All the Stars Look Down: A Duo of Christmas Romances

by Elizabeth Hunter

  He thought a few meetings and a few conversations would satisfy his wonderings about Claire. His interest would wane, and he’d move on to his next flight of fancy before Nicholas called him to his annual duties. Instead, his interest had deepened to fascination then to enchantment as he came to know the woman who’d first captured his attention one Christmas past.

  When he invited her to dinner, Andor had been sure she’d say yes. Cautious and reserved she might be, but she had expressive eyes, and he hadn’t mistaken her attraction to him. She accepted every invitation to lunch. So when she declined his invitation to dinner, Andor felt like he’d been sucker-punched. He’d grown overconfident, saw an interest that wasn’t there and made wrong assumptions.

  He was good at hiding his emotions, but it took effort to relax his hands on the steering wheel as he drove back to the museum after lunch. “May I ask why?”

  Claire fiddled with her purse strap, her gaze alighting briefly on his face before flitting away. “I won’t be able to get a babysitter for Jake on that short of a notice.”

  Was that it? Not an insurmountable obstacle, and the tightness in his chest eased. “You can bring him with you,” he said. He wanted more time with Claire, and if that included her son, so be it. Her child was a part of who she was. Besides, after ten centuries of acting as Santa’s bodyguard, delivery boy and overall helper, he’d grown to like human children. They saw magic in everything. “I’d like to meet him. He can even pick the restaurant.”

  Claire’s shoulders sagged a little, her faint smile rueful. “Thanks, but that won’t work. Jake’s not...” She trailed off, her gaze drifting to some point in a middle distance he couldn’t see. A frown creased her brow for a moment before smoothing away, and her back straightened. Andor didn’t miss the sudden death grip she held on her purse strap. “We can have dinner at my house if you want.”

  Judging by the look of dread on her face, he was sure he’d misheard her. She looked like she just invited him to a public hanging, and she was the condemned.

  “An excellent idea,” he said before she changed her mind. Something warned him—a flicker in her eye, the twitch of her eyebrow maybe—this was more than just another alternative to dinner out on a Friday night; it was a test of some sort.

  Andor mentally shrugged. So what. A dinner, a hanging; he was fine with whatever she planned. He’d either end up helping her wash dishes or saving her from the noose. He was quite capable of doing both. “I’ll bring the food. Just tell me the time and what you two want to eat.” He waited, hoping she wouldn’t rescind the offer.

  She uncurled her fingers from around the purse strap—a good sign. “How about 7:30? Don’t worry about Jake. He’s a picky eater. I’ll have something for him at home.”

  They pulled into the employee parking lot. Andor found a parking spot but kept the car running a moment longer. “What should I bring for you?”

  “Surprise me.” Claire smiled, opened her door and unfurled her tall frame from the seat. Andor unapologetically admired the view for a moment before killing the engine and joining her on the walk back to the building.

  He escorted her to her cube, greeted a slyly grinning Delilah—he’d never think of her as Dee—who had peeked around the corner of the wall separating her cube from Claire and left with a brief promise to see Claire the next evening. His sensitive ears caught the follow-up conversation between the two women.

  “Sooo, how was lunch?” Delilah’s voice rang sing-song down the hall, followed by Claire’s more exasperated “Not another interrogation.”

  “I just asked how lunch was.”

  “Yeah, and then you ask me how he licks his spoon and if I’ve seen him naked yet.”

  Andor held in his laughter until he made it to the loading dock, certain Claire wouldn’t appreciate his amusement.

  He spent the following day, thinking of Claire’s fleeting smile while he and two other preparators wrapped and packed the fragile ceramics that would be shipped to another museum for exhibition in New Mexico. Evening couldn’t come fast enough, and after a quick text message from her at the end of the day assuring him they were still on for dinner, Andor bolted from the museum.

