How the hell did it get to December? Emma could feel her heart starting to beat harder. One minute she’d been staring at pumpkins and Thanksgiving turkeys and now… there was a week to go till Christmas. A week? Really? Why hadn’t Gee reminded her? Not that he usually had to remind her as she was normally a Christmas elf type, but this year… Oh. Yes. That.
She and Gee were pretending almost too well; false cheeriness was a constant presence if they were both in the house. She had to second guess every time she went to touch him. Did they usually touch like that? Or was she getting clingy? It was exhausting. Because even though she wanted nothing to change, she really didn’t, she also didn’t want him kissing someone else like he’d kissed her. She wished she could have trapped their friendship in amber, the way they had been before Halloween.
And she was so tired, time was simultaneously dragging and moving too fast. The rainbow bear tableaus had eased off somewhat, which helped. It turned out that making sure Will and Ed were too busy to cook anything up directly coincided with it. She wasn’t saying they were obviously linked, but she was.
She clicked through to check what was in their schedules for this week. It was the week before Christmas so there was a lot to put in place before Frankie’s visit.
Was it too late to have them visiting tree farms, she pondered. Trees. The visuals would be good, if Ed actually smiled in any of the photos, they’d be amazing. But was buying a tree this close to Christmas a little late?
There was something that kept tickling at her, something she had forgotten. No, she had Ed going on a date, and Will was spotted looking grumpy in his fifth Starbucks visit with Tina in two days. Amit and Jessie had been photographed at Winter Wonderland in Hyde Park last night. Admittedly Amit had looked like he was dozing in most of them, even in the TiltaWhirl, while Jessie screamed her head off and almost had a wardrobe malfunction.
No, it was something else.
Bugger.
Her own tree. How the hell had she forgotten? She grabbed her phone and scrolled back through the calendar. She knew she set a reminder, she always did. So how had she forgotten the tree?
Oh, now she remembered. It had been two weeks ago, she’d seen the reminder come up, but she’d dithered over whether Gee would go with her like usual. How many texts had she deleted, while she tried to compose the perfect one that was friendly enough but didn’t give away too much? Didn’t promise anything she couldn’t follow through with? And then that emergency came up, when it looked like Ed and Will were kissing on stage, everything online had gone wild. They’d spent the weekend planting little love stories about the fauxmances and it eventually settled down. But she’d forgotten to buy a tree.
And if she’d forgotten that what else had she forgotten? She scrolled back through the whole month of December.
Bloody hell, she’d forgotten everything. The food, the presents. How had this happened? She’d planned for it, had it all scheduled in as usual but those bloody boys and their bears.
It wasn’t that she spent too many hours trying not to look at her phone, at the lack of text messages from Gee. How empty her life was without those small vibrations to say that he was thinking of her throughout the day.
No, it was the Breach Of The Peace boys. They really did breach her peace. Was her career worth all this? It seemed as though the more she tried to wrangle the boys into the stories she had made for them, the more they pushed back and fucked it up. Hadn’t they agreed to play along? Wasn’t that what the whole LA business had been about?
And now she had no tree, no presents, no food for Christmas dinner and if this carried on, maybe no promotion come the new year.
She stopped scrolling through her calendar and put her phone down. There was no point in looking at it. The phone wasn’t going to magic anything out of thin air and solve all her problems. She held a hand to her chest to rub the choking feeling away. Where was all the structure she needed? It seemed to be crumbling. Was it because of what had happened between her and Gee? She needed him, she hated this second-guessing state they were in.
But this was the way it would have always ended up, them growing part. She wasn’t ready. She had always thought the mythical man would be there to lessen it. She needed to grow up and move on. She took a shuddering breath but he was still here now, he hadn’t left yet. And he’d said he would always be… Without trying to overthink it, she picked her phone back up and went to her favourites. His name was at the top, she pressed it.
‘Hey, you,’ his voice rumbled through her ear. It was as if nothing had happened between them, she felt her shoulders relax even as her heart ached.
‘Christmas,’ she gasped.
‘Yes, the major religious holiday at the end of the week, what about it?’
‘Plans, Christmas, tree.’ Emma couldn’t string a proper sentence together.
‘Oh, I had wondered why I hadn’t been dragged out to choose a Christmas tree, I thought we were going old school and decorating it on Christmas Eve. Are we having one delivered? Oh, and how many is it for dinner on Christmas Day? I’ve invited Johnnie so we need to think of a vegetarian option.’
‘Food?’ It was as if she whimpered.
‘Hell, did you forget?’ He said it in awe.
She might have sobbed in reply.
‘Emma. Don’t worry. You’ve got too much on at the moment. It’s my fault for not checking in. Leave it with me, I’ll sort it all out.’ Gee said. ‘Promise.’
Could he? Would he get the right tree? The right food? She didn’t know anymore, all she knew was that she wanted to weep with gratitude. And fall into his arms, her mind whispered. Or was it her heart?
‘Thanks,’ she whispered.
***
She opened the front door, and the smell of pine and resin puffed out on a pillow of cinnamon.
Christmas. It smelt like Christmas.
