by Kelly Oram
I wouldn’t mind picking things up from where we’d left them last night, but I didn’t want to pressure her. I wasn’t even sure how she felt about it. What if she regretted kissing me? It had been really late, and she’d been sleeping for hours. She could have considered it a mistake, for all I knew.
“I suppose I can let you have the shower first and make sure there’s fresh coffee waiting for you when you get out.”
It wasn’t a kiss, but it wasn’t a bad deal. I rose to my feet, grinning despite the fact that I had no clue what she was thinking, and it was driving me crazy. “Actually, that would be nice. Thank you.”
She graced me with a beautiful smile. “You’re welcome.”
I could feel her eyes on me as I slowly made my way to the door, still wrapped in the blanket I’d stolen off her bed. “Nate?” she called as I opened the door. I looked back, and she smiled again. Maybe now she was going to say something. “Good morning.”
The simple greeting after everything that had happened in the last five minutes made me chuckle. “Good morning, Jordan.”
. . . . .
By the time Jordan got out of the shower and was ready to start her day, my father, brothers, and I had pulled all the Christmas decorations out of the shed and were checking all the different strands of lights to see which ones still worked.
“What’s all this?” Jordan asked, blinking at the plastic crates stacked all over the living room.
“Christmas decorations,” Tyler grumbled, wrestling with a tangled cord of lights that were only half working. “What’s it look like?”
“Yeah, I can see that. There’re just a lot of them. I guess I had you guys pegged as the minimalist types in the decorating department.”
Chris shrugged. “It’s tradition. Mom was crazy about Christmas.”
That was an understatement.
Dad pulled a blow-up Santa out of a box and plugged it in to test it. When it started to inflate, he unplugged it again and reached for the blow-up Christmas tree. “She used to try to turn on the Christmas music before Halloween. Drove us all insane. So we made her sign a contract that if she waited until after Thanksgiving to turn the house into a Winter Wonderland, we would help her put up the decorations and take them down in January.”
He pointed to a large frame sitting on the table that held the actual contract we’d all signed when we boys were eight years old. Jordan picked up the framed contract and her eyes misted up as she read it. “It’s amazing that you still have this.”
Dad moved next to Jordan and stared down at the contract wistfully. “She got sick in October and we knew she most likely wouldn’t make it to Christmas. We spent Thanksgiving Day with her in the hospital and she made us promise that we would keep our end of the bargain even if she wasn’t home to see it, so we went home and decorated the house that weekend. I think these decorations were the only reason I made it through that first Christmas without her. I think she made me promise because she knew it would be a hard year for us and that we’d need the cheer.”
Dad cleared his throat and went back to unpacking his crate.
Jordan set the frame back down on the table and wiped a tear from her eye. Seeing her emotional over my mom tugged at something inside me. I stood up and wrapped my arm around her, loving that she cared enough about me—and I suspected about my dad and brothers, too—to be moved to tears over the story even though she’d never known my mom. She squeezed me back. “The next year,” I said, “after Thanksgiving came and went, we all just got up and started decorating without a word. We’ve never missed a year.”
Jordan buried her face in my neck and sniffled. I hugged her tightly and when she lifted her head, I gently wiped away her tears. “You okay?”
“Yeah, sorry.” She laughed self-consciously. “It’s just, even without your mom, you guys are more of a family than mine ever has been. Thank you for bringing me here and letting me be a part of it for a few days. This has been the best Thanksgiving I’ve ever had.”
Her confession broke my heart, and I crushed her to me in a fierce hug. Chris and Tyler were quick to jump in on the action, and Dad completed the group hug, fully immersing Jordan in Anderson-family lovin’. She let out a strangled laugh, which made us all crack up.
Dad, Ty, and Chris let go quickly and got back to work, but I was more reluctant to release her. My arms slid from around her shoulders to low around her waist. Instead of hugging her, I was now just sort of holding her against me. She felt good like that, in my arms as if she belonged with me.
