Jamison (Beautiful Mine #3) (6 page)

“I did.”

She smiled, and I could only imagine how validating it felt for her to have someone love her work as much as she did.

“Have a seat.” I pointed to the place I’d set for her at the island. “Wine?”

“Please.” She reached for the glass I’d poured for her and took a careful sip. “You have a good day at work today?”

I shrugged. “As good as could be expected.”

“I don’t even know what you do,” she said, forking some chicken. “I kind of like not knowing, because I have this idea of you, and I really like it.”

I chuckled and swallowed my bite. “What’s that?”

“You’re always so dressed up,” she said, her dark eyes sparkling as if she hadn’t been nearly in tears just fifteen minutes earlier. “I think you work in money. Wall Street, maybe? But you’re not an asshole, though, so I don’t know. Maybe you run your own company? You have this air about you, like you’re in charge. And you’re kind of on the quiet side. Like you’re always thinking. So right there, I can tell you’re smart.”

I smiled, never taking my eyes off her as she rambled on. Apparently, she’d been thinking about me quite a bit.

“It’s your facial hair that throws me off,” she said, squinting at me from across the island. My place was dark, save for some mood lighting, and the reflection of the city lights seeped in the windows and cast soft illuminations on her face. “Not a lot of guys can pull that off, but you can.”

“Thanks,” I laughed, running my palm along my meticulously and closely trimmed scruff. “It’s winter. It’s functional.”

She took another sip of wine, glancing around my apartment. “You decorate this place yourself?”

“No,” I said. Daphne had begged me to let her do it, but I never wanted her to leave her stamp there. I’d have sent the wrong message. “I hired someone.”

“You have a very… distinct style,” she observed. “Masculine. Clean lines. Muted colors. Says a lot about you.”

“Does it?” I glanced around.

“You’re kind of a no muss, no fuss guy, aren’t you?” she said, hopping down from the bar stool and leaving the rest of her plate untouched. She walked over to my bookcase, dragging her finger across the spines of my collection. “Reader. Figures.”

“You like to read?”

“Do I look like someone who likes to read?” She spun around and shot me a playful look, rendering the teary-eyed girl from earlier null and void. “I can’t sit still for two seconds.”

“That is true,” I said, staring at her untouched dinner. This girl was night and day from me. We had nothing in common. And yet I was completely and utterly mesmerized by her. In a sky full of stars, she was the shooting kind. The fiery comet. The movement amongst all the stillness. And I was the moon, quiet and still, observing it all from my unmovable place in the universe.

“Christmas is in a week,” she said, flitting over to the window and peering down at the street as people swept along the sidewalk carrying shopping bags from their last-minute excursions. “Any plans?”

“Might work,” I said.

She spun around and made a face. “Not going home to see your family?”

“Nope,” I said, staying mum. My family was a complicated mess of upper crust dysfunction, chock full of First World problems.

“Me neither,” she sighed, her fallen expression telling me not to pry. “I’ll be here. Mia’s going home to Connecticut. She invited me, but I think I’d rather stay here and paint.”

I smiled to myself. We both seemed to lose ourselves in our work, burying our unspoken burdens with passionate distractions. Maybe we weren’t so different, after all.

“You sure you have to work on Christmas?” she asked.

“I don’t have to, no.”

She stepped back toward the kitchen where I still stood, never having moved. “Maybe we can meet up, or something?”

My brows raised, surprised at her eagerness to spend time with me having only recently just met me. It always took me a long time to warm up to people, sometimes years. But the warmth of her personality was nothing short of inviting, and I couldn’t say no to those big brown eyes of hers. I’d have lived in the familiar strangeness of her sparkling stare forever, if I could.

“Yeah, we can do that,” I said.

“No one should be alone for the holidays,” she mused, staring down at the stained concrete floor beneath us. “We can do something fun. Maybe walk the city or something? I love when the city feels vacated. Is that weird?”

I shook my head. I loved it too. It was why I took my nightly walks. New York during the day was hustle and bustle, excitement and chaos. On the street I was anonymous. And late at night, it was like I had the whole place to myself. Quiet and solitude was the only thing that ever really felt like home for me.

“I know exactly what you mean,” I said. “Let’s do it.”

Her face lit up.

SOPHIE

Christmas morning I stood at Jamison’s door, a small wrapped box in my hand, and took a deep breath as I knocked. A minute later the door swung open, Jamison’s blue eyes drinking me in as he waved me inside. A thick, gray sweater hugged his broad shoulders. A faint cloud of aftershave saturated the air, as if he’d just showered.

His place was dark, lit up by city lights and the crackling of a fire in his living room fireplace.

“Here,” I said, handing him the small box wrapped in multi-colored birthday wrapping paper. “Sorry. I didn’t have any holiday paper.”

He smiled uncomfortably. “I didn’t know we were exchanging gifts. I’m, uh, a little unprepared.”

I waved it off. “It’s not a big deal.”

He tugged at the paper, gently ripping it and pulling out the small wooden box and propping it open. “Cufflinks?”