  Now, at 7:30 on the dot, he stood at the door of a small home fronted by a modest porch with a swing on one side and potted plants on the other. Claire answered the door on his second knock. Dressed in a black blouse and jeans that highlighted the length of her legs, she stood within the golden corona cast by the porch light, as beautiful and luminescent as any ljósálfar woman under moonlight.

  “Sunday’s Child,” Andor said softly.

  Her eyebrows rose. “Pardon?”

  He held up two bags of fragrant take-out. “You said surprise you. I brought Indian.”

  She gave a delicate sniff, and her eyes widened. “That smells marvelous. Come in!” She directed him to a modest table set in a part of a main room designated as a dining area. The table was set for three. A votive candle sat in the middle alongside a bud vase holding two carnations.

  Andor set his packages down and turned to survey the room. Small and modest, the living room/dining room combination reflected Claire’s muted tastes. The colors, the lighting and the furniture gave a sense of peace and calm, along with an unspoken invitation to have a seat, prop your feet up and stay for a while. Even the music, played low, and piped softly through speakers against one wall added to the home’s cozy ambience.

  Claire’s gaze rested heavily on him. “Welcome to the manor. Not grand, but it’s home.”

  He’d lived in soaring palaces built of starlight and gemstones, where moonbeams striking the water spilling from fountains resonated like the chime of exquisitely tuned bells. He preferred this. “I like it. It feels like a sanctuary from a hard day.”

  Her entire demeanor eased, and her wide smile deepened the tiny lines at the corners of her eyes. “Thanks. That’s a lovely thing to say.” She gazed at him a moment longer before giving a start. “I’ll get Jake. I told him we were having company tonight.” She disappeared for a moment into a short hallway, returning with a young boy who clutched a tablet in one hand.

  Dark-haired where his mother was blonde, Jake had inherited her refined bone structure and arched eyebrows. His gaze was focused on the tablet screen, and he didn’t look up when Claire nudged him closer to Andor. “Jake, this is my friend Andor. Say hello.”

  “He-wo.” Jake’s gaze flickered briefly to his mother, but he still didn’t look at Andor, and his greeting sounded ...young, the vowels broad and the consonants blunt as if spoken by a toddler instead of a ten-year old.

  Andor crouched down to eye level with the boy. He didn’t hold out his hand to shake, suspecting he’d get no response. “Good to meet you, Jake. I work with your mom at the museum. She’s amazing, but I bet you already know that.” He glanced at Claire, whose cheeks had gone rosy at his compliment, and winked.

  She patted Jake on the back. “Go sit at the table, please. We’re about to eat.” He did as she instructed without protest or any verbal response at all. Claire’s eyes were shadowed, the wariness returned full force in both her gaze and her posture as she turned to Andor. “Jake’s autistic,” she said softly. “So don’t be too weirded out if he does odd things at the table while we’re eating. You’re a stranger, and having someone over for dinner who isn’t the babysitter is out of routine. He might act out.”

  Andor watched Jake sing to himself, a wordless tune. The boy rocked in his chair, occasionally flicking the back of his neck with his fingers. “This is why he couldn’t go out with us?”

  “Yeah. I don’t keep him trapped at home all the time, but a loud, crowded restaurant on a Friday night would be a nightmare of overstimulation for him. See how he’s snapping his fingers against his neck? That’s stimming behavior, a coping mechanism he uses when something is out of the ordinary.”

  The fabric of her blouse was smooth across his fingertips where he touched her elbow. “He’s a lot more polite about it than I wou
ld be. Usually by the end of dinner in a noisy restaurant, I’m ready to stab someone with my fork.” Andor winked at Claire once more. “Yours is a better idea. Nicer place, better music, great food, and I won’t have to shout at you across the table to be heard. And I was able to meet your son.”

  One graceful eyebrow rose. “Are you sure you’re not a psychopath?”

  He laughed. “Stabbing someone with a fork in an eating establishment would get me not only jail time but probably a mental health evaluation. That being said, I can assure you I’m harmless.”

