Christmas of Love

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Christmas of Love Page 8

by Erin Wright


  “So in the end, I did nothing at all. Well, except move to San Francisco. I did that graduation night.”

  Austin gathered his thoughts, trying to marshal them into some semblance of order. He had to let her know that it wasn’t okay, what she went through. That she wasn’t a wimp. That to choose life was hard, damn hard, and she should be proud of herself for doing it.

  But before he could get his words lined out, she said softly, “I had only come home once since graduation, before this trip up here. I was doing my very best to pretend that Sawyer didn’t exist, Long Valley didn’t exist, Idaho didn’t exist. When people asked me where I was from, I’d usually give them some flip answer about having lived a lot of places, which wasn’t true. I’d lived in Sawyer, Idaho and in San Francisco, California. That’s it. But I didn’t want to claim Idaho, not even in passing. But…”

  She took in a deep breath, and she turned to him in her seat, sending him a genuine smile this time.

  “But I’m glad I came. I’m glad I met you.”

  He reached out across the console, and took her hand in his. “Me too,” he said softly.

  He would tell her everything later – how proud he was of her, making it through this life that hadn’t been kind to her. How beautiful he thought she was, inside and out. How happy he was to have met her.

  But for now, he’d simply hold her hand, and be there for her.

  Chapter 15

  Ivy

  Ivy guided her horse, a beautiful palomino, down the rocky path carefully. Large stones plus deep snow weren’t a good combination for the health of a horse, especially considering the fact that she was pretty sure that Adam Whitaker, the vet in town and owner of said palomino, would actually want her back in one piece.

  Strange how that worked.

  “It’s beautiful out here today,” Austin said over his shoulder to her.

  “It really is,” Ivy said wonderingly. She had borrowed Iris’ warm winter jacket for this outing, along with some long johns and wool socks, and it was amazing what a difference that made to her mental state of being. It was bizarre to think that she was enjoying a horse ride in the dead of winter in Sawyer, Idaho, but…

  She was.

  She tightened her hands around the reins, looking down at the beautiful gloves Austin had given her. She found herself staring at them often – they were quite possibly the most gorgeous gloves she’d ever laid eyes on. Iris whispered to her that she’d heard through the grapevine (meaning Declan, of course) that Austin had spent a couple hundred dollars on them.

  That seemed crazy to Ivy – who had that kind of money to put down on Christmas presents?! – but the quality of the gloves made Ivy believe the price tag was real. They felt like heaven, wrapped around her hands.

  “Are you getting cold?” Austin asked, pulling her out of her thoughts.

  She looked at him, squinting against the glare of the sun off the snowdrifts. Next time, she needed to wear her sunglasses.

  There will be no next time.

  She pushed that depressing thought away and sent Austin a cheerful grin instead. “Nope, I’m good. Why do you ask?”

  “You were staring down at your hands,” he said with a low chuckle. “I thought you were trying to send beams of heat at them with your eyeballs.”

  She threw back her head and laughed. “Don’t I wish that was how it worked,” she said, still laughing. “Us wimpy California girls would appreciate that superpower, that’s for sure.”

  He tossed her a sexy grin over his shoulder. Not intentionally sexy; just sexy because it was Austin. He probably looked good enough to eat with a spoon after working a cattle drive for a week straight. He had those kinds of genetics. It just wasn’t fair.

  “Hmmm…superpower. You’d waste a superpower on keeping your hands warm?” he asked teasingly. The trail widened out a little, and she nudged her horse forward to pull it up even with Bob. Austin stabled his horse out at Adam’s place, so it’d been a quick trip to trailer them both up and bring them out here into the national forest.

  “Waste?” she repeated saucily. “You are obviously an Idaho boy if you think it’s a ‘waste’ to keep your hands warm. And anyway, I’d use my heat beams on other things too. No more cold feet! And if I could really turn up the power, I could cook dinner with just my eyes.” She looked at him and batted her eyelashes. “Seems like a damn good idea to me!”

