My True Love Gave to Me: Twelve Holiday Stories(12)

“I don’t even have ferrets,” Miranda says.

*

On Christmas Eve, while all the visiting Honeywells and cousins and wives and boyfriends and girlfriends and their accountants are out caroling in the village, Elspeth takes Miranda and Daniel aside. She gives them each a joint.

“It’s not as if I don’t know you’ve been raiding my supply, Daniel,” Elspeth says. “At least this way, I know what you’re up to. If you’re going to break the law, you might as well learn to break it responsibly. Under adult supervision.”

Daniel rolls his eyes, looks at Miranda. Whatever he sees in her face makes him snort. It’s annoying but true: he really has become quite spectacular looking. Well, it was inevitable. Apparently they drown all the ugly Honeywells at birth.

“It’s okay, Mirandy,” he says. “I’ll have yours if you don’t want it.”

Miranda sticks the joint in her bra. “Thanks, but I’ll hang on to it.”

“Anyway I’m sure the two of you have lots of catching up to do,” Elspeth says. “I’m off to the pub to kiss the barmaids and make the journos cry.”

When she’s out the door, Daniel says, “She’s matchmaking, isn’t she?”

Miranda says, “Or else it’s reverse psychology?”

Their eyes meet. Courage, Miranda. Daniel tilts his head, looks gleeful.

“In which case, I should do this,” he says. He leans forward, puts his hand on Miranda’s chin, tilts it up. “We should do this.”

He kisses her. His lips are soft and dry. Miranda sucks on the bottom one experimentally. She arranges her arms around his neck, and his hands go down, cup her bum. He opens his mouth and does things with his tongue until she opens her mouth, too. He seems to know how this goes; he and the girl with the ferrets probably did this a lot.

Miranda wonders if the ferrets were in the cage at the time, or out. How unsettling is it, she wonders, to fool around with ferrets watching you? Their beady button eyes.

She can feel Daniel’s erection. Oh, God. How embarrassing. She pushes him away. “Sorry,” she groans. “Sorry! Yeah, no, I don’t think we should be doing this. Any of this!”

“Probably not,” Daniel says. “Probably definitely not. It’s weird, right?”

“It’s weird,” Miranda says.

“But perhaps it wouldn’t be so weird if we smoked a joint first,” Daniel says. His hair is messy. Apparently she did that.

“Or,” Miranda says, “maybe we could just smoke a joint. And, you know, not complicate things.”

Halfway through the joint, Daniel says, “It wouldn’t have to complicate everything.” His head is in her lap. She’s curling pieces of his hair around her finger.

“Yes, it would,” Miranda says. “It really, really would.”

Later on she says, “I wish it would snow. That would be nice. If it snowed. I thought that’s why you lot came here at Christmas. The whole white Christmas thing.”

“Awful stuff,” Daniel says. “Cold. Slippy. Makes you feel like you’re supposed to be singing or something. In a movie.”

“Or in a snow globe.”

“Stuck,” Miranda says. “Trapped.”

“Stuck,” Daniel says.

They’re lying, tangled together, on a sofa across from the Christmas tree. Occasionally Miranda has to remove Daniel’s hand from somewhere it shouldn’t be. She doesn’t think he’s doing it intentionally. She kisses him behind the ear now and then. “That’s nice,” he says. Pats her bum. She wriggles out from under his hand. Kisses him again. There’s a movie on television, lots of explosions. Zombies. Cameron Diaz unloading groceries in a cottage, all by herself.

No, that’s another movie entirely, Miranda thinks. Apparently she’s been asleep. Daniel is still sleeping. Why does he have to be so irritatingly good-looking, even in his sleep? Miranda hates to think what she looks like asleep. No wonder the ferret girl dumped him.

Elspeth must have come back from the pub, because there’s a heap of blankets over the both of them.

Outside, it’s snowing.

Miranda puts her hand in the pocket of her dress, feels the piece of damask she has had there all day long. It’s a big pocket. Plenty of room for all kinds of things. Miranda doesn’t want to be one of those designers who only makes pretty things. She wants them to be useful, too. And provoking. She takes the prettiest blanket from the sofa for herself, distributes the other blankets over Daniel so that all of him is covered.

She goes by a mirror, stops to smooth her hair down, collect it into a ponytail. Wraps the blanket around herself like a shawl, goes out into the snow.

He’s there, under the hawthorn tree. She shivers, tells herself it’s because of the cold. There isn’t much snow on the ground yet. She tells herself she hasn’t been asleep too long. He hasn’t been waiting long.

He wears the same coat. His face is the same. He isn’t as old as she thought he was, that first time. Only a few years older than she. Than Daniel. He hasn’t aged. She has. Where is he, when he isn’t here?

“Are you a ghost?” she says.

“No,” he says. “I’m not a ghost.”

“Then you’re a real person? A Honeywell?”