Christmas Is All Around

Chapter Ten

CHAPTER TEN

Two days later, she was working in the coffee shop down the street from Ava’s when Graham sat down in the chair opposite her without so much as a word in greeting, clutching a cup of tea and wearing a Christmas sweater so ugly that she honestly wondered if he’d lost a bet.

“Why in god’s name are you wearing that?” she asked, deciding that they were past any need for niceties in their relationship.

He glanced down, his expression softening slightly at the sight of the giant, glowing-nosed Rudolph that had been carefully knitted onto the green sweater. “It’s my Christmas jumper.”

“It’s the most horrifying thing I’ve ever seen. Where did you get it—dumpster diving in the dead of night?”

He took a sip of tea, then set down his cup on the table. “It belonged to my father,” he said evenly.

His dead father, he didn’t bother to clarify.

“Oh.” Charlotte scrambled to salvage this. “It’s… whimsical.”

“Is it?” he asked dryly, running a finger idly around the rim of his cup. “I’m so glad to hear it. You can’t imagine how desperately I strive for whimsy.”

“I mean, it has a sort of… vintage charm,” she offered this time, trying a different tack. “You know—so ugly it’s good, that sort of thing?”

“I think you were best off calling it horrifying and leaving it at that,” he advised.

“Noted.” She paused, wishing that her coffee cup wasn’t empty, so that she’d have something to bury her face in. “Did you have a reason for stopping by, other than to have me unknowingly insult cherished family heirlooms?”

This, at least, prompted a smile—or the small curve of the lips that came when he was trying not to smile, but couldn’t quite manage it. She preferred it to many of the proper smiles she’d ever seen. “I actually came to ask if you had plans this evening. I do not don the Rudolph sweater lightly, and it’s time for my annual drunk Christmas night with my sisters and Leo.”

“Your… what?” Was this some quaint English custom that she should be aware of? It didn’t sound terribly quaint, but lots of things here sounded nothing like what they actually were, so maybe it was just a continuation of that noble tradition.

He waved a hand. “We started it when I was at uni, and it’s continued ever since then. Lizzie is a more recent addition to the guest list,” he added hastily, as though concerned she’d think he’d been leading his adolescent sister into vice and sin. “We compete to make the best Christmas cocktails and do a blind taste test.”

“How blind can the taste test really be, if there are only four of you?” she asked skeptically.

“Five, now, because Jess comes too. And it used to be six—Leo broke up with his longtime girlfriend a few months ago.”

Charlotte hesitated; she knew that Ava and Kit didn’t have plans tonight, other than a delivery pizza and watching some of the old Bake Off Christmas specials (further proof that Christmas was bad: the fact that they sprinkled a bunch of fake snow in a random field in Berkshire, had the bakers don Christmas ensembles, and expected people to ignore the fact that there were green leaves on all the trees outside; this holiday was so stupid ).

She should say no. Should resist this strange pull, which made her feel nervous and exhilarated and worried, all at once. If it had just been simple attraction, she’d have known what to do with it—it was maybe not the world’s best decision to sleep with the guy she’d just entered into a business arrangement with, but she was pretty sure they’d be able to handle it like adults, if that was all it was.

The problem, however, was that she was growing increasingly worried that this was something else entirely—something more. Something that she’d find it harder to walk away from.

But when he looked at her the way he was now—the arrogant smile gone, something close to naked hope in his eyes—and the air still felt charged between them, and every sentence they exchanged somehow felt full of possibility…

She didn’t want to say no.

The ugly Christmas sweater seemed to be a family thing. “Charlotte!” Eloise said, flinging open the door and looking thrilled— too thrilled—to see her. “Graham didn’t tell us that he’d invited you.” She turned and called over her shoulder, “What an interesting omission.” She was wearing a sweater that looked as though 1993 had vomited all over it; there was a terrifying polar bear wearing a Christmas sweater of its own, and whoever had stitched on the eyes hadn’t filled them in with a different color thread, so they were the same red as the sweater, giving the polar bear a slightly demonic look.

Charlotte smiled a bit uncertainly, and then lifted the bottle of bourbon she carried. “I brought cocktail provisions?”

Eloise flung a dramatic hand before her eyes. “Don’t show me! We’re not meant to see any of the ingredients anyone’s bringing!”