“I got them at this indoor flea market thing in the Meat Packing District,” I said. “They’re handmade by this artisan from Vermont. Sterling silver and obsidian. You always wear suits, so I just figured…”

The gal who made them told me obsidian represented life and death, which was sort of what Jamison was beginning to remind me of. I was straddling the line between both worlds when he came along.

“They’re perfect, Sophie,” he said, taking them out and rolling them around in his hand as he examined them. “I love them. Thank you.”

I shrugged, quickly realizing I still donned my marshmallow coat. “Did you want to go on a walk?”

He stood so still, so steady, and I was nothing but a ball of nervous energy like usual.

“Yeah, we can go for a walk.”

Jamison sat the box down on his island and grabbed his coat from the rack by the door.

“It’s actually not too bad out,” I said, holding my hands up. “Look. No gloves.”

We hit the street a moment later, practically having the entire city to ourselves. I thought about the snow day we had when I was fourteen. School was canceled and a storm system had dumped a foot of snow on our little town. My parents were at work, and I’d convinced my sisters that we should walk to the mall, which was miraculously still open. We had the whole place to ourselves. We ran and skipped and messed around, completely carefree and living in the moment, making it back home before our parents got off work. It was always our little secret, a precious moment buried forever.

“I love when everyone goes out of town,” I mused, skipping along. Jamison walked slow and steady like a freight train, his eyes fixed on me as if I amused him. “Want to head up to Midtown? Maybe see the Rockefeller tree?”

“Sure.”

I slowed down a bit, letting him catch up with me. He was always so calm and quiet, a stark contrast to my rapid-boil personality, and it was becoming quite soothing.

“I need to get you a present,” he said as we strolled up the sidewalk. I wasn’t sure why he was so fixated on that. The cufflinks were nothing in comparison to the things he’d done for me, if we were keeping score.

“No,” I said, swatting his shoulder. “Please. Don’t.”

“I will,” he said. “Stores are all closed today, but I’ll get you something.”

I glanced up at him, offering him a polite grin and completely missing the pothole of melted snow, which promptly took the ground out from under me. My body fell in slow motion as my arms wind-milled, reaching for something to grab onto until someone caught me before I could hit the ground.

Jamison’s arms hooked under mine, wrapping around me and steadying me back up to a standing position. My cheeks burned red hot. There was no playing it cool. There was no recovering from that, or hiding the fact that I was the world’s biggest klutz. My heart drummed in my chest as I breathed him in. Something about being so close to him made me forget what I was thinking for small moments.

“Is that coffee shop open?” I said, pointing across the street and tugging my coat into place even though I wanted to curl up in a hole and pretend that hadn’t just happened.

“It appears so.”

I grabbed him by the arm, checked for traffic, and tugged him across the crosswalk to the other side of the street where I could practically taste a mocha latte on my tongue.

“Want anything?” I turned to him as we waited in line for our turn. A minute later he ordered a tall, black coffee and reached for his wallet before I had a chance to object.

Coffees in hand, we braced ourselves for the brisk Christmas weather once again and trekked back outside, heading north to Midtown.

It was my second Christmas in the city and  my first time seeing the Rockefeller tree. The holidays had lost their special, warm-me-up feeling after my sisters died. They’d have loved the giant display.

Each Christmas, the five of us would load up in the Suburban and make the hour trek to Winkleman’s Tree Farm just outside of Albany to pick out the perfect blue spruce. Mom would let it sit in the breezeway to acclimate for a day or two, and then we’d spend a quiet Sunday afternoon decorating it while dad sat in his recliner sipping eggnog and letting us girls have at it. The tree may have looked like Christmas elves threw up all over it by the time we were done, but my parents never said a word.

The older I got, the more I realized how tedious and monotonous Christmas traditions could be for my parents. The same thing every single year. The same songs on the radio. The same movies on T.V. The same sugar cookies cut in shapes like stockings and snowmen. And the older I got, I realized just how much they did just to see those smiles on our faces.

I wiped a tear from my eye and brushed it off, hoping Jamison didn’t see.

“You like Christmas?” I asked, turning to him. He stood quietly, eyes glued to the majestic tree before us.

“Are we being honest?” he asked, pursing his full lips, his ice blue eyes vivid against the white and gray backdrop of the day.

“Always.”

“No.” He slipped his hands in his pockets, unapologetic. “It’s just another day to me.”

“Oh,” I said, drawing inwards. He didn’t have to spend Christmas with me. I thought I was doing him a favor by keeping him company. I must have had it all turned around. “I didn’t know that. I wouldn’t have asked you to hang out today.”

“It’s fine,” he said.

“I’m so embarrassed.” My hands flew to my cheeks. “I got you a gift. I bugged you about hanging out on Christmas. I was trying to make it all fun for us. And here you were, just doing me a favor.”

He inched closer to me, staring down into my eyes as a smile curled across his lips. “Sophie, it’s fine. I wanted to hang out with you.”

“You did?”

I gazed up into his unreadable expression as he studied me. “I did.”

Out of all the people in the world, he wanted to spend his Christmas day with me. I blinked away a tear before he noticed.