AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Ruby laughs. “This is a timed event?”
“Sure. That will put some pressure on us to find something and not to overthink it. This is supposed to be fun.”
Ruby stands and wipes her hands on the front of her jeans. She’s left her coffee sitting on the bench and she picks it up now, holding it in front of her chest. “I’m in.”
Dexter looks at his watch, waits for the second hand to tick around to the top of the clock, and then looks at Ruby. “Ready, set, go.”
Without another word, he walks away, still holding his coffee and his donut bag. Ruby watches him go with a smile; at every turn, Dexter surprises her. When she first agreed to this…partnership?—Can she call it a partnership?—she’d been sure that their interactions would feel dry at best, or antagonistic at worst. That she might be too guarded or reserved to ever give him a good story. But then they’d met and everything about Dexter had felt genuinely curious, and like he was truly on her side. Even his more sensitive lines of questioning are gently probing rather than baldly investigative, and it’s easy for Ruby to see him for who he is. And, maybe more importantly, to like him for who he is.
Ruby’s eyes follow him until he turns a corner and disappears from view. She glances at her watch: 27 minutes to find an ornament for Dexter. Okay, she can do this.
The first booth is all animal-related ornaments: barnyard animals wearing Santa hats; paw prints on clay disks; various types of birds dressed up as wisemen in a manger. Nothing there for Dexter. Ruby moves on. Another booth is comprised entirely of ornaments that look like sexy fruits: a coconut with big red lips and two tiny coconuts attached like breasts; a banana with bedroom eyes; two apples kissing. Not quite right.
Around the corner Ruby finds a booth filled with intricate Christmas train sets. The booth operator has holiday jazz playing from a boombox, and people are slapping credit cards on the counter to pay for eight-hundred dollar purchases like it’s nothing. The train sets are amazing, but there’s not an ornament in sight. Ruby moves on.
After about twenty-two minutes she finally arrives at a booth that’s full of the kinds of holiday decorations she needs. The tent is strung with frosty white lights, and a man with an acoustic guitar is sitting on a stool, strumming a mellow, wordless version of “Last Christmas.”She glances around to make sure Dexter isn’t lurking over her shoulder, and then picks up a cowboy on a reindeer. His ten-gallon hat is covered in brown glitter, as are his boots.Not exactly, but getting closer.She hangs it back on the ornament holder and moves on.
Up by the register is a miniature tree covered in baubles that catch Ruby’s eye, so she stops there to browse, glancing at her watch. Three minutes to go. There is a competitive streak that runs through Ruby and it’s egging her on here—she can’t lose this challenge. It’s all in good fun, and there’s no prize for “winning,” but she still wants to get it right.
Fortunately, as she spins the mini tree, she lands on the perfect ornament and picks it up. Without even looking at the price, she hands it over to the woman working the register, then quickly taps her credit card on the screen to pay for it. With seconds left to spare, she takes her ornament, ignores the fact that there are people in the booth surreptitiously taking video of the former First Lady buying Christmas knickknacks, and dashes back to the bench where she and Dexter have agreed to meet.
“I’m here! I’m here!” Ruby shouts, holding up her ornament as she approaches.
Dexter looks at his watch with an exaggerated face. “You’re thirty seconds late. Should I consider that a forfeit?”
“There’s no prize,” Ruby laughs, catching her breath. “Only the promise to hang whatever the other person buys on the Christmas tree this year.”
“That’s true.” He sits down on the bench and pats the spot next to him. “Okay, you first.”
Ruby sits and hands over the ornament that the cashier has wrapped in tissue paper and put in a bag. “I saw it and for some reason I just knew it had to be yours,” she says, watching him hopefully as he starts to remove the white tissue paper. “It’s Iceland,” she says in a rush, unable to stop herself from explaining. “I thought it was so beautiful.”
“It is,” Dexter says, holding the round glass ornament in one palm and admiring it. It’s green and blue and purple, and the colors bleed together to create the Aurora Borealis in a polar night sky that looks like a painting. “I love it. How did you remember that I love Iceland?”
“Well,” Ruby says, tucking her hair behind her ears, “youdidjust tell me yesterday, so I at least had a fighting chance of remembering.”
“Thank you,” Dexter says, looking touched. “I got this one for you.” He hands over a similarly wrapped bag with an ornament inside. “It’s Blackbeard,” he says as she opens it, watching her hands lift the ceramic pirate on a string from the paper.
Ruby’s smile is enormous as she realizes that he’s gotten her a pirate ornament for her first Christmas on Shipwreck Key. It’s perfect.
“He’s got real yarn for a beard,” Dexter adds.
Ruby runs her fingers over the little twists of dark brown yarn that make up his beard. The pirate is holding a gun in one hand a sword in the other, and his mouth is wide open as if he’s been caught mid-action, shouting “Ahoy, matey!” at an oncoming foe. His ceramic jacket is flapping in the wind, and he looks fearsome.
“I love it!” Ruby says, looking at Dexter with shining eyes. She truly does love it, because it shows how much thought he put into it. She felt a bit like Blackbeard when she swept onto Shipwreck Key with the wind blowing her hair around, guns drawn, ready for action. And okay, maybe she wasn’t there for battle, per se, but she was there to carve out her own future in an unknown land. “I will hang it on my tree with pride,” she says, beaming as she re-wraps the ornament and puts it into her purse.
They spend the afternoon wandering the bazaar, looking at Christmas stuff in October, and listening to holiday music under the bright autumn sun. Throughout the day, Dexter pulls more stories from her as they stop to laugh at a grumpy looking cat on a leash wearing an elf costume, and against Dexter’s will, Ruby gets him to pose with her in Santa’s workshop, where they both kneel next to the Big Man in Red while wearing silly, hand-knitted stocking caps with tassels.
It’s a fabulously weird and unexpected day, and Ruby loves every minute of it. She loves it so much that she knows she needs to be on the next plane out of New York City, otherwise she’s going to do something rash and somehow reveal to Dexter how much she feels like a woman again in his presence—not just a female, but awoman. She’s on a slippery slope here, and she needs to find more secure footing fast.
Dexter is surprised and visibly disappointed when she tells him that she needs to get back to Shipwreck Key as soon as possible to handle some things there, but she holds firm, even turning down his invitation to dinner that night. She knows that this project is too important to both of them now to muddy the water with longing or romantic feelings, and she’s going to stick to her guns on this one—just like Blackbeard holding Charleston for ransom until his requests for medicine were met, only with a lot less violence than the most notorious pirate in history.
The very next day, Ruby is on a plane, flying high over the Eastern Seaboard towards home, with her ceramic pirate ornament tucked safely inside the purse that’s resting on her lap. She breathes a sigh of relief at every mile that she puts between herself and Dexter North.
It’s better this way,she tells herself, watching the Atlantic Ocean far below from her seat by the window.I need to stay clear-headed for this book. I need to tell my story. I need to figure out my life.
But a little part of her misses Dexter’s smile. She misses the way he cracks a joke or says something sly and then looks at her, waiting for her to pick up on it. She misses the way he asks questions and then really listens to her answers. She misses the way he can go from a serious journalist to a silly guy who wants to buy her a Christmas ornament in the blink of an eye.
But mostly, she misses the way he makes her feel, andthatis the reason that she’s on an airplane, winging her way home instead of sitting across from Dexter at a coffee shop, staring into his blue, blue eyes.
