Ghostwriter of Christmas Past Page 5

  “I haven’t gotten you anything,” he said. “Well, nothing I plan to wrap, anyhow.”

  Tom nearly choked trying not to laugh. He managed to have a more or less straight face when Mallory turned to give them a disapproving look for the snickers. Obviously they weren’t taking the whole tree-decorating thing as seriously as she wanted.

  “Actually I wanted to ask you about that.”

  “What I want for Christmas? Whiskey,” Jason said. He rubbed his cheek against Tom’s and snorted. “A shave.”

  Tom ignored that.

  “If you needed to do any shopping, I’m off tomorrow,” he said. “I can keep the kid occupied for a couple of hours.”

  Jason huffed a short sigh of relief and dragged Tom into a rough one-armed hug. “For that,” he murmured against his ear, “I’ll put a bow on it.”

  If it had been up to Tom, he’d have taken Jason up on it then and there. Unfortunately overexcited ten-year-olds aren’t good at taking a hint. So they put the tree up instead and spent the night watching a bad Christmas movie. Then another. Then a really weird one about a cat.

  MALLORY WOBBLED back up to the lakeshore, her tongue poking out between her teeth as she struggled to balance on borrowed skates. Her cheeks were pink and her eyes were bright. Tom caught her wrists as she reached the edge.

  “I saw a fish.” She waved a mittened hand back at the blade-scuffed surface of the lake. “Under the ice.”

  She stomped awkwardly over the grass and mud to the rows of damp wooden benches set up for the kids. There was a first aider on duty as well, and a roughly built kiosk with a bored teenager in it to prevent too many people from going on the ice at once. When Tom was a kid, the bunch of them just skidded out in sneakers to see who could get farthest out.

  He’d always taken the first turn, but it was Jason who always won that game. He got right out into the middle of the lake, where the ice was clear and creaked under your weight, and he laughingly refused to come in until Tom begged.

  Yet it was the two of them who were alive, and careful Ben—who never ventured far from the shore—who was gone.

  “You want another spin?” Tom asked. He wasn’t sure if he wanted her to say yes or not. The whole “taking care of the kid for the day” thing seemed like it would go a lot easier if they stuck to her doing stuff and him making sure she didn’t die. Play to their strengths. On the other hand, he was freezing his balls off out there.

  “Well, I thought you could maybe take me into town,” she said through her hair as she bent down to unlace her skates. “So I could get Jason something.”

  Tom laughed. He brushed away her curious look and nodded. “I can do that,” he said. “We’ve got an hour or so.”

  She pulled on her boots and stopped with the laces still dangling. “He’s trying really hard,” she said.

  “What do you mean?” Tom asked. He sat down next to her. The wood was damp under his ass.

  Mallory scratched the tip of her nose and sniffed. “He wants me to be happy.”

  “I know. You don’t have to be.”

  She rolled her eyes at him. The blue was watery, but she never let the tears fall. “Jason didn’t even know me, you know? He came to visit once when I was born. He was just Uncle Jason in California. Sometimes Dad would point to a book in the store and tell me Uncle Jason in California had written it. All sorts of things. Kids’ books and romances and… I thought he was teasing me. Then my parents di….” She stopped herself, the word caught on her tongue. “Then Mom and Dad just dumped me on him, and he had to take me in. He did write all those things, and he had this whole life that I messed up. His boyfriend broke up with him because I’m such a pain. I can’t screw up Christmas for him too.”

  Her voice cracked, and she stumbled over the last words and then went quiet. She sniffed again and blinked hard.

  The selfish urge to ask about the boyfriend jabbed at Tom. He put his hand awkwardly on Mallory’s shoulder instead and tried to think of something to say. It took him too long.

  “Sorry,” Mallory said. She swallowed and twisted out a smile that looked too old for her face. “It’s not your problem. I didn’t mean to dump it on you.”

  Tom gently squeezed her shoulder. “Jason’s always been good with words.” He paused as he remembered the rough, angry kid who was in love with poetry for the way the words could hurt—the kid the English department hated because he didn’t care what a teacher thought about books. “He was always pretty crap at talking, though.”

