Page 85 of It Always Snows on Mistletoe Square
‘Nope, not if I snuggle up to you, it isn’t.’
Ben pulls me close and wraps both his arms around me.
‘That better?’
‘Always.’
‘I was wondering … ’ he says with a slight hesitation to his voice. ‘Now, don’t take this the wrong way, cos really it’s none of my business.’
‘That sounds ominous … ’
‘No, not at all. I was just wondering if you’d been in touch with your parents recently.’
I sit up straight, loosening myself from Ben’s embrace.
‘Why?’
‘Because it’s Christmas?’ he replies, looking surprised at my frosty reaction.
I turn and rest my back against the bench, so I’m facing forwards. ‘I emailed them, if you must know.’
‘You emailed them? At Christmas?’
‘Yes!’ I’m already a little ashamed of this, and I don’t need someone reminding me. ‘Have you been in touch with your adoptive parents?’ I ask, turning the tables.
‘Yes, I rang them today as it happens.’
‘Did you?’ I ask, looking at him in surprise. ‘When?
‘This morning, while you were getting ready to go out. Just to tell them I wouldn’t be coming for Christmas really, but the conversation went on for much longer than I thought it would.’
‘Oh,’ I reply. I’m pleased Ben has spoken to his parents, but part of me is selfishly hoping that he isn’t going to announce he’s spending Christmas with them after all this year. ‘Why was that?’
‘I’m not sure really. Probably because of everything that has been happening in the house.’ Ben glances across the square to Christmas House. ‘It’s made me start thinking a lot about my past. Especially when Angela told us about giving up her daughter, it made me think about my own mother again, and what reasons she might have had for abandoning me.’
‘You don’t know she abandoned you. Angela didn’t abandon her child, remember – she was taken away from her.’
‘I was abandoned,’ Ben says, not looking at me, but into the distance across the square. ‘They confirmed it for me.’
Immediately I take Ben’s hand in mine.
‘I was left at a children’s home on Christmas Eve, not long after I was born. No name was left, just me. Luckily I was taken in and cared for until my adoptive parents came along. And you know what else?’
‘What?’ I notice that Ben’s eyes are beginning to mist up as he speaks.
‘I wasn’t even their first choice. The baby they were going to adopt got reunited with his mother again after she changed her mind. No such luck for me, though.’
Ben turns to me again, and I can see now just how distraught he is. His grief-stricken face is full of bottled-up emotion that he can’t contain any longer. ‘So not only was I adopted because my mother abandoned me, but I wasn’t even my adoptive parents’ first choice either! It seems no one wanted me.’
‘I want you, Ben,’ I tell him, as the tears he’s fought so hard to hide for so long begin to pour down his face. ‘I want you.’
Ben looks at me, a mixture of love and gratitude on his anguished face. Then before I know what’s happening, he leans into my shoulder, and I find myself comforting him while he sobs.
After a few moments he sits up again, but covers his face with his hands. ‘I’m sorry, Elle. I shouldn’t be burdening you with all this. It’s not fair.’ He rubs furiously at his eyes, desperately trying to wipe away any evidence of weakness. ‘What sort of a man am I? Sobbing into your shoulder like a baby.’ He shakes his head, as though he’s trying to shake his emotion away with it.
‘Ben, I can assure you, you’re more man than all my past boyfriends put together. It takes a strong man to show his feelings, to allow himself to share his emotions. We’re not in the past now, you know, in one of Estelle’s stories where men had to be strong and silent and not show their feelings.’
‘Just as well, eh?’ Ben says, trying to lighten the moment. ‘I wouldn’t have fitted in very well back then.’
