Page 69 of Spicy or Sweet
Hearing him say her name for the first time in so long almost knocked the wind out of me, but I pushed down the tears choking me up and said, “Yeah. I know the perfect place.”
I figured a bench would take at least a couple of months to complete, but last night, while Noelle was holding Croissant up to the fridge to “show him things he’s never seen before,” I got a three-word text:
It’s finished. Tomorrow?
I lean against my car, half-expecting Nico not to show—he never did come back down to meet Noelle after the fire—but, sure enough, an engine rumbles up the road and his truck pulls in beside me.
He steps down from the truck, wearing a red flannel and jeans that look like they’ve been through surgery a time or two. “Hey.”
“Hey!”
Nico frowns at my sweater. “Is that a Christmas sweater?”
I follow him around to the back of the truck. “Yeah. The Whittens don’t celebrate Thanksgiving—they celebrate ‘pre-Christmas.’” It was heavily implied that the festive dress code wasn’t optional.
Nico pauses. “Today is Thanksgiving?”
I nod, not surprised that he wouldn’t know. Sometimes I think he would forget Christmas if I didn’t brave the mountain to spend the day with him. I don’t think he could ever forget our birthday, though.
We were never a big Thanksgiving family growing up, but Georgie loved the holiday for exactly one reason: after Thanksgiving dinner, every year, our parents let her put up the Christmas tree. Like the Whittens, she would’ve had a tree year-round if they’d let her. Today feels like the perfect day to honor her.
Nico looks down, his jaw set. He sniffs exactly once before squaring his shoulders. “Good. Yeah. She’d like that.”
“She would,” I agree, squeezing his arm.
The bench is covered by a blue tarp and some kind of thick bungee cord, presumably to stop the tarp from flying off on Nico’s journey down the mountain. He looks at me skeptically when I offer to help him carry it, understandably, considering he has a full foot of height on me, and a hell of a lot more muscle. He single-handedly lifts the bench down, straining but not uncomfortably, and politely pretends I’m helping when I grip the other side to help him carry it to the reservoir.
I marked out the spot I had in mind before he got here, and it fits perfectly, right beside a flat rock that could be a side table if someone was sitting here with a cup of coffee or, knowing Wintermore, peppermint hot chocolate.
Nico fusses with the bench until it’s perfectly in place, then stands back and nods. “Good spot.”
“I thought so. Can I see it?”
“Oh. Right, of course.”
Nico unclips the cords and tosses them aside, and I gasp as he reveals the bench. It’s beautiful, like everything he makes, but it’s… us. Three little mice stand on top of the backrest, each with a letter carved on their stomachs—N, S, and G. Carved forget-me-nots wind around the arms of the bench, coming up on one side so there’s a single flower in front of Georgie’s mouse.
“It’s beautiful,” I say, wiping my eyes. It’s no use—the tears are going to fall whether I wipe them or not. “Seriously. You’ve outdone yourself. How the hell did you do this in less than a month?”
He shifts, rubbing the back of his neck. “I started it twenty years ago. Just wasn’t ready to finish it.”
I look up at him. His eyes are red, and he looks so much younger.
“But you’re ready now?”
He rubs his hand over his beard. “Shit, I don’t know, Shay. I don’t know if I’ll ever be ready.” Because he knows as well as I do that this isn’t about a bench—it’s about closure. It’s about moving forward. “But you were ready. I could tell. And I wanted to do it for you.”
“Thank you.”
If he could hug me after the fire, surely I can hug him now. I wrap my arms around him and, after a second, he does the same. There’s still something—someone—missing from the hug, but a soft breeze blows through my hair, and I let myself believe that it’s the universe’s way of telling us Georgie is still with us.
“Should we test it out?” I ask when we break apart.
“Test what? It’s a perfectly good bench. It’s not going to break.”
I hold my hands up, fighting a laugh at Nico’s indignation. “Hey, no one is implying otherwise. I meant test the spot.”
“Oh. Right. Sure.”
