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That made her laugh. She walked down the porch steps, wool socks on a scrim of snow, turned around, and began pointing. “All along the front there, and also up there. You’re going to need the extension ladder to do that level. Then down the gutters …”
It was the laugh that did it. Her laugh, directed at him. Her hair whipping around in the wind, and her socks planted in the snow, and just … the Julie-ness of her. Seeing her that way, smiling up at him without reserve, struck a final blow to the dam he’d built against all the old feelings. It gave way with a flood of pleasure that warmed him despite the cold.
She was special. She was Julie. She was his.
Forget keeping his distance. As soon as he got her fucking garlands up, he was going to kiss her.
Julie sat by the front window, watching Carson’s legs on the ladder. She couldn’t see his face or his hands, but just his being up there made her wobbly, nervous for his safety, weak with yearning that just kept getting worse.
At night, she dreamed he was in her bed, in her body. She dreamed he was part of her life, here in the house. Cruel dreams that she wished away, bu
t wishing didn’t get her anywhere with Carson.
When she was twenty and she decided to give Glory her kidney, she’d wished Carson would understand, but he didn’t. For Julie, it had been the first opportunity she’d ever had to prove that she could be selfless. Different from the way she’d been raised. She’d liked Glory, known she was a good woman, known she would die within the year if she didn’t get the transplant.
Why not give it to her? What did Julie need two kidneys for?
But Carson—despite being grateful—had read her the riot act. He’d repeated the risks of general anesthesia and major surgery, staph infections and renal failure, shortened life span. You barely even know my mother. You don’t know what you’re getting into.
After the surgery, she was weaker than she’d expected, and he grew more restless every day, pacing the hospital room, pacing the corridors. The semester was starting, and he wanted to head back to Alfred and finish up his degree.
I’m staying here for a while, she told him when she got released to recuperate at his parents’ house. I like it here.
College hadn’t really worked out for her. Except for Carson, she hadn’t found anything there to latch onto. She didn’t know who to be. And without knowing that, she was afraid to latch on to him too hard. Afraid of being subsumed in the very energy and purpose that attracted her to him in the first place.
He was so confident, even then. So sure of himself, when Julie was still just finding her feet.
But in Potter Falls, strangely enough, she knew exactly who she was.
He hadn’t even tried to talk it through. You can go, she’d said, and he’d just left. Packed up his things and drove back to school.
It took her months to process that it was really over. Years of wondering if she could have done something different, kept him somehow without ruining him. Gone with him without losing herself.
She became his mother’s friend, and he became a stranger who came to visit periodically and knocked her equilibrium out of whack.
In his room across the hall from hers, his backpack leaned against the wall, the top an open mouth from which he retrieved things as he needed them. He’d been around for half of December, and his dresser sat empty.
When the time came for him to leave, he’d be fast about it.
She wanted him to stay. She had always wanted him to stay.
Carson set about it deliberately. He hung up all the garlands, put away the extension ladder, and tucked the boxes back into the closet. Showered. Dressed in clean jeans and flannel over a thermal shirt. Shaved for the second time today.
When he found her, she was in the front room—the first one guests would see when they arrived to check in. She stood on a low step stool, tacking mistletoe up along the crown molding. She’d draped garlands along the ceiling in loops, then filled them with Christmas stuff. Sugarplums, tiny reindeer, twinkling lights.
Carson walked right up to her. He was used to being taller than Julie, but the stool put her a couple inches above him. The house smelled like orange peels and cinnamon, and she smelled like the coconut shampoo he’d found in her shower.
“You’re making this real easy for me,” he said.
“The mistletoe?”
“The mistletoe.”
“It’s a handy excuse for a kiss.”
“I don’t need an excuse to kiss you. I need excuses not to kiss you. And I’ve run out.”
Her eyes had crackles of black in them. He’d forgotten. It had been a decade or more since he stood this close and looked.