  That wasn’t true in many contexts, but Claire was infinitely safe with him. He protected what he cherished. The thought brought him up short. How had this woman—once a child blessed with magic now lost—embed herself so quickly and so deeply into his soul?

  Something of that breath-stealing realization must have revealed itself in his expression. Claire’s eyes widened. “Hey, you okay? You just went pale.”

  He nodded, still trying to recapture his mental footing. “I’m fine. Just hungry. We should eat. Passing out on your floor isn’t how I want either of us to remember our first dinner together.”

  Dinner started out an exercise in endurance. At first tense, nervous and obviously resigned to the idea Andor would bolt for the door the second her son did something odd, Claire had given lengthy explanations for everything from why Jake could synchronize two separate videos on his tablet to play the exact thing at the same time but couldn’t easily handle a fork to eat to how he used a particular program to help him communicate.

  “He’s echolaic too,” she explained. “So if you say something, and he repeats a portion back to you, it isn’t mockery.”

  Andor laid his hand over hers, feeling the twitch of her slender fingers against his palm. “Claire. Relax. I’m not a therapist; this isn’t an interview for either you or Jake. It’s just dinner. He’s fine. I’m fine, but I’ll take another beer if you have an extra.”

  It was a not-so subtle ploy, but she grasped it like a drowning person clutching a lifeline. “Of course! I’ll be right back.”

  The kitchen was no more than five steps from the dining area and separate by a wall, but Andor guessed a few seconds away from the table would give her a little time to breathe. He glanced at Jake whose fingers flew over the tablet’s screen, opening videos and games and closing them just as fast, as if the brief flashes of pictures they presented were far more entertaining than the content in its entirety.

  “Jake, can I hear that song you played earlier from the two videos?”

  Jake didn’t look up, but his fingers danced across the screen, opening up files faster than Andor could track. Soon the two videos played together in perfect synchronization.

  “Well done, child.” Andor toasted him with his empty bottle. His heart stuttered in his chest when Jake suddenly looked up to meet his gaze. His face, still soft and rounded with youth, grew animated for a moment. “Elf,” he said. His eyes returned to his tablet as if Andor had suddenly winked out of existence.

  Andor gawked at Jake for a moment before breaking into a grin wide enough to squint his eyes shut. Claire had passed her gift of the deep sight onto her child. Jake, who didn’t speak or hold a fork easily, could see the ljósálfar elf sitting at his mother’s table.

  Ah, Nicholas, he thought. Did you ever meet this boy on Christmas Eve?

  Claire returned to the table, two bottles in her hand, her equilibrium restored. She gave him and Jake a puzzled look. “What were you two up to while I was in the kitchen?”

  Andor clinked his beer against hers. “Plans to conquer the world. Jake will be my general.”

  The remainder of dinner was a far more lighthearted affair. Claire told stories about the Carmichael and some of the exhibit catastrophes that had turned the museum director’s hair prematurely white. “I keep waiting for some of the exhibits to come alive at night, like in those films. I’m just afraid our security team would shoot first and ask questions later.”

  Andor regaled her with tales of his travels. His only permanent point of place, where he was required to appear annually, existed in another realm. When he wasn’t at Nicholas’s service, he lived a mostly nomadic existence in Midgard and had traveled its realm many times over. Claire listened wide-eyed as he described the places he had visited for days or weeks, sometimes a month or two before moving on.

  Jake had grown tired of their company during Andor’s recitation and disappeared into his room with the ever-present tablet. Andor adopted a crestfallen look. “I think I bored him.”

  Claire chuckled. “Unless you can sing the song “Hot Potato” six hundred times in a row, he probably won’t find you that interesting. I, however, am hooked. If I hadn’t heard you speak at least four different languages myself, I’d think you were trying to feed me a load. Have you really been to all those countries?”

  “Every one.” He didn’t mention he’d visited most of them multiple times across the centuries, seen them rise, fall, change names, change governments, change religions. He went for the mundane instead, something Claire’s practical thinking would accept. “It’s doable if you’re very wealthy or willing to work any odd job for the travel money.”