She glanced up at me with pink cheeks and a shy smile that I wanted to kiss so badly my mouth dried up. But Jordan wasn’t the only person in the room currently staring at me—Dad’s knowing gaze was burning a hole in me—so I couldn’t act on my impulse. Clearing my throat, I forced myself to let her go. “I’m glad you came.”
“Us too,” Dad said. “You’re welcome back anytime.”
Chris grabbed a huge wreath and headed for the front door. “Especially around New Year’s, so you can help us take all this damn stuff down.”
Dad smacked him on the back of the head. “Don’t curse at her.”
“I didn’t curse at her.”
“Don’t curse at all, then.”
“Why not? You curse. Just ten minutes ago when you shocked yourself, you said—”
“Never mind what I said. You don’t curse.”
Their banter brought Jordan’s light attitude back and she rubbed her hands together eagerly. “All right, what can I do? Put me to work.”
Dad handed her a box of ornaments. “How are your tree-decorating skills?”
She shrugged. “Don’t know. How hard can it be, though?”
We all stopped our various activities and gaped at her.
Tyler’s jaw fell all the way to his lap. “You’ve never decorated a Christmas tree before? You’re not a Jehovah’s Witness or something, are you?”
Jordan laughed. “No, just a rich kid. We had half a dozen Christmas trees around the house every year. I just never set them up. My parents always paid a service to come in and decorate for the holidays.”
Chris shook his head, amazed. “No freaking kidding.”
Tyler huffed. “That’s insane.”
“It’s disgraceful.” Dad shook himself from his bewilderment and handed me a strand of lights. “Teach the woman how to trim a Christmas tree.”
Dad, Chris, and Ty went outside to hang lights on the house, leaving Jordan and me to do the tree. She grabbed a random ornament from the box in her hands and started to place it on the tree.
“Oh, wait, you can’t do that first. There’s an order to things.”
Jordan gave me a wry look when I took the box of ornaments from her and set it on the couch.
“Lights first, then?”
I smiled ruefully. “Come on, Jordan, you know me better than that.”
“Right. Music. What was I thinking?” She rolled her eyes. “Couldn’t possibly decorate a tree without music.”
“Not just any music.”
“Let me guess. Christmas music?”
The sound of “Silver Bells” filled the room before the question was all the way out of her mouth. Laughing, she joined me at the stereo and listened to the song for a moment. I could tell she was trying not to let the music get to her, but not many people are immune to Christmas music. After only a few moments, her eyes were alight in a way they hadn’t been before. “You’re right. This is better.”
She reached for my hand. Instead of gripping it, she tangled her fingertips in mine with the lightest touch. The delicacy of the gesture had my stomach fluttering. Her gaze met mine and her expression softened, knocking the air from my lungs.
The garage door slammed, shattering the moment between us. Shaking myself from her spell, I held up a strand of lights. “You ready?”
She moistened her lips before forcing herself to smile brightly. “Let’s do this.”
I handed her the lights and grabbed a sec
ond strand. “The key to lights is the more the better.”
“Okay, Chevy Chase.”
I grinned. I’m always proud of myself when I recognize her movie references without her having to tell me. National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation is an old holiday family favorite in our house. And honestly, not too unfair a comparison in terms of decorations.
We fell into a comfortable silence, wrapping the tree in lights and strands of beads. When we started hanging the ornaments, she stole one of the candy canes and sucked on it as she continued to work. It was such a little kid thing to do—then again, she was grinning like a kid, as if she were an eight-year-old again. I laughed at her and she stuck her tongue out at me—she’d definitely connected with her inner child.
We were working on the tinsel when the song “White Christmas” came on. We were standing on opposite sides of the tree, which was so fat around we couldn’t see one another. “Hey, this is totally us today,” Jordan’s voice called to me from beyond the thick branches.
“Is it?”
Jordan poked her head around the tree to flash me a look of horror. “Have you never seen White Christmas?”