“How on earth can you possibly do a blind taste test if you all need to assemble the cocktails?” Charlotte asked as Eloise stepped back to let her into Graham’s flat, on the first floor of a terraced house on a quiet, tree-lined street a couple of blocks from the Chiswick high street. She noted the sleek shoe rack just inside the door, and toed off her own boots, feeling very pleased that she was wearing her Fuck off, I’m reading socks, which she’d bought matching pairs of for herself and Padma a few years back.

“You can’t,” came Graham’s voice from another room, in answer to her question. “The notion of the blind taste test is a complete fiction that Eloise insists on clinging to.”

“Let me have my illusions!” Eloise smiled cheerfully at Charlotte, then led her into what turned out to be the kitchen.

“Wow,” she said, as soon as she walked in. “This looks like a kitchen in a magazine.” It really did: there were cabinets painted a gorgeous navy blue, fitted with brass hardware; a black-and-white tiled floor; beautiful, retro-looking appliances; a copper light fixture casting a warm glow above the marble-topped kitchen island, which currently featured an assortment of liquors, liqueurs, and mixers.

“It’s because he sold his soul to work for the capitalist pigs ,” Eloise said dramatically. Charlotte thought about Graham’s coldly logical decision to pursue a specific line of work in order to support Eden Priory, partly to ensure that his sisters didn’t have to, and had to bite her lip to hold back a retort. This wasn’t her family—wasn’t her fight. And Graham wasn’t hers to protect.

“Says the woman whose greatest dream is to open a florist’s shop and sell flowers to posh people in Richmond,” Jess said dryly from where she was sitting at the kitchen table, cross-legged in her chair, a half-full coupe of champagne in her hand.

“Rude,” Eloise said.

“It’s because I love to cook,” Graham said patiently to Charlotte. “So I spent my entire renovation budget on a single room.”

“Mystifying,” Charlotte said, and he flashed a grin at her. “All I need in my kitchen is an air fryer so that my leftover take-out fries can be reheated properly.”

Eloise brandished a bottle of champagne in Charlotte’s direction. “Bubbly?”

“Why not?” Charlotte said. She turned to face Graham, who was peeling a lemon to create lemon twists. “This is fancy.”

He glanced up at her, his hands still busy. He was still wearing his appalling Christmas sweater—of course—but the sleeves were rolled up, revealing his forearms. There was a battered watch on one wrist that looked as though it had seen a few generations of use. “I told you, we take drunk Christmas seriously.”

“Hence starting with champagne, despite the fact that we’re all about to be drinking large quantities of liquor?”

“Precisely.” He set down the peeler, reached for a knife, and began slicing an orange. There was something oddly mesmerizing about watching the movement of his hands, which was so assured. Oh no—she had a competence kink. She knew this about herself. Did slicing citrus fruits count for this kink? She wouldn’t have thought so, but the fact that she couldn’t tear her eyes from him indicated otherwise.

Eloise handed her a champagne coupe.

“Where’s Leo?” Charlotte asked, leaning back against the counter.

“Picking up the curries,” he replied, eyes on the task before him. “And Lizzie’s on her way.”

“Correction!” came a voice from the other room. “Lizzie is here!”

Charlotte turned to see the erstwhile Cindy-Lou Who from the Christmas lights switch-on entering the kitchen; Graham dropped his knife and crossed the kitchen to take the reusable Waitrose bag she clutched in her arms. She was wearing an oversized Christmas sweater featuring—Charlotte did a double take to confirm—a bunch of dancing skeletons in Santa hats and an elf emerging from a coffin.

“Lizzie, this is Charlotte—Charlotte, Lizzie’s my youngest sister.”

“Hello,” Charlotte said, a bit wary in light of the expression of undisguised curiosity on Lizzie’s face.

“Nice to meet you,” Lizzie said simply, and Charlotte—who had been halfway expecting some sort of interrogation—breathed a sigh of relief. “You’re the one who’s an artist, right? Graham mentioned it. I’d love to buy you a coffee sometime and pick your brain about making a living in the arts.”

“Of course,” Charlotte said, flattered; it was always a strange, novel pleasure whenever someone was impressed by her art career, rather than vaguely amused by it, as had always been the case in her family. “Nice sweater.”

Lizzie glanced down at it. “It’s my protest sweater, because Halloween is clearly superior to Christmas, and I want this party moved to October.”

“Halloween doesn’t have the right flavors for festive cocktails,” Eloise protested, and Jess rolled her eyes; this was clearly a long-standing family debate.

“It does,” Lizzie insisted with a frown. “You’re just unimaginative.”

