Three Girls And A Leading Man (18 page)

“Come on, Annie, I really think
this will be fun.”

“Nate, seriously? What the hell is
fun about tramping around in the freezing cold to carry some sappy, half-dead
tree home?”

“Why do you think it will be
half-dead?” he asked, looking disappointed.

“Because it’s almost Christmas. The
trees in these lots are cheap rip-offs. Of course it will be half dead.”

Nate shook his head at me. “You are
way too cynical for your own good. Come on, Annie. Come pick out a Christmas
tree with me.”

I sighed. “Fine,” I said. “But you
have to stop and buy me hot chocolate on the way home.”

He grinned. “Sold.”

Minutes later, I was shivering
while Nate walked up and down the rows of trees. A tree lot had sprung up a few
weeks ago down the street from his apartment and he had been bugging me to go
with him to find the perfect tree ever since.

“Hmm, we always get a nice blue
spruce at home,” he said, squinting at a tree in front of us. “What do you
think this one is?”

“If you can’t tell them apart, why
do you care what kind you get?” I asked.

“It’s tradition!” he replied,
grabbing me around the waist to pull me close. “Come on, don’t you have any
traditions?”

I shrugged. “My mom had an ugly old
silver fake tree that she would pull out every year and decorate while I was at
school.”

Nate looked at me with an
expression akin to horror on his face. “Are you kidding me?” he asked.

“No,” I said, pulling away. “Why
would I be kidding?”

“You guys didn’t put your tree up
together? What about the eggnog? What about the cookies?”

“Nate, I was too old for that stuff
by the time I was ten.”

“No,” he said seriously, shaking
his head. “No, no, no. You’re never too old for decorating a Christmas tree.
Oh, Annie. Now my mission is clear to me. I must impress upon you the
wonderfulness of Christmas traditions.”

“Oh, Jesus,” I muttered.

“Seriously, Annie. Some of my
favorite memories are of putting up the tree. We would go out with my whole
family, all my cousins and my aunts and uncles, and we’d find a good tree
farm—”

“A what?”

“A tree farm,” he said. “You know,
a place you go to cut down trees.”

“You actually went out in the woods
with an axe to chop down your tree?” I asked him. “Are you sure you’re not
confusing your life with a Laura Ingalls book?”

He pulled on my earlobe, an
annoying habit he had picked up to get back at me when I teased him.

“We did not go into the woods,” he
said with dignity. “We went to a tree farm.”

“Like that’s so much better,” I
muttered. He just looked at me. “Sorry,” I said. “You were saying?”

“So we would all go out and find
the perfect tree for each of our houses. And then we would take turns with the
saw to cut them down. And after we got them all loaded up on top of the cars,
we would go back to my aunt’s house for pizza. It was so great.”

“I guess you had to be there,” I
said drily. Nothing that he had described sounded remotely like fun to me.

“Maybe,” he said. “Maybe next year
we can go out to Maryland to visit them and you can come along for the
tree-picking day.”

I stared at him, aghast. He was not
seriously making plans for us in a year—especially not for me to meet his
entire family.

Before I could say anything, Nate
started cracking up.

“Oh, you’re too easy,” he said.
“God, it looked like your head was about to explode there, Annie.”

“Haha,” I replied, turning away.
“You’re such a laugh riot.”

“Anyhow,” he said as he grabbed my
hand, undeterred. “The next weekend my dad would spend all day Saturday putting
lights up on the tree. And he would complain the whole time because the needles
were so prickly. Then he and my mom would fight about the tree—he would
say that next year we were getting a scotch pine, something with softer
bristles. And she would yell at him and say that the blue spruce was prettier
and she would be damned if she would get anything else. And then he would say,
‘Well you can put the lights up yourself then!’”

Nate’s face suddenly turned
wistful, the way it did when he would get carried away in telling a story about
his dad. It was almost like he would forget for a few minutes why he was sad…

I squeezed his hand. “Would they
make up?” I asked softly.

He shook his head almost
imperceptibly, as if he was clearing it, then smiled down at me. “Yeah. By that
night they would be snuggling in front of the lights. And then they’d have the
exact same fight the next year.”