  He laughed, and she unthinkingly reached over and put her hand on his arm as she chuckled with him. He looked down at her hand and then up at her. Their gazes caught and the air crackled around them. Tomorrow was New Year’s Eve, and Ivy knew how she wanted to ring in the new year.

  She cleared her throat. “So, you didn’t say what you wanted as your superpower,” she said huskily.

  “Hmmm…” He pretended to think deeply about the question, as if his life depended on the answer.

  “I mean, other than light beams coming out of your eyes. Obviously, that would be the best superpower, but since I already have that one, you have to pick another one.”

  “Is that how it works?” he said quietly, laughing.

  “Of course! Haven’t you paid any attention to the Marvel universe? Not a single character has the same superpower. That would just be boring. Duh.” She gave that last word her best Valley Girl flair, which earned her another laugh from Austin.

  “Well…” he said contemplatively, “I guess I’d pick the superpower of being able to go back in time. Time traveler.”

  Her first instinct was to tease him – that sounded like a lamer superpower than heat beams from her eyeballs so she could cook dinner easily – but as she looked over at him, her breath caught. She didn’t know what was causing that look on his face, but somewhere along the way, Austin had become serious on her.

  “So why do you want to become a time traveler?” she asked softly. He’d listened to her yesterday; it was only fair she listened to him today.

  It surely couldn’t be any worse of a story than hiding in the art closet at the high school and bawling your eyes out while contemplating suicide. She was pretty sure that particular story won the Shitty Story Contest.

  She’d never told anyone that story, not even Iris, and having him listen yesterday…it meant a lot to her. She felt better. Freer. Lighter.

  She wanted to offer the same support to Austin.

  She waited patiently – not usually one of her strong suits – while he mulled through what he was going to say. He wasn’t someone to blurt things out – unlike her – and so she’d learned over the past month to wait longer and be more patient with him. Rather than taking silence to mean he had nothing to say, she’d learned to take silence to mean that he was still thinking about what to say.

  Which was a totally different thing.

  His brow furrowing, he looked off through the trees and rocky hillsides. “Monica Klaunche and I dated for five years. For the record, that’s one more year than Declan and Iris dated before Declan contracted temporary insanity and broke up with Iris for fifteen years. Well, so maybe not temporary, but definitely insane.”

  Ivy laughed softly, but just kept watching his face closely. The idea of him dating someone else for five years was oddly painful, but wherever this chick was now, she was obviously not still Austin’s girlfriend.

  Not that Ivy had any say over who Austin did or didn’t date. She would be heading back to California soon.

  Or would be as soon as she could figure out how to pay for a plane ticket.

  He let out a sigh, drawing Ivy back into the present. “Monica had always been this sweet girl – big smile, friendly to everyone, and I thought I was in love. You can’t be with someone for five years without thinking it’s true love. We were going to wait until I graduated from college and took over my dad’s farm before getting married. I wanted to be able to provide for her, you know?”

  He snuck a quick glance at Ivy, maybe to check if she was listening? Ivy leaned over and squeezed his arm, her silent affirmation
that she was indeed listening to him. She didn’t want to derail him from his thoughts with words, though, instead choosing to simply be there.

  Sometimes, you just needed someone to hear you.

  “We graduated from high school and then…she didn’t want to go to the University of Idaho with me. Told me she wanted to stay back at home and just take a year off from school. She was burnt out on it.

  “I understood, but it was hard because home was an hour away from the U of I, which meant an hour trip each way through deep snow in the dead of winter if I wanted to come home and visit her. I won’t lie and claim that I was thrilled with her decision, but I understood it.”