“Your feedback has been taken into consideration, as always,” Graham said, ruffling his sister’s hair. She directed her scowl at him.

There was more commotion from the other room, and in another moment Leo entered the kitchen, his arms full of takeaway containers and in the midst of some sort of monologue about the environmental impact of takeaway.

“I’ll reuse the containers,” Graham said, “so long as you stop whingeing now and actually let us eat in peace.”

“I’ll agree,” Leo said, nodding seriously as though they were taking some sort of solemn oath together, “only because I want us to eat before it gets cold, because based on previous years’ experience with this event, it’s best not done on an empty stomach.” He looked at Charlotte, assessing. “I hope you’re up to this. You’re a bit small.”

Charlotte drained her glass of champagne. “I once drank my college boyfriend under the table, and he was ten inches taller than me.”

Leo considered her for a long moment, then turned to look at Graham, who was now plating the food.

“What are you doing?” Graham asked, not looking up from the container in his hands.

“Considering your height difference with Charlotte here. I believe it’s about ten inches as well.” Leo turned back to Charlotte. “Would you say that’s your preferred height difference with a romantic partner?”

“Leo?” Graham asked, his tone pleasant.

“Yes, oldest friend in the universe?”

“Please shut up.”

In the fuss that followed, as everyone was occupied with retrieving plates and dishing up heaping servings, Charlotte was able to busy herself pouring another glass of champagne, claiming a plate of her own, and fighting the blush creeping up her throat, carefully avoiding looking at Graham for even a second.

Three hours later, Charlotte had decided that the drunk Christmas party was the best idea ever .

“Seriously,” she said to Eloise, definitely not for the first time, “I think I should have come up with this.”

“I know!” Eloise squealed; it was a relief to note that however much Charlotte had had to drink so far that evening, it was still not as much as Eloise, who had been going back for seconds of some of the contest entries.

Graham, of course, had been right: the notion of it being a blind taste test was insane, and the entire evening had almost immediately devolved into chaos, with each of them advocating loudly for their personal creation. Graham, annoyingly, had won; he’d made some sort of delicious mulled whiskey with clementines—Charlotte had already had two glasses of it, and was very tempted to go back for a third. (The knowledge of how badly her head was already likely to hurt tomorrow morning was the only thing causing her to exercise a small degree of restraint.)

Eloise turned to face Leo, who was in the process of explaining to a very tolerant Jess why his pomegranate martini had been better than Eloise’s rosemary gin fizz. “There’s not a prize for second place,” Jess said patiently; she alone among them had limited herself to a few sips of each cocktail, and was therefore something of the parent in the room at the moment.

“There’s not a prize for first place,” Graham put in, sounding annoyed. He was sprawled in an armchair opposite Charlotte across the coffee table, one leg slung over one of the arms. His glasses were a bit askew, his cheeks flushed from the drink. Every time his dark eyes landed on her, she felt a wave of goose bumps rising on her arms.

“Your prize is the satisfaction of a job well done,” Lizzie told him, leaning over to offer him a poke in the side. He gave her a look of tolerant affection that softened something within Charlotte.

“Then why,” he asked his sister, “did you make me buy you the world’s most expensive notebook the year you won?”

“I just wanted to see if you’d do it,” Lizzie said frankly. She turned to Charlotte. “If I ever win again, though, I’m demanding a holiday change as my prize.”

“Does this mean that I can ask you for some overpriced bit of rubbish this year, then?”

Lizzie considered. “No.” She reached up to ruffle her brother’s hair. “When I start working for an evil consulting firm making heaps of money, we can revisit this conversation.”

“Need I remind you that I am not, at the moment, making any money at all?”

“Well, then it’s good you won the cocktail contest this year, so you can save your pounds instead of buying me nice stationery.”

“Why,” Graham wondered to the room at large, “do I feel as though I’ve been taken advantage of?” He looked at Charlotte, and her skin prickled again, despite the fact that there wasn’t— shouldn’t have been—anything at all suggestive in what he’d said.

“At least Francesca’s not around anymore, making that same elderflower cocktail every single year ,” Eloise said, draining her glass.

“I liked that cocktail,” Leo said with a frown. He turned to Graham. “You should’ve got the recipe off her before breaking up.”

“Noted,” Graham said, extremely dryly. “Next time I’m ending a yearslong relationship, I’ll be certain to write down any important recipes ahead of time.”

Eloise yawned and reached for her phone on the coffee table, checking the time. “God, we need to go. Jess and I both have to work tomorrow, no matter how hungover.”

