth and Daniel allow her to be. This isn’t her real life.
It’s ridiculous, of course. Real is real. Daniel is real. Miranda is real when she isn’t here. Whatever Fenwick Septimus Honeywell is, Miranda’s fairly sure it’s complicated.
“Please,” she says.
“As you wish it, Miranda,” Fenny says. She helps him out of the coat. Her hand touches his, and she pushes down the inexplicable desire to clutch at it. As if one of them were falling.