Chapter Twelve
Cristina
I thought that the sound of me chewing the waffle cone was much too loud. I tried to process it, trying to understand why my chewing was suddenly so damn loud. It was like I had a mouthful of nails or that something metal was scratching up against something else metal.
Like a key in a lock.
Oh my damn. Somebody is trying to get in the house.
The realization shocked me out of my sleep too fast for me to even finish my dreamy ice cream cone. I had fallen asleep on the couch sometime in the afternoon, and now I was wide awake, but disoriented by the darkness that had fallen over the house. I wondered how long I had been sleeping, but mostly I wondered who the hell was fumbling with a key at the front door just a few yards away in the entry hall. My mother was at my sister's house for the night and would have used the back entrance that led directly into her room. Matteo was staying with his father for the weekend and never had any issue using his key.
"Shit!"
I heard a muffled mutter and knew that it was a man who was trying to get inside. My mind spun. I tried to think of what to do next.
Call 911. I should call 911. Don't be that woman who just stands there in the house waiting to get Dahmered.
I quickly realized that I couldn't call 911 from where I was because my phone was on its charger in my bedroom and the only landline in the house was down in my mother's room. I would have to run right past the door in order to get there. I didn't have the chance to make a decision before I heard the front door open. I scrambled across the living room carpet and onto the polished wood floor of the dining area, heading for the door to the front room. I hoped that whoever had just made it into the house would make his way down the hallway and into the rest of the house and that I could get into the front room and out of the house. When I finally got through the door, however, I saw the dark figure of the intruder entering the room. He seemed to already be carrying something and he took a few steps into the room before setting the items down.
Was he planning on bombing me?
He turned and walked out of the room, and I started to stand, ready to slam the front door and lock it again, not that that would have stopped him for long considering he apparently had a key, but seconds later he stepped back into the house. I dropped back into the shadows and watched him enter the room with a few more objects. This was the only chance I had. When he turned away again, I got to my feet and ran across the room, jumping onto the man's back and wrapping my arms around his head with as intimidating a cry as I could muster.
Josh
I grunted as the person hit me from behind and wrapped around me, arms tightening over my face and legs squeezing my hips. I grabbed onto the arms and spun around, trying to buck the person off of me.
"Who are you?"
The voice was angry, but I recognized it as Cristina's. I tried to answer her, but one of her arms was pressing against my mouth too much for me to be able to get the words out. She lifted her other arm and started pounding on my back as she alternated between asking me who I was and yelling at me to get out of the house. It was a fairly impressive approach, but one made entirely ineffective by the fact that even if I did want to follow her instructions and leave, I wouldn't be able to because she was stuck to me and it probably wouldn't be a good idea to bring her along with me.
I shouted against her arm, but she only squeezed harder. I reached around behind me with both hands and grasped her hips, trying to peel her off. Finally, I made my way toward the wall and felt around for a light switch. When I didn't find one, I spent a moment cursing the room in the same apparently indecipherable garble. I whipped around again and saw the silhouette of what I hoped was a large overstuffed chair across the room. I turned around so that my back was to the chair and reached out with my arms. Falling back, I caught myself just enough that some of my weight pressed down onto her, but I held most of my body up so that I didn't crush her. It was just enough to cause her to loosen her grip and I was able to slide down away from her and onto the floor.
"Cristina!" I gasped. "It's me!"
"What?" she asked, sounding breathless.
I'm guessing from doing her best to beat the hell out of me.
"It's me," I repeated. "It's Josh."
I felt her scramble off of the chair behind me and heard her footsteps cross the room. A lamp snapped on in the corner and I saw her glaring at me.
"Josh! What are you doing?"
"What kind of room doesn't have a light switch?"
"It's a parlor," she said. "It's not supposed to have overhead lighting. I don't think that my home's lighting approach has any bearing on my original question, though. What are you doing here?"
"You left everything at the office," I said. "I wanted to bring it to you."
She stared at me questioningly.
"You did what?"
She rubbed her eyes and I realized that she had been sleeping.
"I thought that you would want to have everything. You told me that you always hide the gifts until at least the week of Christmas. I don't have your phone number, so I looked up your address in your personnel file."
She squeezed her eyes closed and rubbed her eyelids.
"You looked up my address and you couldn't have just looked two lines down and gotten my phone number?"
I opened my mouth, then closed it again.
"That didn't occur to me."
"So, after you got my address, you came here and broke in?"
"I didn't break in. You really shouldn't leave a key sitting under the welcome mat. It's not very secure."
"As I've become extremely aware of in the last several minutes. You know, I very much doubt that the police would agree with your assessment that snatching a key from under a mat and using it to go into a dark house is not breaking in. Why didn't you just ring the bell?"
"I did," I told her. "You didn't answer and like you said, the house was dark, so I thought that I would just slip in, leave the stuff, and then go and it would be a nice surprise for you when you got home."
Cristina
I blinked at Josh a few times, trying to get my mind to catch up with what he had said to me.