Emma took a huge breath in, letting the scents soothe away the tension of another day wrestling with Will undermining her stories. The latest she’d uncovered was the story that he had managed to somehow shoe horn into the fandom. Supposedly Tina was really one of a set of triplets and they took turns posing with Will which, to the fandom, proved that it was all fake. Which was plainly ridiculous. Fans online had way too much time on their hands. She would concede that Tina’s nose did seem to change shape in some photos. But the lengths some bloggers had gone to included deep analysis of angles and checking photos for photoshopping. Honestly, all they had to do was check the birth registry and realise that Tina didn’t have sisters called Elinor or Gretchen. And the way she acted was purely due to the fact she was a spoilt only child.
Although Emma had to give Will kudos for throwing out these completely contradicting stories. It was making it hard for any of the fauxmances to look anything but fake. And if it wasn’t for the fact that it was directly affecting her, she’d have offered him a job.
On top of that there was Ed, who had been seen in another pap shoot with Frankie. If she hadn’t seen him quite happily holding hands properly with Sean as they had been mucking around on stage, she would have thought he had no idea what he was supposed to do with his fingers. His hand had hung there like a bunch of sausages, while Frankie clung to it.
Of course, the fans had gone crazy.
If she had to listen to another rant from Frankie’s team, with them threatening to sell outrageous sex stories about the two of them and have him photographed sneaking out of her hotel room, she’d quite happily lynch them. All of them.
She took another deep breath. Another hit of cinnamon and pine…
‘Hey,’ Gee came up from the kitchen wearing a festive green apron with a snowman.
‘You baked?’ she asked.
‘More like heated stuff up,’ he grimaced, coming past her. He smelt like sugar and spice and all things nice. Maybe not just little girls were made of it.
‘Look.’
He took her arm and pulled her into the front room. There in the bay window was the most prefect Christmas tree. It looked like it had been taken straight from someone’s Pinterest board for a perfect Christmas. Its branches spread from the ground and tapered to a point which almost brushed the ceiling.
It was wound around with fairy lights and there were ornaments weighing down the boughs. The lights were off. But when they were lit, it would be like a beacon shining for her when she was on her way home.
‘I was waiting till you got home before we put on the star and turned the lights on,’ he said from behind her.
It was the reverse of the past ten years. She was the one who carefully decorated the tree, the one who chose the theme and the colour scheme. And then she would impatiently wait for Gee to finish off in the studio, come back from a meeting or in from the pub, so he could crown the tree and they would raise a glass as she turned on the lights.
She moved closer to the tree. She could feel sobs clogging up her throat, and tears burning in her eyes. The ornaments he’d chosen were either wooden or coloured in red and white or both. It was the Scandinavian theme she’d dreamed of when she’d been mulling over this year’s theme. Had she mentioned it to him? She had vague memories of talking about it in August and he’d complained that it was too early to talk Christmas.
But he’d remembered. And he’d made it happen.
She brushed a branch with a finger and watched it bounce and shudder. No needles fell.
‘I got one of the no shedding trees. The bloke I found on the internet said it was the best they had,’ Gee said standing next to her staring at the tree, his arms crossed as he stared at it.
‘It’s beautiful,’ she said.
‘And I’ve bought all the food for Christmas dinner, it’s being delivered on Christmas Eve. Enough for us, your parents, and Johnnie.’
She smiled up at him, reaching over to grab the star that usually sat on top of the tree and handing it to him.
‘Don’t you want to do the honours?’ he asked.
‘One, I’m too short, two, I hate the rickety step ladder. And three, this tree is your baby. I think you need to crown it.’
He took it from her and standing on the lowest step reached up and finished the tree. She couldn’t help but admire the long lines of his body as he stretched. When he was done, she bent down and turned on the fairy lights.
They twinkled and flashed, bathing Gee and her in an otherworldly glow.
It was perfect.
If only it could stay like this forever, she thought.
***
She stared at the master spreadsheet for all the fauxmances against the general band activities. Will was going home without Tina, Amit was going to be photographed in Jessie’s home town on Boxing Day and Sean was jetting off to Ireland sometime tomorrow. She checked for Ed. Frankie was due at his family home on the 24th of December, Christmas Eve, which was… She checked the date on her screen – the day after tomorrow. Which made today the 22nd. Why did that date seem significant? The only thing on the band’s schedule was some private party this evening, with the note no paps. She checked all the other diaries. Nothing but this private party. Then what was it that was setting her internal alarm off? Gee had the food and presents sorted out for home, so it couldn’t be that. Maybe it was a leftover date from some time in her past that was setting off vibrations she was mistaking for something significant.
Emma shook her head. She was getting fanciful. There were still so many loose ends, she was stressed that was the problem.
‘So, I haven’t asked you but what are you wearing tonight?’ Jamie looked positively bouncy, his hair shook and crackled with energy. Or was it just static from the synthetic Santa hat he had on.
Tonight? Why would she be wearing anything except her comfy jimjams when she got home and curled up on the sofa.
She must have looked blank because he looked at her with a frown. ‘The company Christmas party tonight, you remember…’