  “You’re not supposed to swear.”

  “Yeah, sorry.” Tom scratched the back of his neck. “Look, I don’t think Jason expects you to have the best Christmas ever. He just wants you to have a Christmas, to know that things can get back to normal.”

  Mallory looked down at her laces where they dangled in the mud. “I don’t know if I want them to.”

  “You kind of don’t get a choice,” Tom said. “That’s okay, though. It’ll be a new normal, one where it’s okay to still miss your mom and dad. They wouldn’t want you to stop being happy, stop enjoying things.”

  “That’s what Jason said about you. That he didn’t stop missing you, he just got used to it.” Mallory kicked her feet against the bench and didn’t notice how that clenched in Tom’s chest. She sniffed with a sort of hard finality. “But he got to see you again, didn’t he? I won’t see my mom and dad again.”

  Mallory didn’t wait for Tom to say anything. They both knew there wasn’t anything to say to make it better. She grabbed her cast-off skates and took them back to the kiosk where she’d rented them. The laces of her boots dragged behind her.

  Left on the bench, Tom rolled his head from one side to the other and wondered if he’d screwed that up. Probably. Maybe. Enough that he’d have to talk to Jason about it.

  “Let me watch the kid for the day,” he muttered as he got up. “Trust me, I’m the police. I end up giving her frostbite and an emotional crisis. Jason will be impressed.”

  A BOX set of documentaries, a bottle of good whiskey—Tom picked that one out and bought it—and Man to Man: A History of Gay Photography. Tom felt the judgment in the bookseller’s eyes when she smacked that down on the counter.

  It reminded him of something, though. Tom went upstairs and left Mallory sitting in front of the decorated Christmas tree—dripping threads of tinsel to fill in gaps where she thought they didn’t have enough ornaments.

  Three years and there were still boxes he hadn’t unpacked. He dragged them out from under the bed and rifled through them—old clothes, older paperwork, dusty old folders, and an envelope of old receipts.

  The book of poetry, High Windows by Philip Larkin, was shoved into the bottom of the box as though it were an afterthought. Except he kept it, hadn’t he? For ten years and through a dozen moves, he grabbed the book and tossed into one box or another. He’d never read it, but he never left it behind either.

  It wasn’t a difficult psychological puzzle. He bought it for Jason, and then he kept it in case Jason ever came back.

  And he had.

  He turned the paperback over in his hands and dragged his thumb over the dog-eared corners. The paper was dry and smelled musty. It wasn’t new when he bought it, fished out of a bucket of books in a secondhand bookshop, but it looked like a better present back then. He’d been eighteen and broke as hell.

  Still. What else was he going to do with it? Finally memorize another poem?

  A door banged, and a shriek carried up the stairs. “Don’t come in here yet! You can’t see.”

  Tom tossed the book onto the bed. He could decide what to do with it later, and he had the whiskey to fall back on, so he went out to see what Jason had bought.

  The answer to that, based on the number of bags Jason was carrying, was everything.

  “How many old women did you have to fight for that haul?” Tom asked.

  Jason shoved the bags into the guest room, toys and boxes tipped out over the bedspread, and turned to face Tom.
A grin tugged at the corner of his mouth, and his eyes were dark and honey gold with excitement.

  “Go out with me.”

  “There’s more? Was there anything left in the shop?”

  Jason grabbed Tom’s shoulder and pushed him up against the wall. He kissed him roughly, his lips eager and nose cold where it bumped against Tom’s.

  “No.” He leaned back just enough to let the words out. Tom could feel Jason’s breath tickle against his mouth. “Go out with me. On a date.”

  I missed you. Stay.

  “Is that how they do it in your romance novels?” Tom teased.

  Jason winced. “They aren’t my romance novels. They’re Rosalyn Patterdale’s romance novels. Nothing to do with me. I just write some of them.”

  “Which ones?”

  “Fuck off.” Jason leaned in until his lips almost touched Tom’s. “Go to dinner with me.”

