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"Let’s get a coffee before the crowd descends," he suggested amiably.
As soon as they were out of earshot, Nora hissed, "Did you sleep with our Craftmas neighbor?"
"What? No! They’re the one I was telling you about. River. Who I brought the cat to."
"Oh, right. So they’re just being weird because they had the displeasure of hanging out with you?"
She grinned and shoulder checked him.
"Haha. They, uh, aren’t the biggest fan of taxidermy, I think. They don’t like the idea of kids coming to adopt a kitten and imagining it stuffed on someone’s wall."
"Pshh, kids think about the weirdest shit all the time. Buck Slater’s kid told me I was a demon at the grocery store the other day."
"How did she figure it out?"
"I know, right?" Nora winked at Cassidy and whisked their coffees to the register where she paid for both.
"Thanks."
Nora caught Cassidy’s elbow and turned him to face her.
"Listen. This is going to be great for us. We’ve never had the whole year to prepare before, and we didn’t have the capacity to take custom orders on the spot. Now that we do, we can actually see if this will be sustainable."
Cassidy nodded, visions of a dozen new projects he wanted to start already dancing in his head. His head, which was already throbbing from being in the fluorescent lights for an hour. The devastation that he’d feel when he dragged himself home tonight—to say nothing of the two days that would follow—was a guarantee, and he tried to push it from his mind.
"And that means that I need you to be a hundred percent."
"Huh? Oh, yeah, of course. What?"
"Cass …" She bit her lip. "Just, please focus on our booth, not on the cat kid. Okay? I know how you are."
"And how am I, exactly?" he sniffed.
"Don’t get upset, I’m not saying you’re gonna do anything wrong. Just that …"
Her face cycled through expression after expression, like she was searching for a non-devastating way to announce his failings as a person.
"Jesus, just say it, Nor."
"You have a tendency to get a bit distracted when you’re focusing on someone you have the hots for. I know you can’t help it. It’s not a bad thing. It would just be terrible timing if it happened this weekend. You know?"
Cassidy nodded.
"Yeah, fine."
Nora wasn’t wrong. ADHD was something that he’d been dealing with since before he was diagnosed at ten. For the past twenty years he’d experienced what it meant to have a brain that didn’t work with the ways the world was set up. And, yeah, one of the things his brain loved to do was to fixate on new people as he met them.
There were so many questions and they were all so interesting that sometimes hours would pass in conversation or thought without his notice, leaving him in a position where he needed to scramble to keep the rest of his life in order.
Still, Nora being correct didn’t make it feel any better to be reminded of the capacity his brain had to ruin their collective lives.
"I’m sorry, C. It’s just—"
"I know, dude. Don’t worry about it. It’s under control."
He didn’t add, Because they probably want nothing to do with me now that they think I’m an animal murderer. Some things, he’d learned the hard way, didn’t need to be said aloud.
Nora squeezed his shoulder and they headed back to the table, sipping their very bad coffees.
For a moment, the Christmas music that was piped through every speaker in the building quieted and a nasal voice announced, "Attention vendors, staff, and volunteers, the doors are opening now. Repeat, the doors are now opening and guests will be inside shortly."
Nora and Cassidy turned to one another. This weekend could make the difference between them being able to keep making art full time and having to go back to the jobs they’d left the year before.
"Here," Cassidy said, "goes nothing."
CHAPTER 5
Cassidy
The first rule of Craftmas was: people don’t know what they want until you tell them. The second rule of Craftmas was: if they think they don’t want what you’re selling, tell them to gift it.
"Hello!" Cassidy would call to people passing the table. "Do you like ethical taxidermy?"
And like clockwork, they’d ask what made it ethical, leaving an opening for him to tell them about how he didn’t hunt, trap, or kill any animals. Instead, he found animals that had died already (he’d learned the first year never to say the word roadkill) or that people found and brought to him. He told them that he and Nora were now able to use many other parts of any animal he mounted in her candles.
Nora would offer people the matchbooks she’d made with the Candledermy logo and use the freebies to draw them into conversations about the candles. Very few people could resist a freebie.
