A Mountain Springs Christmas

Chapter 8

eight

CONNOR

Most of the gingerbread houses had been picked up by their owners, leaving only a handful behind. Except for the tables and half a dozen folding chairs that were placed randomly throughout the space, he and Katie were all that was in the room. Yet, Connor wasn’t ready to leave.

He probably could’ve left as soon as he was done judging, but he’d had fun hanging out with all the people from town who came to look at the gingerbread houses before the winners were announced. He loved seeing them notice the same details that he had noticed when judging them and seeing if their reactions had been the same as his. He chatted with them quite a bit, too. And it was a lot of fun to help the mayor hand out the awards to the winners.

The whole time, he hadn’t thought about the fact that he was back in Mountain Springs, about his dad, or even about hockey. And he always thought about hockey. Everything tonight had just been about being in that moment. It had been a long time since something had captivated him so fully. Since some one had captivated him so fully.

Instead of walking out to his car, as he should have, he walked over and sat down in one of two chairs close together and stretched his legs out in front of him. It only took a moment before Katie sat down next to him. Possibly because she felt like she couldn’t leave until he did, but he hoped it was because she wasn’t quite ready to leave, either. He was so drawn to her, and he hoped that she was having a hard time walking away from him, too.

“So,” Katie said, “it looks like that honorary gingerbread judging certificate really kicked in.”

“It definitely came in handy. Would you have chosen the same winners?”

“Oh, I’m not here to judge. I’m just here to document it all for the masses.”

He nodded toward the video camera still in her hands. “What got you into videography?”

She shrugged. “I noticed that when you are in the middle of experiencing a memorable moment, it can be too much to take in all at once, you know? Like if you’re dribbling a ball down the court and making a game-winning basket, your focus at the time is on the other players, the ball in your hands, the basket. It can’t be on everything else, too, so you don’t experience the moment all the way. If you’re at a family Christmas party and are focusing on your ninety-eight-year-old grandma’s delighted face when the tree is lit up for the first time, you probably aren’t noticing the look of wonder on your nephew’s face.

“But if you also have it on video, you can experience other parts of it later. Just like if you re-watch a TV show or movie, you catch different things the second time through. And re-watching lets you relive those same emotions you enjoyed the first time around. I like being a part of that.”

“I have never thought of it that way.”

“I started doing it to catch those moments for people, and by doing it, I kind of found out that I’m good at capturing the emotion of the event. Of knowing what to focus on.”

Connor studied her, wondering if her camera would catch the sense of wonder on his face that he was feeling just by talking with her. He had known since that moment when she said they were on the same team in her parents’ kitchen that he liked being around her. The more he learned about her, the more he realized why. He liked the way her mind worked.

He nodded at the few gingerbread houses that were left. “Did you ever enter a gingerbread house into this competition?”

“Oh, yeah. I was nothing if not up for a competition. Plus, we made them together as a family every year.” She chuckled. “I was probably six the first year I entered one. I was always pretty independent, so even though I didn’t exactly have the skill to make a gingerbread house without help, I was adamant that I do it myself. Of course, the walls kept falling down before I could even get a third one attached because I was working with two little hands and not a lot of patience or coordination.

“Eventually, I got one of those square boxes of tissues from the counter and just glued the walls to the side of that with the icing. But I’d had so many struggles leading up to it that the gingerbread was covered in icing smears and fingerprints, so it wasn’t the prettiest thing ever.”

Connor chuckled, too, as he imagined it.

“The roof was a different story, though, because I couldn’t glue it to the tissue box. It was the most askew roof ever. I came across a picture of it a couple of years ago and was surprised that it somehow stayed put. Anyway, I finished, decorated it, and since I didn’t think to empty the box of its tissues before commandeering it, I reached with my little fingers in between the roof pieces and tugged a tissue halfway out, and said it was the smoke from the chimney.”

Now, he was fully laughing. “That’s genius.”

“It didn’t win, of course, but I was so proud of that house!”

“As you should be.”

“Did you ever enter a gingerbread house?”

Connor shook his head. “If we lived here when I was in elementary school, I totally would have. We used to make them together as a family, too. I always tried to see how creative I could get— building it unconventionally, using candies in less obvious ways, and putting in lots of details. I loved it. But we didn’t move here until the middle of my freshman year. And by then…”

Katie nodded. “Things just get so much busier once you hit high school.”

“Yep. It gets a little crazy. Besides, my family wasn’t really doing family things by then.”

That last part was something he wouldn’t normally share. With anyone. Yet, it had just come out. And when Katie responded with an “Oh?” that was clearly an invitation to share more, he didn’t change the topic like he normally would have. He realized that he felt not only comfortable enough around Katie to share, but felt like he could trust whatever response she’d have to it.

He took a deep breath. “I think maybe my parents decided we should move to Mountain Springs as kind of a last-ditch effort to save their marriage. Spoiler alert: it didn’t work. I think that they wanted to get away from everything that was making them so busy in the city and move somewhere that had more of a community feel. Like maybe a change was what they needed to start over.

“But it didn’t really fix anything. My parents were still there for me and my sister, Laura, but just not at the same time as each other anymore. Then they decided they were going to get divorced, and my dad gave us the speech about how he was still going to be there for us.

“I believed him. And at first, he was. He lived in Mountain Springs for the first little while, and we saw him all the time. Then he moved to Denver, and it got less frequent. He started loving that newfound freedom, I guess. It was harder to get him to come to things that were important to me or Laura. Then he just stopped coming around altogether.

“We’d been pretty close, too! He may have said it didn’t have anything to do with me, but it was hard not to get your feelings hurt when he didn’t seem to want to see you.”

“I bet. I am so sorry you had to go through that.” Katie reached over and placed her hand on his forearm, and it sent a tingling warmth radiating out from it. He just gazed at her hand for a few moments until she asked, “Is that why your family moved? I don’t remember seeing you again after that dance.”

He flinched. He did every time he even thought of the dance because it had been the culmination of everything bad. “It was. My mom knew something big needed to change for me. She literally let me throw a dart blindfolded at an NHL teams map and we moved to the one closest to where the dart landed. We started completely over there— everything we’d known was in Colorado.”

“Wow,” Katie said. “I can’t imagine the bravery that required of your mom. Of all of you.”

“And I love her forever for it.”

“It was a good move? You didn’t miss home?”

“It was exactly what I needed— I thrived there. It’s coming back here that is hard.” It wasn’t a place he wanted to be. But he couldn’t bring himself to tell her that he was going to request a trade.

“Well, I guess we need to change your memories here into good ones.”

He smiled.

“You have an away game tomorrow, right?”

“Yeah. Minnesota.”

“All right, on Friday, your third event to fulfill your contract is a hay ride. We’ll make sure it’s full of good memories.”