  “I imagine you have a very interesting resume.”

  Andor choked back a laugh. “An understatement, trust me.”

  After dinner, he only had to help her throw away cartons and load the dishwasher instead of rescue her from certain death. Claire made coffee, and they took their cups out to the back patio. The bench set in the middle of the plain concrete pad was just big enough for two and face out to a back yard fenced from the neighbors. Claire’s hip was warm where it pressed against Andor’s. He wished this was more than just the awkward first date, and he could stroke the length of her long thigh through her jeans.

  Early November in Houston was one of the best times of the year. Cool enough to feel a snap in the air, but the mosquitoes that made a meal out of everyone during summer and early fall were gone. The dark silhouettes of two live oaks spread even darker shadows across the ground. Through the gaps between their branches, the sky wheeled salted with stars and clear of clouds.

  Claire pointed up. “You don’t see that too often. It’s either a humid haze or light pollution that blots those out. One day I’d like to take Jake out to the George Ranch observatory. If I can coax him to look through a telescope, he can see the Milky Way.”

  Andor glanced behind him at the partially open back door. “Will he be okay in there?”

  She nodded. “Until last year, I couldn’t turn my back for a second, or he was in to something or destroying it. Imagine the terrible twos lasting for seven years.” She snapped her fingers. “Then it stopped all of a sudden. I don’t know if an internal light bulb came on or what. I didn’t dissect it, just counted my blessings.” Her gaze followed Andor’s to the door. “He might join us in a little bit. He likes to watch his shadow move. In the summer, before the mosquitoes get too bad and the city starts to spray, we’ll come outside and he’ll follow fireflies.”

  Andor could hear it in her voice, a joy tinged with melancholy, at her son’s antics. Claire chose to see the wonder in Jake’s reactions to such things as his shadow and fireflies. Her deep Sight might be gone, but Andor had been wrong. She still saw magic, just a different, very human kind.

  “Where is Jake’s father?”

  For a moment, she stiffened next to him, and her face tightened. “In Germany on business I think.” She glanced at him from the corner of her eye. A rueful smile hovered on her mouth. “I know what you’re asking. We divorced four years ago. We were only married for five. Bad choice on both our parts. Special needs children can be tough on even the strongest marriages. Ours was already in trouble. For Lucas, I think Jake’s diagnosis felt like the key that locked him in a prison. He served me with divorce papers two months later.”

  Andor scowled. Lucas sounded like an idiot. “Who’d leave a woman like you and the child you made together?”
>
  “That’s very sweet of you.” Her blush darkened her face, even in the moonlight.

  He shrugged. “It’s true.”

  She fiddled with the handle of her coffee cup. “It’s tempting to demonize him, but he isn’t a bad person, and I’m no saint. I have custody of Jake, and Lucas has visitation. He pays child support on time, every time. Not a dead-beat dad, just a distant one. I try to encourage him to spend more time with Jake, but honestly I think the autism scares him.”

  Andor frowned even harder. “He does know it isn’t contagious, right?”

  Claire chuckled. “He isn’t quite that dumb. He’s like a lot of people I guess. They avoid what they don’t understand. Humans are odd ducks sometimes.”

  “No truer words,” Andor said. He finished his coffee and set the cup down by his feet. “Do you miss him?”

  The question earned him a full laugh. “Good God, no.” She sobered a little. “That’s not true. I miss having help with Jake or someone I can share a rant with when one of us has a bad day. An evening watching a show we both like. But that’s less about the specific person and more about the perks of living with someone you love. Even when Lucas and I lived together, we rarely did the things I just mentioned.”

  He had nothing to relate to those moments she listed. They appealed to him greatly, made him wonder what it would be like to live a life waking up each morning with this woman in his arms, to spend evenings like this evening with her and Jake—not as a single date with the hopes of another to follow, but the expectation that the two would be waiting there, happy to see him when he came through the door.

  It was such a human thing to crave. He’d been too long among them.