Page 36 of Christmas Is All Around
She stood, rubbing her hands on her leggings. “I’ll help you clean up,” she said, and Graham rose, too, collecting glasses from seemingly every flat surface in the room. She was glad he didn’t tell her to leave it for later; she didn’t know what to do with herself, despite the fact that this was hardly the first time they’d been alone together.
She set the dishes down on the counter, and turned to the kitchen table, gathering up the plates they’d eaten on to hand to Graham, who was standing at the sink, rinsing the dishes in cursory fashion before loading them into the dishwasher. He carefully rinsed each of the reusable plastic takeaway containers, true to his word to Leo.
All too soon, however, the dishwasher was loaded and quietly humming away, the paper bags the takeaway had come in tossed in the trash, and Graham was wiping down the counter. He was very neat, she’d noticed; after a party like this, under ordinary circumstances—circumstances in which she wasn’t trying to avoid having a conversation with the man standing next to her, because she had no idea what to say, no idea how to alleviate the pressure that seemed to be growing around them—she’d have dumped the dishes in the sink and gone tobed, worrying about the mess the following morning. (A strategy that she always regretted the next day, of course, but she never learned her lesson.) But his kitchen was once again spotless; the living room, too, had the sort of cozy-and-lived-in-but-tidy look to it that Charlotte had dreamed of achieving but never quite managed, given her propensity for leaving art supplies and books and empty coffee mugs scattered around all the common areas of whatever apartment she happened to live in. And compared to the new-baby disorder of Ava and Kit’s flat, this felt like something out of a catalog.
Graham tossed the rag in the sink and turned to look at her. Despite the ill-advised number of cocktails she’d consumed that evening, Charlotte felt suddenly wide awake, alert to every movement of his body. He looked at her for a long moment, and then reached out slowly—so slowly that she could have stepped easily out of his reach, if she wanted.
But she didn’t want.
Instead, she let him hook his thumb and forefinger around her wrist, tugging her closer.
She felt her heart thumping in her chest.
She looked down at his hand, the fingers tanned a shade darker than the fair skin of her wrist, and felt the tap of her pulse against his thumb.
She looked up and met his eyes.
He swallowed.
“I’ll walk you home,” he said softly, after a long moment in which they stood in silence, linked by his fingers on her skin, neither of them speaking.
“What if I wanted to stay?” she replied, equally softly, and she saw him exhale slowly—feltit, somehow, in her chest.
“If we’d not just drunk our body weights in liquor, I’d want you to,” he said. He hesitated. Reached out. And very, very slowly tucked aloose strand of hair behind her ear. His eyes were dark on her; a curl had broken ranks and tumbled onto his forehead, and she didn’t trust herself to reach up and push it back. Didn’t trust herself to touch him at all. She, apparently, had less self-control than he did.
And then, at last, his eyes slid from hers. “I’ll get your coat,” he said, his voice low.
And while she waited for him to hand it to her—while he walked her home, along the streets of Chiswick, aglow with Christmas lights, passing the occasional throng of Friday-night revelers—and when he left her on Ava’s front steps with a last, lingering glance—she knew that something, somehow, had changed.
And that she was in very deep trouble.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
You look awful.”
This helpful greeting was Ava’s way of saying good morning on Saturday, when Charlotte staggered into the kitchen at a little past nine, which, all things considered, she thought was a completely reasonable time to awaken. It had not been an entirely peaceful lie-in—Alice had woken up at five, resisted all of Kit’s murmured attempts to soothe her, screeched fitfully for some time, and finally been removed to the living room, allowing Charlotte to drift back into a doze, which had involved a very weird dream in which she and Graham were in costume as Santa and Mrs. Claus, serving cocktails to the Grinch.
“I’m too old for drunk Christmas, I think,” she muttered, sinking down at the kitchen table and gratefully accepting the mug of coffee that Ava set down in front of her.
“I miss hangovers,” Ava said wistfully; now that Charlotte got a proper look at her, she could see that Ava was tired, too, with dark circles under her eyes and the bleary look that seemed to be common to all new parents. Charlotte wondered if Ava would be offended if she bought her an eye cream for Christmas, before immediately deciding that yes, she would.
Right on cue, there was a howl from the living room.
“But you’ve traded hangovers for the knowledge that you have contributed to the continuation of life on earth,” Charlotte informed her sister with a saccharine smile; Ava responded by flipping her off, then rose to see if Kit needed an assist.
Left alone in the relative peace of the kitchen, Charlotte pulled her phone out of the pocket of her joggers, mildly surprised to see that she had a text. Normally her phone was quiet in the mornings here, since everyone back home was still asleep.
Graham Calloway: Good morning. Was wondering if you had plans tomorrow?
She stared down at the message, her heart tapping a strange beat in her chest, warring with an urge to laugh. Of course he used completely proper punctuation in his texting.
Charlotte: Hello, sir. I do not have plans tomorrow, after careful consultation of my calendar.
Graham: . . . . .
Graham: Are you taking the piss?
Charlotte: Yes re: the weirdly formal texting manners