“Who’s doing the lights this year?”
I asked, feeling suddenly guilty for monopolizing so much of his time when his
mother probably wanted him at home.

“She got a fake tree,” he said, his
face clouding over a little. “The year after he died. One of those pre-lit
ones. She can set it up all by herself.”

Something about the story made me
feel incredibly sad. I squeezed his hand again, determined to change the
subject. “I’m freezing my butt off out here, Hughes,” I said. “Let’s pick that
tree and get it home.”

He smiled at me, a grateful smile,
and started to lead me down the rows of trees. I squinted at the tags in the
darkness, hoping I would find…

“Here,” I said, tugging on his hand
so he would stop. “This one looks perfect.”

He looked at it for a long minute,
his head cocked as if in serious consideration. “It does look pretty good.”

“I think it’s beautiful,” I told
him.

He peered down to look at the tag.
“Blue spruce,” he murmured.

“Your mom has good taste,” I said.

Nate looked up at me, a grin
spreading across his face. Then he leaned forward and kissed me.

“So do you,” he said. “Come on,
let’s get this home.”

***

We dragged the tree behind us on
the sidewalk. My fingers were freezing around the trunk in spite of my warm
mittens. “God, you owe me so big for this,” I muttered. “I’m so cold!”

“Oh, stop being such a baby,” he
said, looking at me over his shoulder. “This is good for you. Fresh air,
exercise…”

“Nate, it’s five below,” I said. “This
isn’t fresh air, it’s torture.”

“Such a baby,” he said sadly.

We finally reached his apartment
and dragged the tree up the stairs to the second floor. It wasn’t until he was
unlocking his door that I remembered what was missing. “Hey!” I said loudly.
“You were supposed to get me a hot chocolate!”

“Not to fear,” he said, opening the
door and pulling the tree through. “I have hot chocolate right here in the
house.”

“Seriously?” I asked, following him
in and stamping my boots on the welcome mat to rid them of their cover of snow.
“What twenty-eight-year-old man keeps cocoa in his house?”

“I’ve got marshmallows, too,” he
said happily. He raised one eyebrow at me in a mock-seductive expression. “You
know you think that’s sexy.”

I couldn’t help but laugh. “Oh
yeah, baby,” I replied.

Nate pulled the tree into the
living room.

“Don’t you need one of those stand
things?” I asked him.

“Yes,” he replied. “And I have
one.”

“Where?” I asked, surprised.

“In my Christmas decoration box,”
he said.

“Oh my God,” I said, collapsing on
the couch. “You have a decoration box? Who are you?”

“Let me rephrase that,” Nate said.
“I have several decoration boxes.”

When I stared at him incredulously,
he only smiled. “Annie, trust me,” he said. “Christmas is the best time of
year. This is going to be fun.”

I shrugged my shoulders. “If you
say so...”

Twenty minutes later, Nate had
pulled several plastic tubs up from his storage cage in the basement and set
the tree up in a red metal stand. Now he was pulling out string after string of
lights.

“I have a feeling your dad had a
point,” I said, gingerly touching one of the branches. “These needles are sharp
as hell.”

“It builds character,” he said
bracingly.

But a few minutes later he was
asking me for my mittens in an effort to protect his hands.

“These don’t help,” he said
grumpily. “The needles just poke right through.”

“Do you have any hockey gloves?” I
asked.

“No,” he muttered, wincing again as
he struggled to wrap the wire around one of the top branches. “Crap, that
hurts!”

“I have an idea,” I said, pulling
the lights from his hand. “Instead of wrapping, let’s go for a more artistic
drape.” I started to lay the strand on top of the braches, pulling it around
the tree as I went.

“Smart girl,” Nate said, taking the
lights back and continuing to drape the strand. When he was finished I plugged
the lights in and we both stood back to admire it.

“Well,” Nate said. “Maybe not quite
as nice as my dad did it, but still not bad.”

“Okay,” I said, looking around at
the boxes. “What now?”

“Now,” Nate said excitedly. “We put
some music on and we start to decorate!”

