"Making sure of what?"
His expression turned innocent. The fact that I immediately distrusted it was probably a bad sign. “That you weren't planning to make me wait all day."
I laughed. "You've been awake for approximately twenty minutes."
"And yet somehow it feels much longer."
I shook my head. "You're impossible."
"That's not an answer." The excitement in his voice was impossible to miss.
For some reason, hearing it made me even more eager to give him his gift.
TWENTY-ONE
KIERAN
Thane reached toward the nightstand and picked up a gift bag.
The movement immediately made me nervous, which felt ridiculous considering we'd agreed to buy each other presents the day before. It wasn't as though the gift was a surprise. Even so, seeing the bag in his hands suddenly made everything feel real.
"This one's yours." His smile was soft when he handed it to me.
I accepted the bag and looked down at it for a second before reaching inside. The tissue paper crinkled beneath my fingers. Then I pulled it out.
For a moment, I simply stared.
Slowly, I looked up. "You bought Mr. Maple?"
Something warm settled into Thane's expression. "You looked disappointed when you put him back."
I'd never actually told him I wanted Mr. Maple. I hadn't asked for him. I'd picked him up, held him for a few seconds, and then put him back on the table because that was what people didwhen something wasn't theirs. That should have been the end of it.
Yet somehow Thane had noticed anyway.
What surprised me was that he'd understood.
Out of everything happening at that fair—the lights, the music, the crowds, the dozens of booths we'd wandered through—he'd paid attention to one small moment most people probably would have forgotten five minutes later.
My fingers tightened around Mr. Maple's scarf.
For most of my life, wanting things had felt dangerous. Foster care taught you quickly that disappointment hurt less when you kept your expectations small. If you never expected something to belong to you, you couldn't miss it when it disappeared. Eventually, you stopped asking. Eventually, you stopped hoping for things you weren't sure you could keep.
Looking down at the moose in my lap, I realized the gift wasn't really about Mr. Maple. It was about the fact that Thane had noticed. And somehow that meant more than I knew how to explain.
I swallowed against the sudden tightness in my throat and ran my thumb over Maple's crooked scarf. "Thank you."
Thane's expression softened. "You don't have to thank me."
"Yeah," I said, looking down at the moose again. "I kind of do."
There weren't enough words for what I was feeling. So I leaned over and kissed him. Long enough to say everything I couldn't seem to put into sentences. When I pulled back, his smile had returned.
"You're welcome."
My fingers tightened around Maple for another second before I set him beside me and reached toward the nightstand on my side of the bed.
The gift bag had been sitting there since the night before. I hadn't thought much about it when I tucked it into the drawer. At the time, I'd been more concerned about whether Thane would somehow figure out what I'd bought him before Christmas morning arrived. Now that the moment was actually here, I found myself feeling unexpectedly nervous.