  It wasn’t a question. The cockiness made Jason, had always made Jason, harder to refuse.

  “I’ll think about it.”

  For a second Jason looked uncertain. Tom caught the back of his neck, buried his fingers in the short, dense black hair, and pulled him into a kiss. He bit the curve of Jason’s lower lip and caught the taste of cinnamon and sugar. Then it was just Jason on his tongue, in his mouth.

  “Okay.” He slipped the word between their lips. “Date it is.”

  Jason pulled back long enough to call him an asshole, and then kissed him again.

  IN THE end it wasn’t that hard to get Geoff Harris to swap Christmas Eve shifts with Tom. He owed Harris a kidney if he ever needed one and to come in first thing on Christmas Eve to take over the Jenkinses’ spot check.

  The town hall was mostly shut for the holidays. There was just a skeleton crew of clerks and inspectors to run the phones and catch any disasters and mop up a few outstanding reports on a day they could be pretty sure the subjects were home.

  “Mr. Clayton?” Tom rapped his knuckles on the edge of the door and poked his head in. Sandy Clayton looked up and frowned, a mute question in his narrowed eyes. “I’m filling in for Harris.”

  Sandy huffed in irritation. “Marvelous,” he muttered. “Mr. Jenkins will pop some bible-thumper aneurysm just looking at the pair of us.”

  He wasn’t wrong. Sandy grabbed the files off his desk and shoved them into his satchel. He slung the heavy tan leather bag over his shoulder and waved an irritated hand ahead of him. “Well, let’s go and get preached at, Officer Ryan.”

  Jenkins bred animals. Once a year, sometimes twice, the county would roll up the road and seize the animals. Eight months later the cages were full again. They had been there at Easter that year, carrying out handfuls of fluffy chickens while Mr. Jenkins screamed bible verses and his wife stomped about, swearing the animals were well-cared for. The quiet, dusty-looking daughter never said much. She just watched from the porch with her arms crossed. Most of the office had their money on her being the one who called in the complaints.

  The barking started before they reached the end of the drive—shrill yaps, deeper woofs, and a few full-throated beagle bawls.

  “That sound like a residence that’s rehomed 80 percent of their animals?” Sandy asked.

  It took four hours to negotiate Mr. Jenkins’s litany of bible verses and the addition of a small, nonverbal child, snotty with dismay that they were going to take his puppies away. They loaded the worst cases into the truck in padded crates with bowls of water, and handed over another citation.

  “I haven’t seen the child before,” Tom said.

  “I have,” Sandy sighed. “I will again.”

  Tom rolled down the windows. The icy air was better than the stink. All told, he wished he could have just confirmed the kidney and gotten it over with.

  Christmas Eve

  “C’MON,” JASON muttered at his reflection. He stood in front of the narrow dressing table and straightened his cuffs. His hair was styled and stylish, his shirt was black, silk, and fitted, and his lean cheeks were freshly—pointedly—shaved.

  He looked good—good enough to pick up a one-night stand in any of the clubs he hung out at in San Diego.

  So why was he still paralyzed at the idea of going downstairs and doing the one thing he’d never done with Tommy—actually going out on a date, a real date, with food and where other people could see them?

  He dragged a hand down over his face in frustration. It was stupid. He wasn’t the kid who’d been scared to even think the word “gay,” even when he was naked and sticky with his best friend. Fuck it. He could admit it. Boyfriend. He’d left the closet behind along with the town. It was Tommy who stayed and probably dated as many men in the last ten years as Jason picked up on a weekend.

  Or used to.

  He was an experienced cosmopolitan man. Tommy was an uptight hayseed who still lived in the house he grew up in.

  That made him feel better for a second. Then he remembered the way Tommy had cupped his face, the low, steady “stay” that took Jason’s legs out from under him. Jason had always been brash and took decisions on a whim and stuck to them out of stubbornness and a refusal to admit he was wrong. It wasn’t confidence.

  It wasn’t as though he even left Malachite under his own steam because he wanted to shake the manure of the place off his heels. He left because he was told to go.