Before I could respond, Nate had
hurried off to the bedroom. A few minutes later he came back with his iPod,
which he plugged into the docking stereo. The strains of Nat King Cole’s ‘Christmas
Song’ soon filled the room.

“I’m not even going to say it,” I
said, staring at him.

“What, you think it’s lame I have
Christmas music on my iPod?”

I just shook my head at him. “Hide
your true feelings all you want,” he said, bending down to rifle through one of
the boxes. “But I know you think I’m adorable.”

I would never admit it, but the
truth was, I kind of did.

“Get over here,” he said, putting
his hands on his hips and looking at me sternly. “You’re helping, missy.”

I groaned, but got up and joined
him. “Is there, like, some specific traditional order we need to follow here?”
I asked.

“Nope,” he said. “Just grab one and
get going.”

Nate had a lot of ornaments. And
most of them had a story, which he insisted on sharing with me. “I got that one
in Frankenmuth,” he told me, pointing at the glass bulb in my hand. “The year
after I moved here. My sister Emily came out to visit and we went to that
Christmas store, you know, the one that’s open all year?”

I nodded. Frankenmuth was a
touristy little town about two hours away. They got
really
into Christmas up there.

“We took Danny to see Santa there
last year,” I told him.

Nate laughed. “My mom still writes
‘from Santa’ on half of our gifts.”

I snorted. “When I was seven I told
my mom to give up the act.”

He stared at me, aghast. “You were
only seven?”

I shrugged, feeling uncomfortable.
That was the year I asked Santa to make my dad leave his newest girlfriend.
When he didn’t come home for Christmas, I decided I’d had enough of the fat man
in the red suit.

Nate must have noticed I was
uncomfortable—he had gotten surprisingly adept at that—and he
changed the subject.

“So, that ornament,” he said,
pointing to the misshapen clay lump in my hand, “was a gift from my sister
Janna. She made it when she was six.”

“What is it?” I asked, holding it
up to the light.

“I think it was supposed to be a
reindeer,” he said, squinting at it.

I felt a rush of affection for him,
this man that would keep such a gift for all these years, a man who would cart
it all the way from Maryland to Michigan and put it on his tree. I watched him
as he hung a red glitter bulb on a tall branch. The lights from the tree
reflected in his blond hair.

“Nate,” I said suddenly.

He looked at me, smiling slightly.
“Yeah?”

I kissed him, holding onto his face
for a long moment as I pressed my lips against his.

“What was that for?” he asked, when
I finally pulled away. He had a slightly dazed look on his face, but he was
smiling at me.

“Nothing,” I said, grinning back.
“I just felt like kissing you.”

It took us about twenty minutes to
finish the tree. Sometimes we talked, Nate telling me about ornaments or
memories they invoked. Mostly we worked in comfortable silence, the soft
strains of Christmas music the only sound in the room.

When we were done, Nate went to the
kitchen to make us some cocoa. He joined me on the couch a few minutes later
with a mug for each of us, and a plate of cookies. “Those look homemade,” I
told him, already imagining him in a frilly apron whipping up a batch of
cookies.

“You can stop that right now,” he
said, as if reading my mind. “My mom sent these this morning.”

He turned all the lamps off in the
apartment so the only light was coming from the tree. You could barely tell we
had phoned it in with the strings of lights; with the ornaments on, the tree
looked perfect.

“Come here,” Nate said, pulling me
against him on the couch. I snuggled against his chest, subconsciously finding
the now familiar place where I fit perfectly.

“Thank you for doing this with me,”
he whispered, kissing the top of my head.

“Thank you for making me,” I told
him.

“You had fun, didn’t you?” he
asked. I couldn’t see his face, but I could tell that he was smiling.

“Yeah,” I whispered. “I had a lot
of fun.”

We stayed like that for a long
time, sitting in front of the tree with the music playing softly, Nate’s arms
around me. I snuggled closer to him, feeling happy. Feeling so happy that it
scared me.

Chapter Twenty-three

‘Are you the type of
girl who always puts her girlfriends first? While those relationships should be
precious to you, it is essential that you learn to put your man first. No
self-respecting gentleman wants to play second fiddle to your female
friends!’—
The Single Girl’s Guide
to Finding True Love