  The trail narrowed for a moment, so Austin slowed down, letting Ivy go in front and duck under a few low-lying pine tree branches before they met up again on the other side. He continued, “One visit back home, my mom was acting weird. Her face was all red and her eyes were swollen and she just looked like shit, you know? I mean, I won’t pretend that I’m the most observant person on the face of the planet, but she just looked awful. When I asked where Dad was, she said he was back East, visiting relatives. Which was weird, because we don’t have any relatives back East, but she just clammed up after that. Wouldn’t answer a thing. It was like trying to nail jello to the wall.”

  He let out a little laugh that turned into a sigh. “The next weekend, I came home again because even though it’d been a week, I hadn’t gotten any closer to getting an answer. I thought if I came home, I could demand an answer in person. Force the issue. I hadn’t had any luck the week before; I don’t know why I thought I’d have more luck the next week. Naïveté, I guess.”

  He shrugged.

  Her heart broke. She too had believed that life would always get better; that the bullies would finally leave her alone; that she’d finally be able to quit working as a waitress; that she’d…

  Well, that she would be able to magically pay for a plane ticket back home.

  Yeah, Ivy was the Queen of Naïveté.

  “I heard them yelling before I even got out of the car. I was so confused. There’s my dad’s treasured guitar, lying out in the snow in the front yard. Out sails a painting of my dad when he was a toddler. The frame broke and scattered.

  “I slammed the door of the car and took off running for the front door. I don’t know what I thought I could do – save my parent’s house from the thief who was apparently destroying things instead of just stealing them? I was in shock, and acting purely on instinct. If I could just get in the front door, I could make things better. Make things right.

  “My parents turned and looked at me when I came running in, and we just stared at each other for a minute. I hadn’t told them I was coming home, and the shock of me showing up in the middle of their fight scared them into silence.”

  He took a deep, haggard breath, rubbing the back of his neck as he stared off through the wintry woods. “They were getting a divorce. My dad had been cheating on my mom for years, and she’d finally caught him. All of the stupid, cliché stuff that you hear about but you don’t think would actually happen to your family? My dad admitted to it all. He’d been sleeping with the bookkeeper for our family farm. I’d always thought that she seemed a little too…friendly. Attached. Familiar with my father. But I didn’t know. I didn’t think…”

  He took another deep breath and looked at Ivy. “You’re a really good listener,” he said quietly with a small chuckle that quickly died on his lips. “I didn’t mean to tell you all of this. I don’t tell people this very often.”

  Ivy was pretty sure he meant, “Absolutely never,” but she didn’t say that. Instead, she squeezed his hand and said softly, “I’m hear to listen to whatever you want to say.”

  He nodded slowly. “It wasn’t enough that this destroyed my family. One fell swoop, and my home and my parents…all of it was wrecked. No, it got much worse than that.” He sent her a tight smile. “I was once the heir to the largest spread in Kootenai County. I bet you didn’t know you were on a date with such a rich guy.”

  “I honestly had no idea,” she said with a laugh, “but now that I know…” She winked at him.

  His smile quickly disappeared. “I was the only kid. My parents struggled to conceive, and were lucky to even have me. My parents raised me, secure in the knowledge that I had a future. They insisted I go to college and get a bachelor’s degree, but once I did, the farm was mine. Lock, stock, and barrel. My parents had a small cabin that they were going to retire to. I’d give them a stipend every year until they died, as my payment for the farm, but the farm itself would be mine. That’s why I wasn’t willing to take that year off from college with Monica. She’d wanted me to, but I wanted to finish college and get on with the rest of my life, you know?

  “Except, once my father’s infidelity was discovered and my parents started the process of getting a divorce, things got really ugly really fast. The belongings on the front lawn were only the beginning. Quickly, they devolved into physical fights and the judge ordered them to have no contact with each other outside of the courtroom, except through their attorneys. Neither parent acted better than the other one; they were both awful.”

  His mouth pinched, and Ivy knew that wherever this was going, it was about to get there, and it wasn’t going to be pretty when it happened.

