Page 78 of The Christmas Fix
Cat felt embarrassed over her embarrassment. He had her off kilter. It reminded her of when she and Gannon were kids playing baseball in the neighborhood. In their infinite nine-year-old wisdom, they’d put their foreheads on the end of the bat and spun and spun until they couldn’t run a straight line.
That’s how she felt now. Dizzy and giddy and not completely in control.
“An observation isn’t small talk,” Cat argued.
“Hmm,” Noah responded. He was watching her with something warm, something possessive in those sharp green eyes. His hair was a mess from her demanding fingers pulling on it. He looked so relaxed, so happy and confident. All Cat wanted to do was curl up in his lap and fall asleep. But that wasn’t how she rolled. Not even close.
“Well, I’ve got an early morning,” she began.
“Ask me to stay, Cat.” He gave the order calmly, quietly. She blinked, opened her mouth to argue. But her body didn’t want her to argue. Her body wanted to curl up next to Noah’s heat, wanted to wake up to that soft look and those strong hands.
But, damn it, her body also wanted pizza and a Jack and Coke and deep fried Snickers. Her body did not rule her mind.
“Stay with me. Please.” The words were out of her mouth before she could corral her traitorous urges.
He pulled her back against him, his lean, hard body cradling hers. Cat resisted the urge to relax, but his heat and the gentle stroke of his hand over the curve of her hip were impossible to fight.
“I have questions,” she said into the dark.
“Okay,” Noah sighed indulgently into her hair. “Fire away.”
“Your mother. Why is she… the way she is? And why is the Christmas Festival so important to you personally?”
He took another breath, let it out slowly as if he were carefully choosing his words. “My dad was an alcoholic gambler. But I didn’t know that until years later. All I knew when I was five or six was that he scared me. There was never enough food. Never any money. The house was never warm enough in the winter. My mother was never happy. They fought a lot at night. He’d disappear for days at a time.”
Cat sat up to look at him. This was not what she’d expected.
Noah swallowed hard and then gave a wry smile.
“One day he was supposed to be watching me while my mom went to the grocery store. He thought I was making too much noise. So, he… he, uh, locked me in the basement. When my mother came home, he was passed out drunk, and she thought I’d wandered away. The cops were called, but it took a while before they finally found me.”
“How long were you down there?” Cat asked quietly.
“Six hours.” There was no amusement in Noah’s dry laugh. She reached out and interlaced her fingers with his. Just a touch. A friendly reminder that the past was where it should be. Far, far behind him.
Cat swore under her breath. “You could have just said ‘none of your business, nosy.’”
He gave her a crooked grin and adjusted his glasses. “After what we just experienced right there,” he said, pointing to the floor, “you want to start drawing boundaries?”
“I don’t want you to feel obligated to tell me…anything,” Cat began. “It’s just—I mean I know it has to be hard for you, and we didn’t exactly get off to the best start.”
“I think we’ve more than made up for that,” Noah countered. “I guess I just want you to know. That’s why the festival is so important to me. Cat, that was the only time of year I could really escape. When that tree was lit the day after Thanksgiving every year, when the whole town was decked out in lights and tinsel, I had a place to go every day after school besides home. I helped out wherever I could just so I wouldn’t have to go home. And the people of Merry let me. I manned the hot chocolate stand. I swept sidewalks. I wrapped gifts. They fed me, paid me. Even when they didn’t have to.”
He cleared his throat, his voice thick with emotion. “I went to every tree lighting. Ada Romanski—she was the last city manager—she’d give a little speech and then push the button that lit the tree, and I thought it was the coolest job in the world. I wanted that job. Sometimes in the summer when my parents were fighting or when there wasn’t enough to eat, I’d go to bed, and I’d dream about those lights.”
Cat blinked back a hot rush of tears. “Jesus,” she breathed. “Is your dad still alive? Because I’m all for driving to his shithole apartment—because I know an asshole like that doesn’t have a house—and kicking his ass.”
“He left when I was a teenager. Went to work and just never came back. It was a relief to me at first. He wasn’t around to tell me what a disappointment I was or how pathetic I was. But then reality set in. Mom didn’t work, never had. And we went from barely scraping by to heads underwater.”
Cat squeezed his hand, her heart breaking to bits over the little boy who dreamed of Christmas lights.
“The only things I had in those days were school and the Christmas Festival. Two bright, shiny things that I could hang onto to get me through the rest of it. The fights, the never having enough, the never being good enough. So I worked hard, got some scholarships, and decided I’d spend my life giving back to the town that had given me so much. And my mother? By the time he left, there wasn’t much left of her. She moved, a couple miles outside of town. Neither one of us could stand the sight of that house anymore. But she just gave up a long time ago.”
Cat dropped her head back and stared up at the ceiling. “Noah, this explains so much.”
“Like what?”
“You’re not an asshole. You’re scarred.”
