Page 66 of Sublimate
He didn’t answer that.
“It doesn’t hurt my feelings,” I assured him. “Kolter’s mom hated me, too. She still does.”
“There’s no good reason for anyone to feel that way about you.”
“You don’t have to have a good reason for feelings. They just happen,” I said. “Like, I hate mushrooms but I love bubbles, I just do without any mathematical reasoning. I wouldn’t have wanted to be there if they didn’t want me.”
“I’m not planning to go down again in the near future. We should spend Christmas here at home. I don’t want to go anywhere for little while.”
He did look tired, and the ice cream cake was long gone. It was time for bed. He stood and held out his hand.
“Do you want to come upstairs?” he asked. “Would you mind?”
“To sleep with you?” My thoughts flashed back to the conversation I’d had earlier, the one about sex.
“Not to—I’m not asking—” He stopped. “I’m not propositioning you.”
“Let’s go,” I told him. I took his hand and we went upstairs together. Just platonic, like Cadence had said. It worked for me and it did for him, and I wasn’t going to ask for anything else.
I wondered if Nolan ever would.
Chapter 14
About eleven months before, I had taken a rusty saw from an old toolbox that I’d found under Kolter’s front porch (it was the same place I’d found the hammer that I’d used to try to fix the broken furniture). I had walked a little way into the woods behind his house, afraid of both bears and nature spirits, and then I’d found a skinny, sad little tree that was growing at a bad angle. According to what I had recently studied about math, it had been at least thirty degrees away from straight up and down.
I had sawed its trunk for a while, not because it was thick but because my tool hadn’t worked very well for cutting, and then I’d carried it back to the house and set it in the stand I’d gotten at a garage sale. I’d decorated it with the ornaments I’d made and a few that I’d bought, and I had thought it was so pretty. Then Kolter had gotten mad and ruined it.
My life had changed a lot since then.
“What do you think? Do we need to hang more bulbs?” Nolan asked me.
I looked up at the tree we’d brought home together, which was so tall that we’d also had to bring home a large ladder. We had gotten a lot of strings of white lights, too, since the ones stored in his attic hadn’t come on when we’d plugged them in. But we had plenty of ornaments because his grandparents had always put up a huge tree in their home. Actually, they hadn’t done it themselves.
“The housekeeper handled the tree,” he’d explained. “She and one of the maids decorated every room. It was like walking into a Christmas storybook.”
We had done this tree ourselves. And as for what I thought about it?
“We don’t need anything else. I’ve never seen anything prettier than this,” I told him.
He smiled at me and climbed down the ladder. “I have.” He tugged one of my braids. “I like these.”
He was always a big fan. I was thinking I might grow my hair, so they would be even longer. It was nice that he only said things like that, compliments, rather than pointing out when I was wearing something with a hole or mentioning that I looked fat in my winter coat. And when I thought about my boyfriends, I realized that had been another trait they’d shared. They had all liked to say anti-compliments—mean stuff. Nolan didn’t do that, which was just another sign that this was the best relationship I’d ever had. Ever, including parents and siblings.
He had headed to the kitchen but I stayed for a moment, breathing in the pine aroma and admiring the pretty ornaments that his grandparents had collected. They’d liked to buy one as a souvenir from every place where they had traveled, so their Christmas tree was a record of their exciting life.
“We could get ornaments like that,” I suggested as I joined him at the stove. “We could start our own collection.”
“It took years for my grandparents to get so many.”
“Well, yeah, unless they went a different place every week. But neither of us can do that, since I’ll be working at your cousin’s car dealership and you’re going to start classes in January.”
He looked over at me and his wooden spoon halted its sweep through the sauce on the burner.
“We don’t have to,” I said. “There are plenty of pretty things to hang already. I could make some, too, even though I’m not as artistic as Cadence.”
“Sure,” he answered. He sounded distracted. “This looks done. I should take it off the heat.”
We had guests coming tonight for dinner, his old friend Beau and the baby. They got to have Christmas Eve together so we’d decided to make a big meal to celebrate. Then Nolan had thought that we should have a tree, so we’d gone out to buy one, and we’d started in on the lights, the ladder, and the ornaments. While he dealt with his sauce, I went to check the dining room, which we’d prepared with flowers, greenery, and his great-grandmother’s china and crystal. It looked beautiful under the chandelier that his cleaning ladies did such a good job dusting.We had three place settings and an area on the table for Finley’s bouncy seat.