I shrugged. “Sure. Once. Like a million years ago. I love the song, but we’re more of a Die Hard family in this house. Terrorists, gunfights, explosions, and blood—now there’s a Christmas movie.”
Jordan snorted and went back to decorating. After a minute, the curiosity got to me. “How are we White Christmas?”
“Aside from the snow outside and the fact that you keep bursting into song, there’s this scene at the end of the movie where Bing Crosby and Rosemary Clooney are decorating a Christmas tree. It’s a big one, like this one.”
“And?” I could tell from her voice that there was more to this story, but she’d stopped talking.
Jordan peeked around the tree again and pinned me with a mischievous look. “And they meet behind the tree where no one can see them.”
She disappeared again, waiting for me to follow. Intrigued, and very happy with where I thought this might be going, I joined her around the back of the tree. I boldly crowded her and stared down at her with an unmistakably heated gaze. “And?” I asked again.
She wet her lips. “And then they do this…”
There was no hesitation when she threw her arms around my neck and kissed me. She was as ready for a repeat of last night as I was. The kiss was deep and eager, but lacked the urgency of the night before. We took our time this time, exploring this new connection between us and simply enjoying one another.
She smelled of coconut shampoo and tasted like the peppermint of the candy cane she’d eaten earlier. She felt absolutely perfect, wrapped in my arms. Gripping her tightly, I broke the kiss and smiled down at her. “It’s about time. I was beginning to think I’d imagined last night.”
Jordan blushed. “I wasn’t sure what to think. It was really late last night, and you were…on a creativity high.”
I chuckled at her phrasing and she glanced away from me, chewing on the bottom of her lip. “I know how that feels,” she said. “It’s easy to get caught up in a moment.”
“Jordan.” I caressed her cheek with the backs of my fingers, then lifted her face so that I could look into her eyes. “I may have acted impulsively last night because I was in a fantastic mood, but I’m glad I did.”
Jordan seemed surprised, but a glint of hope filled her eyes. “Really?” she asked in a small voice.
I wished she didn’t feel insecure, though I found it encouraging, too. She’d always been like this with guys she liked. Somewhere along the way she’d stopped treating me like Colin and started acting with me the way she did the guys she dated. I could be honest enough with myself to admit that I didn’t feel the same about her as I used to, either. “No regrets,” I promised. “In fact…” I brought her face to mine and brushed my lips over hers. “I could get used to it.”
I kissed her again, slowly, and she melted in my arms. She let out a soft sigh that made me chuckle. “You know, Die Hard ends with a kiss like this too, just with more blood.”
Jordan laughed. “How romantic.”
“He saved his wife from terrorists. It’s totally romantic.”
She rolled her eyes. “I think I’ll stick with my secret kiss behind the Christmas tree.”
“Then I guess I’ll stick to secretly kissing you behind the Christmas tree.”
Her lips quirked up into a crooked smile that I simply had to kiss. Five minutes later we were still acting out the final scene of White Christmas when Tyler’s disgruntled voice snapped us out of the movie and back to reality. “Runt, your psycho ex is—oh, geez.”
“Ha!” Chris laughed. “I so called it.”
Ty immediately argued. “You did not. I called it.”
“Bull. I’ve been saying it for months.”
“Whatever. Dude, Runt, quit snogging your roommate and go get rid of—”
Sophie interrupted him. “It wasn’t about her, huh?” Her voice was both shrill and choked with emotion.
Sighing, I released Jordan and came out from behind the Christmas tree. I took Jordan’s hand, refusing to let go of it even though it made Sophie’s eyes gloss over with tears. “This just happened. We didn’t plan it, and I’m not going to apologize to you for it.”
I squeezed Jordan’s hand and felt relieved when she squeezed back.
Sophie’s eyes brimmed over. “So you’re together, then?”