  “The judge ordered the farm sold and the proceeds divided between my parents. They couldn’t agree how to settle it otherwise, so it was just sold instead. And with it, my inheritance disappeared. They didn’t offer to give me part of the sale of the farm so I could buy another one; they couldn’t even agree to let me buy it from them. It went to some ten-gallon hat wannabe who drove the farm into the ground within three years. It went up on the auction block last spring. That was a rough day.”

  He let out a bitter laugh. “And yet, that isn’t even all.”

  Ivy drew in a sharp breath at that. How was that not all? What else could there poss—

  Oh. Monica Something Or Another. He still hadn’t explained why he wasn’t married to his childhood sweetheart.

  “I drove to Monica’s house the day I found out that my parents were selling the farm and I was inheriting nothing at all, and she listened as I ranted and raved. She seemed off that day, but I wasn’t exactly in a happy place myself, so it was hard to say what was going on in her head. I received a small package in the mail a few days later – it was her engagement ring. She no longer loved me. I heard through the grapevine that she was dating the son of the owner of the second largest spread in Kootenai County within weeks.”

  Their horses slowed, and then stopped. The air was still. No bird, no insect, no breath of wind dared to disturb them.

  “I thought I’d found the woman of my dreams. The woman I was going to marry. And…she was a gold digger. Once I had no money, she magically had no love.”

  He shrugged and smiled a small smile that didn’t quite reach his eyes. “Declan was my roommate up at the U of I; he’d moved up there after he’d broken up with Iris. We were roommates for a year before he graduated.”

  “Do you know why he broke up with Iris?” Ivy broke in. “She never could get him to give her a straight answer.”

  “Nope. I didn’t understand it then, and now that I’ve seen them together, I really don’t understand it. They seem pretty darn perfect for each other.”

  Ivy grimaced. “It took me a while to change my mind on that topic,” she said dryly, “but yeah, watching them together…they make a great couple. They always had. It was that fifteen-year hiatus in the middle that lost me. Iris has gone through a lot, and it makes me happy to see her find happiness again.”

  She drew in a deep breath and said quietly, “I’m really sorry to hear about Monica. She sounds like a real piece of work. To lose your parents and your livelihood and your childhood sweetheart all in one fell swoop…I can’t imagine.”

  He let out a humorless chuckle. “I’m not gonna say it was the easiest thing in the world to go through, bu
t at least I didn’t have bullies pushing me around my whole life.”

  “Yeah, but at least my parents are still together and if my father is cheating on my mom…well, there’s literally no hope left for humanity. I think it would be more likely that Idaho disintegrates in a nuclear attack in the next five seconds than my father cheat on my mom.” They both paused dramatically, waiting for the explosion, and then Ivy laughed. “See? We’re both still alive.”

  They paused again this time, and just stared at each other for a minute. “Thanks for listening,” Austin finally said. “I feel better already.”

  “That’s what friends are for,” she said with a shrug and a wink. “But to be honest, I find this part of humanity fascinating. It never fails: When I meet someone, their life appears to be perfect. It isn’t until I really get to know someone that I realize how much shit they’ve gone through. How much each of us wades through in life.”

  “When I met you at your parent’s house, I thought you led a pretty perfect life,” Austin agreed, chuckling. “You have great parents, a sister – I always wanted a sibling! – and this really supportive community. I had no idea what that community had done to you.”

  “If it makes you feel any better, pretty much no one knows what this community has done to me.” They turned around and started heading back up the trail. The sun was starting to sink towards the mountains, and it wouldn’t do to be out at night on this trail. “Some people knew I was miserable, but I never told anyone about the art closet incident. Not even Iris.”

  He looked over at her, eyes somber. “Thanks for your trust in me. It means a lot that you told me.”

  “Well, if I’d known you were going to try to beat me with the gold-digger story, I would’ve made my story more dramatic!” she said teasingly. “Always have to come out on top.”

  He winked. “Sometimes, I don’t mind being on bottom.”

  She wasn’t gonna lie, she wasn’t quite sure she could breathe correctly after that.

 

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