“ Some of us considered this fact at the beginning of the evening,” Jess said, a bit smugly. Eloise flipped two fingers at her.

“I should go, too,” Lizzie said. “I signed up for a yoga class at eight.”

“Since when do you do yoga?” Eloise asked her sister, looking astonished. “You hate all forms of exercise.”

“Since my back started hurting when I get up in the morning. Aging is terrible,” Lizzie informed them solemnly, with predictable, profanity-ridden results.

“I’m taking a cab home,” Leo told Lizzie, once he’d stopped telling her that twenty-two-year-olds should be legally banned from complaining about aging. “Want to split it?”

“Yes, please!” Lizzie said, visibly brightening with the promise of a warm cab rather than a chilly walk to the Tube. She turned to Charlotte. “Are you headed far? Do you need a lift, too—or we can walk you to the bus?”

“I’ll walk her,” Graham said easily, before any other offers could come in, and Charlotte slid a glance at him. This, apparently, sounded exactly as suggestive to the others as it did to her, which meant that no one questioned it for even a second, since—as she was slowly beginning to realize—she and Graham were the subject of an intense, extremely avid bit of collective matchmaking. She hadn’t been on the receiving end of an effort this strong since college. And then, within a matter of minutes, they were alone, and the silence suddenly felt heavy.

She stood, rubbing her hands on her leggings. “I’ll help you clean up,” she said, and Graham rose, too, collecting glasses from seemingly every flat surface in the room. She was glad he didn’t tell her to leave it for later; she didn’t know what to do with herself, despite the fact that this was hardly the first time they’d been alone together.

She set the dishes down on the counter, and turned to the kitchen table, gathering up the plates they’d eaten on to hand to Graham, who was standing at the sink, rinsing the dishes in cursory fashion before loading them into the dishwasher. He carefully rinsed each of the reusable plastic takeaway containers, true to his word to Leo.

All too soon, however, the dishwasher was loaded and quietly humming away, the paper bags the takeaway had come in tossed in the trash, and Graham was wiping down the counter. He was very neat, she’d noticed; after a party like this, under ordinary circumstances—circumstances in which she wasn’t trying to avoid having a conversation with the man standing next to her, because she had no idea what to say, no idea how to alleviate the pressure that seemed to be growing around them—she’d have dumped the dishes in the sink and gone to bed, worrying about the mess the following morning. (A strategy that she always regretted the next day, of course, but she never learned her lesson.) But his kitchen was once again spotless; the living room, too, had the sort of cozy-and-lived-in-but-tidy look to it that Charlotte had dreamed of achieving but never quite managed, given her propensity for leaving art supplies and books and empty coffee mugs scattered around all the common areas of whatever apartment she happened to live in. And compared to the new-baby disorder of Ava and Kit’s flat, this felt like something out of a catalog.

Graham tossed the rag in the sink and turned to look at her. Despite the ill-advised number of cocktails she’d consumed that evening, Charlotte felt suddenly wide awake, alert to every movement of his body. He looked at her for a long moment, and then reached out slowly—so slowly that she could have stepped easily out of his reach, if she wanted.

But she didn’t want.

Instead, she let him hook his thumb and forefinger around her wrist, tugging her closer.

She felt her heart thumping in her chest.

She looked down at his hand, the fingers tanned a shade darker than the fair skin of her wrist, and felt the tap of her pulse against his thumb.

She looked up and met his eyes.

He swallowed.

“I’ll walk you home,” he said softly, after a long moment in which they stood in silence, linked by his fingers on her skin, neither of them speaking.

“What if I wanted to stay?” she replied, equally softly, and she saw him exhale slowly— felt it, somehow, in her chest.

“If we’d not just drunk our body weights in liquor, I’d want you to,” he said. He hesitated. Reached out. And very, very slowly tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ear. His eyes were dark on her; a curl had broken ranks and tumbled onto his forehead, and she didn’t trust herself to reach up and push it back. Didn’t trust herself to touch him at all. She, apparently, had less self-control than he did.

And then, at last, his eyes slid from hers. “I’ll get your coat,” he said, his voice low.

And while she waited for him to hand it to her—while he walked her home, along the streets of Chiswick, aglow with Christmas lights, passing the occasional throng of Friday-night revelers—and when he left her on Ava’s front steps with a last, lingering glance—she knew that something, somehow, had changed.

And that she was in very deep trouble.