“We haven’t had time to discuss it.” I broke Jordan’s grip to rub my head with both hands. “Sophie, you and I broke up almost a month ago. You need to let it go.”
My blunt words made Sophie snap. “I can’t!” she screamed. She dug through her purse and when she found what she was looking for, she thrust it into my hand.
My brain froze when I realized what I was holding. This couldn’t be possible. It just couldn’t be. My knees gave out, and I sank to the couch. My head had been throbbing before, but now it was screaming at me, panicking. “No,” I whispered. I shook my head over and over, as if that might make the last twenty seconds un-happen. “How…this can’t be right.”
“You could act a little less horrified,” Sophie spat bitterly.
I flinched and stared down at the test in my hands again. It was one of those foolproof ones. No guessing if it was one line or two. It actually spelled out the whole word—pregnant.
The room had gone silent. Jordan’s face was pale, and my brothers looked like they were at a Rage Against the Machine concert where Justin Bieber had just opened for them. My father had taken a seat as well. He’d fallen into his armchair and had his hands buried in his face.
“Nate?” Sophie whispered. “Will you please say something?”
What could I possibly say? What was done was done. Swallowing back bile, I took a deep breath and tried to sound calm. “How…you’ve been on the pill for—” Glancing at my father again, I decided how long she’d been on the pill didn’t matter. “What happened?”
She shrugged helplessly. “I don’t know. This past semester has been a bit stressful. I must have missed a few days here and there.”
“You missed a few days? And you never thought to tell me?” I had to take another breath. Yelling at her wouldn’t solve anything.
She shut her eyes and took a breath, but tears continued to fall down her cheeks. “I’m sorry. I’m not perfect, Nate.”
I shook my head again, still unable to accept what was happening. “But you’re the responsible one. You don’t forget anything. You have a plan.”
Her face flushed with rage. “Having your children was always part of my plan,” she snapped, glaring a tearful, loathing glare at Jordan. “Excuse me for worrying that your stupid roommate was trying to steal you from me.”
“Sophie, don’t—”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa, wait,” Tyler interrupted, gaping with disgust at Sophie. “Are you saying you stopped taking your pills on purpose in order to keep Nate in a relationship?”
Jo
rdan gasped. Chris dropped a curse, and Dad didn’t yell at him for it.
I refused to believe it. She couldn’t have. She wouldn’t have. “Sophie, you didn’t.”
At that, she broke down into sobs and fell to the couch next to me. “I was losing you!” she cried. “She was stealing you away from me!”
My stomach rolled. My White Christmas had just turned into Die Hard. I felt as if I’d been trapped by terrorists and things were exploding all around me.
“Nate…”
She grabbed my hands, but I ripped them away from her. “Sophie, this is crazy.”
She sobbed harder. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to—Nate, I love you, and I need you. We’re going to have a baby. We’re going to be a family. I know you didn’t plan on this, but you love me. At least, you used to. Couldn’t you give me another chance? For our child’s sake? We could be happy again, if you would just try.”
Our child.
“Nate, please,” Sophie begged. “At least drive back with me to the city. We need to talk about this.”
She was right. We had to talk. Like John McClane, whether I liked it or not, the explosions were going off around me and I had to react. I had no choice. It wasn’t something that I could just ignore. It wasn’t going to go away.
No matter how it happened, I was going to be a father. Sophie would never give up the baby, and I’d never ask her to. Children were a blessing. Family was the most important thing there was. My family meant everything to me, even if I wanted to strangle them half the time. Maybe this wasn’t how I’d planned on starting my own family, but I would make the best of things. My dad and my brothers would help me. We’d get through this just like we’d gotten through everything that had come our way over the years.
“Okay.” I sounded like I’d aged fifty years over the course of this conversation. I felt like I had, too. “You’re right. We have to talk about it.” I glanced at Jordan, feeling sicker than I had yet. “I don’t want you to have to drive back by yourself, though, so I’ll just go for a little while and be back in an hour or two.”