Page 55 of Comfort Read

But in the warmth of Maggie’s house—buoyed by his sister’s bracing cheer, his brother-in-law’s relentless good humor, his niece and nephew’s enthusiasm—Kit builds new traditions, and rediscovers his place in old ones. He finds himself laughing hysterically at the local tree farm as Riley weaves pine needles into her hair until she looks like a seasonal porcupine; he catches himself humming one of his mother’s favorite carols as he helps Maggie string up popcorn and cranberries for the tree. He makes cookies with Mitch and puts Santa hats on the chickens, and when the first big storm rolls through the second week of December, he takes both kids outside and helps them build a small army of snowmen.

He even lets some of the holiday spirit bleed into the bookstore, in spite of having left that duty largely in Allison’s hands last year. She seems disappointed to let go of what she’d called “The Christmas Armory,” which had largely involved hanging a variety of tinsel-wrapped swords and maces from the walls, but she releases it easily enough. He thinks maybe she’s just glad to see Kit crack the occasional smile. Whatever the reason, she only complains a few times as he enlists her help adding seasonal touches to the shop, and those complaints are halfhearted. When, after a Corner of Knowledge about the history of Christmas, he asks her to choose a few of the kids’ snowflakes to put up in the windows, she spends an afternoon painstakingly taping up every one.

Even Throgmorten seems to get into the spirit of things. He doesn’t pull any lights off their small plastic tree, no matter how many times the shoddy electricity makes them flicker, and hisses at fewer customers than usual. He does, of course, find a way to steal and destroy every Santa hat that enters the shop, but Kit could hardly expect him to change entirely.

It would all be better with Sage. Of course it would be better with Sage; of course Kit thinks about that every day, feeling the lack of his presence like a missing limb. Sage would quietly insist on buying trees for every customer at the farm the day they went, and chase Mitch’s chickens around laughing, scooping up their lost hats from the ground. Sage would take him to some insanely fancy Hollywood party and then find an excuse to leave early, sneak off to hang out in the kitchen at Tinamous instead. Sage would kiss him under the mistletoe, slow and thorough and with such breathtaking, effortless competence that Kit would feel like the two of them were a scene in one of his movies. He watches that video he took more than a few times, the one of Sage putting on a one-man version of A Christmas Carol, and wants to hiss like Throgmorten at how much it hurts, knowing Sage might have been here doing it live if Kit hadn’t messed everything up.

So yeah, it would be better with Sage. But it’s still good without him: not as good, but good.

He watches another video, too, late one night at Maggie’s house. She catches him replaying the Christmas Carol recording, and after briefly threatening to delete it—“As an act of mercy, Critter, oh my God, why are you doing this to yourself”—she asks to show him something else.

To Kit’s shock and mild dismay, it’s a video of him and Emerson a few Christmases ago, opening gifts under Tom and Cheryl’s tree. “Is the theory here that I should dull the pain of one ex by thinking about another? I’m not sure that logic’s sound.”

“No,” Maggie says, rolling her eyes. “I just want you to see something. Shut up and watch, okay?”

Compelled by her tone he shuts his mouth, feeling it twist with confusion, then surprise, and then sadness as he watches. Emerson opens a gift from Kit that contains a carefully chosen leather briefcase, and Kit opens one from him with a thick cable-knit sweater, and—although Kit hadn’t been able to see this at the time—neither one of them is happy with their present. They both smile and say thank you, insist that they love it, kiss perfunctorily before the next person selects a box to unwrap, but from this vantage point their mutual lack of satisfaction is obvious. Their smiles don’t reach their eyes. Kit never saw Emerson use that briefcase once, and he knows he didn’t wear the sweater. It had sat in the back of a drawer until, a few weeks after the breakup, he’d furiously donated it to a thrift store.

“We were never right for each other, were we,” he says, not a question. “It was always going to go wrong, no matter what I did. We weren’t really to one another’s tastes.”

Maggie smiles at him, fond and sad. “I don’t think so, no. You wanted to be, and God knows you tried, but no.” Shrugging, she tucks her phone back in her pocket. “Maybe it helps and maybe it doesn’t, but I thought it might be better to know.”