  “Also that made you sound like a dick,” he muttered to the mirror, as though it were his reflection’s fault. “He’s not gonna say no.”

  Tommy had never said no.

  The photo reel of memory—that first startled kiss in the car, the hot cracked leather sticky under Jason’s ass in the height of summer, and Tommy’s hot lean body sprawled on top of him, wet lips on Jason’s stomach—curled a tight coil of heat through his balls. He had to stop for a second, close his eyes, and swallow hard.

  It had been a while—grieving preteens weren’t the best wingmen—but it hadn’t been that long, and he wasn’t seventeen anymore.

  He grabbed his jacket off the bed and went downstairs. Mallory was in the main room watching TV. It took a bit longer to find Tommy. He had to follow the sound of a conversation down the hall to the kitchen. The muffled noise turned into words as he got closer. “I know I said I’d fly down Christmas, but I don’t think I can. Mom, c’mon, you have ninety-two people there…. I promise. New Year. I promise.”

  Jason stopped outside the door. He should say something. He should tell Tommy to go, that they’d be fine, that he should be with his family.

  Except he’d done the right thing once before. He listened to that little nagging voice, to Ben’s joyless logic, and got on the bus without going to Tommy’s first.

  Mrs. Ryan had gotten over a decade’s worth of Christmas out of that decision. She could give up one—not even a whole one. Half a day.

  He backed down the hall to the stairs and cleared his throat loudly. “Don’t watch too much TV, Mal.”

  “Just turned it on,” she lied.

  Down the hall, the murmur of conversation—indecipherable at that distance—rose and then went quiet. When Jason nudged the door open, Tommy had just put the phone down on the kitchen counter.

  “Everything okay?” Jason asked.

  Tommy leaned back against the counter, his arms braced so his muscles tensed against the sleeves of his T-shirt, and looked Jason up and down. He caught his lower lip between his teeth in blatant appreciation.

  “Better now.”

  Jason snorted and straightened his cuffs. “I feel like I should have a corsage.”

  “I could have done with it earlier,” Tommy said as he shoved himself upright. “When a coworker makes it sound like he’s doing you a favor in return for some small payback? Don’t trust them. I got pissed on by three different dogs today.”

  “You know, you don’t have to keep trying to prove you don’t use the same cologne. I’m not judging.”

  Tommy laughed. “Yeah, alright. It was my jacket. We going somewhere nice?”

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nbsp; “Depends.” Jason reached out and hooked his fingers in the waistband of Tommy’s jeans. A tug brought him close enough to press a kiss against his throat. The rough scruff of beard against Jason’s lips had grown on him. “Did you shower? Because otherwise no.”

  “I am scrubbed top to bottom,” Tommy promised. He draped his arms over Jason’s hips and grabbed his ass. “Just, ah, don’t go into the garage.”

  “I’ll restrain myself.”

  The doorbell rang. One thing about a small town, even after years away, you could still find a respectable babysitter on short notice. Donna bundled a quiet Mallory into the car next to her son and promised to have her back from the school fete by eleven. By that point even Mallory would have had her fill of mulled nonalcoholic cider, homemade Christmas decorations, and new friends.

  TASTY ORIENTAL Cuisine might not have been Jason’s first choice for a date-night restaurant. The food was okay, though, and on Christmas Eve, it was the best of the available options.

  “So you haven’t been pining away in your boyhood home for the last decade?” Jason said as the server delivered bowls of garlic soybeans, vegetable lo mein, and orange beef to the table.

  Busy with other customers—there was a line of tired-looking parents waiting for takeout, tables of snickering teens trying to order sake, and older people who seemed glad for the company—the young man wished them a quick “Enjoy” and was gone.

  Jason stropped his chopsticks together. “Not going to lie, Tomm… Tom. I’m a little disappointed.”

  On the other side of the glossy printed-glass table, Tommy shook his head and took a swig of beer. “I spent about five years in New York,” he said. “Then a couple in Ithaca before the position here opened up.”

  Jason pierced a piece of beef and swept it through the orange sauce. “So let me get it straight: you wanted to come back here? I thought you just never worked up escape velocity.”