"Was the Black Friday thing just too much for you? I bring you shopping and suddenly you've decided you're Santa Claus?"
"This all seemed a lot less insane when I first came up with it," he admitted.
"Those are some perfect serial killer last words if I've ever heard them."
"Why are you in a dark house?"
"It wasn't dark when I fell asleep. I was trying to stay up until going to bed tonight, but Matteo and my mother are out for the night, so I didn't have much to keep me awake."
I reached down to take Josh's hand and help him off the floor. I had meant it as a helpful gesture, but the touch of his skin against mine sent a shiver through me. He met my eyes and I felt the air between us thicken. I looked away from him, forcing myself to pull my gaze away from his and to the boxes that he had brought in. I tried to remember how many of them I had wrapped, but the memories were a touch blurred by my grogginess.
"There are still some outside," Josh said, as if reading my mind.
I nodded and followed him through the room and out onto the porch where he had apparently done an assembly line with himself and brought everything from the car to the porch before breaking into the house. We carried them in and piled them on the floor in the front room, then I offered him a smile.
"Thank you for doing this," I said. "It's certainly the first time I've had somebody break into my house to bring stuff."
Josh smiled.
"I'm glad I could make you happy. I wanted to put them under the tree --"
"Again, with the Santa Claus."
"It was a theme. But you don't have a tree."
I put my hands on my hips and looked at the empty space that I had cleared for the tree but never filled.
"I haven't gotten around to putting it up yet this year. Usually Matteo and I go pick one out together, but he's been so busy that I haven't wanted to stop him."
"I'm sure he would want you to. It doesn't matter how busy he is, you're still his mom and it's still Christmas."
I let out a breath and gave him a tight-lipped smile. My eyes fell on a couple of packages that I didn't remember wrapping and that was embellished with paper we didn't buy.
"I think you brought in some you didn't mean to," I said, pointing at them.
Josh shook his head.
"No, I meant to bring those in."
"What are they?"
"I, too, can Google and because I have a phone that wasn't forged by Moses, I can Google on the go. It was through such mobile surfing that I discovered mine was not the only store to have those video games on sale today, though mine might have been the only one that used such shadiness with them."
"One of two chains," I pointed out.
Josh nodded.
"One of two. Nevertheless, I went on a bit of an expedition of my own and found one at another store, which I proudly patronized using all of the skills you taught me, including taking an entire cart and using it only for the console and a couple of games."
"A couple of games?"
"Well, I didn't know what Matteo likes, so I just picked up the ones that the reviews said were most popular. I figured he would at least find one in there that he liked."
I was stunned and for a few moments I felt speechless.
"I already spent my budget," I admitted. "When I couldn't get the game for the sale price, I used the money I saved to buy him other gifts."
"That's fine," Josh said. "I don't need you to pay for it."
I tried not to shudder at the words.
"I know that you don't need me to. The whole world knows that you don't need me to."
"That's not what I meant, Cristina. I only meant that I didn't bring it here with the intention of you paying me back for it. I just wanted to make sure that Matteo had it, and that you got the joy of giving it to him. I could see how much it meant to you to show him how proud you are and how much you love him by making sure that he had this, so I wanted you to have it."
"I can't accept this," I said, tears starting to sting in my eyes at the incredible gesture. I couldn't believe that he would do something like this for me. "It's just too much."
Josh shook his head.
"Why don't you think of it as a Christmas bonus from the Sommers family. It's the least that they can do after the way that Willa spoke to you."
I thought about that and felt my tears drying and my expression harden slightly.
"I suppose you're right about that. Thank you so much. You have no idea what this means to me." I looked around. "I'm on my own tonight. Would you want to stick around for a little while? Maybe watch another movie? Would Willa allow you to do that?"
“Willa and I are finished. I thought about the way that she acted this morning -- I couldn't do it anymore."
I couldn’t stop the smile that broke through. “Then let’s start that movie.”
Josh's face lit up.
"I'd love that."
"Good."
I led him out of the front room, through the dining area, and into the living room. We settled onto the couch and I turned on another of my favorite Christmas movies. Even as all of the classic scenes slipped past, however, I barely notice that the movie was on. All I could focus on was Josh, there in my house, sitting on my couch. So close to me.
We fell into conversation, the movie becoming white noise behind us. My heart was trembling in my chest and my fingertips tingled with awareness of his presence there. I listened to him talk about his family and his memories of Christmases when he was a child. He told me about the baseball cards that he collected and how much he treasured them even though he never knew if any of them were at all important or valuable. His eyes grew sad and nostalgic when he relayed the story of his entire collection being destroyed in a flood that had damaged their house. It had broken his heart so much that he never replaced them.
I told him about the jewelry that my grandmother used to give me. It had never been very expensive, but she had said that every woman needed enough jewelry that she could change her style on a whim every day. Those pieces were still sitting in my jewelry box, though most of them never had the occasion to come out and be worn. They were also a leading contributing inspiration for maintaining "five golden rings" in my rendition of the Twelve Days of Christmas.