As usual, Maggie’s right. Kit’s alone now, which for years was his worst fear. He’d been freshly sixteen when he started dating Emerson, and back then, nothing had seemed safer or more stable than partnership. Time passed, and so of course he aged and matured, but that part of him, that idea, had kept its feet planted firmly in adolescence. From this vantage point he can see that he’d stuck it out in that doomed relationship, clung to it with the desperation of a drowning man, because he was so afraid of who he’d be without it.

But there are worse things than being alone. Being without Emerson, as it turns out, is better than being with him. Being with Sage… that had been better than being alone, better than anything Kit’s ever known, but it wasn’t because Sage’s presence saved him, or improved him, or made him less pathetic in the eyes of the people around him. It was because Sage made everything more fun, more interesting, more worth doing. It was because being around Sage made Kit feel more like himself.

As much as it hurts—as much as he wishes he could go back in time and make entirely different choices—Kit doesn’t need another person to be Kit. He can do that on his own, and if he does, he has a chance of finding someone else. It won’t be Sage, because no one else will ever be Sage, but Kit thinks he can live with that. There must be someone else in the world, a single soul amongst the billions, who lights Kit up inside the way Sage always did. Surely the odds are with him.

He’s not entirely sure he believes this, but he tells himself he does every morning before work, every night before bed, and several times in the mirror across the course of every day. He reminds himself of it as the Kickstarter Justin set up climbs for a few days, then stalls out at a number far too low to solve the bookstore’s money troubles. He repeats it under his breath as he waits for the inevitable notice of the building’s condemnation to arrive. He thinks about it furiously as he tries, with Maggie’s help, to work out what he wants to do with his life when Sawyer’s Books slips from his fingers, and begins to hesitantly look around for teaching jobs.

It works, or at least comes close enough to working that Kit can function. He’s almost got himself convinced he’ll be all right the day he looks out the bookshop window and sees Frankie climbing out of a sleek black town car.

“Allison!” Though he doesn’t mean to, Kit half shrieks this; several customers turn to stare at him, and he lowers his voice but adds an insistent knock on the office door. “Allison!”

She opens the door with a weary expression. “What? I was nearly done with the inventory report, you know. If you’d just left me alone for two more minutes⁠—”

“Frankie’s here.” Kit’s a little ashamed of how breathless he sounds, though not quite ashamed enough to modulate his tone. “Outside! Just pulled up! She must be coming in; why else would she be here? So I came to get you on the registers so I can talk to her, in case she wants to—well, I don’t know what! Pass a message on from Sage, or… Hey, why are you looking at me like that?”

Allison worries her lower lip between her teeth. “Damn. I thought she wasn’t coming ’til Thursday.”

“Wait—you knew she was coming?”

“Look.” Allison slides a hand under her curtain of black hair to rub at the back of her neck. “I’ve been trying to find the right time to tell you. I didn’t want to pour salt in the wound. But between Christmas with my family and the way people in this town talk, you were bound to find out soon, and I thought I had ’til Thursday! I was going to take you out for a drink and break it to you then.”

“Break what to me?” Though he doesn’t know the answer yet, the rising balloon of hope in Kit’s stomach drops like a stone. Whatever is going on here, he doubts it’s going to end in the happy reunion with Sage that Frankie’s appearance immediately made him imagine.

“We’ve been, um… seeing each other. Me and Frankie.”

“What?!” Kit doesn’t mean to sound so scandalized, or so unhappy; he regrets it when Allison’s face falls into a dramatic wince. “Sorry, sorry, I’m not trying to be rude or anything, just—are you serious? Since when?”

“Ummm.” Two bright spots of color appear on Allison’s cheeks as Kit hears Frankie step inside; Kit, astonished, is fairly certain it’s the first time he’s ever seen her blush. “Since the day she came in here to vet me? And make sure I wasn’t going to spill the beans about you and Sage? So… I guess a couple of months.”

“That long?!” Again, Kit sounds harsher than he means to, and does his best to reel it in as he continues. “I mean—you didn’t say anything! Why didn’t you say anything?”

“I wasn’t sure if it even was anything at first, and then… Oh God, Kit, I don’t know. You were so busy with Sage, and we barely saw each other, and you don’t usually like the people I date, and you were spending a lot of time with her, too, and I thought—I don’t know. I think I was afraid you wouldn’t approve or something.”

“That’s ridiculous! Of course I approve; Frankie’s excellent. And I don’t dislike everyone you date.”

“What about Jeanette?”