12 Days 'til Christmas ✓

chapter twenty

t w e n t y

*

When I get up on Sunday morning, I half expect to look outside and see green, but no such luck. The snow is still there, undisturbed. Unless there was more overnight. It's another day of being snowed in, and this time it seems dingier than yesterday: the sky is grey and overcast, hanging like a heavy weight over the world, pinning us in place.

At least I don't have anywhere to be. Today's the first day of Hanukkah but the Cohens and Levis will just have to wait for their cards because it doesn't look like I'll be able to get out of the house, let alone down the winding road that snakes its way into Saint Wendelin and beyond, to the cul-de-sac both families live on at the far end of the valley.

It's only nine o'clock – I haven't even left my room yet – and cabin fever is already setting in. My skin itches with the need to get out of the house, even though there have been times I've spent three or four days inside at a time before – it's the not being able to leave that bothers me, trapping me in my own home like a prisoner. My choice has been stripped from me by the snow, and by Saint Wendelin's inability to mobilise when the weather turns, even though the weather turns every single year. Multiple times a year.

If the snow's still here tomorrow, I'll recruit Casper to help me dig our way out. Maybe we'll be able to go out for that supper he mentioned yesterday...

Thoughts like that aren't helpful, my hopeful brain inventing dates where there are none being suggested, imagining flirtation where there is just charm. I shake it off as I pull on my dressing gown and head downstairs.

I'm halfway down when I see Casper. He's an early riser – or, at least, earlier than me – and he's lying across the sofa we shared last night, his ankles crossed over the arm, and he has built a fire. A couple of hefty logs are crackling away in the grate, pulsing out heat and light, and he's absorbed in a book. My book. The one he took from my room before I forced him out. One of my favourites.

I was too distracted to notice it at the time, but now I can see clear as day: he's holding my worn copy of The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, a book that I have managed to read five times in the two years I've owned it. As much as I try to take care of my books, that one in particular is a bit battered and bruised. The third time I read it, I was in the bath, wet fingers crinkling the pages; the fourth time, I was finding new details in a story I thought I knew so well, so lost in the pages that when the doorbell went, I jumped and dropped the book in the sink.

Now it's inflated, the pages fat and wrinkled, the cover peeling. I need to invest in a new copy – a sturdy hardback this time, because I know I'll be reading it again soon. It's my comfort book. I always have one, and Evelyn Hugo has been my closest literary companion since I first discovered her. I spent the whole book wondering and guessing, while being totally enthralled by the richly detailed characters and lives that just had to be real – how are they not real? – and the ending blew me away. It made me cry. Like, really cry. Several points in the book brought tears to my eyes, but turning the final page had me bawling.

Casper looks just as engrossed as I am every time I crack it open. He doesn't hear me pad down the stairs; he's facing the fire, so he doesn't catch a glimpse of me out of the corner of his eye as I tread as quietly as I can across the thick rug. He doesn't feel the change in temperature when I open the door to the kitchen and slip inside, and I take the whistler off the kettle so it won't disturb him as I make coffee.

I can't bear to disturb the scene. The guy I'm in love with, lost in the pages of the literary love of my life. I want to watch, to see how his expression shifts as he reads, to see the words reflected in those bottomless irises. I need him to fall in love with Evelyn Hugo the way I did. I need her story to resonate deep in his heart; I need him to clutch the book to his chest when he realises it's over.