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Christmas Is All Around Chapter Twelve 57%
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Chapter Twelve

CHAPTER TWELVE

So, let me be sure I understand this: this is your favorite Christmas movie ?”

It was Wednesday afternoon, and Charlotte and Graham were en route to Buckinghamshire; their day had gotten off to a delayed start when Graham had to deal with some sort of Eden Priory emergency involving missing supplies for a gingerbread-making workshop. Charlotte had briefly considered rescheduling, but she thought that they’d still have time to get to their destination, make a sketch and take some photos, perhaps have an early dinner, and be back in London before too late. They were now weaving their way through the traffic on an A road north of London on their way to a bucolic English paradise. (Or, at least, that’s what Charlotte thought awaited them, based on a lot of internet memes and a weird phenomenon whereby everyone posted the same clip from the movie every December 13, for reasons that she didn’t understand, since she’d never seen the movie in question.)

“Correct,” he said, his eyes on the road. He braked suddenly as a car ahead of them turned on their blinker and slammed on the brakes with no warning, then reached over to downshift. Men driving stick: another weirdly specific kink she hadn’t known she possessed until meeting Graham.

She tore her eyes from his forearms. “ The Christmas Cottage ? Of all the holiday movies on earth, that’s your favorite?”

“Yes,” he confirmed. “It’s heartwarming! There’s a sad couple from London who rent a cottage in the countryside and fall in love again. There’s a lonely dog who adopts them, and a pig who becomes friends with the dog.”

This, at least, was an aspect of the movie Charlotte was aware of, because people posted a lot of photos of the pig and dog curled up together every year at Christmas. It was almost enough to make her want to watch the movie.

“And,” Graham added as an afterthought, “the actress in it is quite fit. I decided I was going to marry her when I was about ten.”

“A ha .” This was suddenly making more sense. “Which actress?”

“You know,” he said vaguely. “The blonde one.”

“Very specific.”

“I’ve always had a thing for blondes,” he said, with a sideways glance at her and a hint of a smile.

“How original. You and most of the men on earth.”

“Ah, but the blonde in this film has a sharp tongue, too, and that really seems to be the irresistible combination for me.” Now it was her turn to smile, and he flicked a glance at her long enough that she knew he saw it. “But no, I stand by this: it’s a great film.”

“Between this and the Beauty and the Beast references, you really could craft yourself into the man of the average millennial woman’s dreams, you know. Do you have thoughts about how hot the fox in Robin Hood is?”

“I beg your pardon?” he asked incredulously, sounding a bit like a duke from one of Padma’s beloved historical romances. Honestly, it was kind of hot.

“The fox,” she repeated. “Everyone knows he’s the hottest Disney character. There has been lengthy Twitter discourse about it.”

“Are we talking about a metaphorical fox?”

“No, a literal one,” she said, then paused. “Though he’s extremely anthropomorphized, so I’m not really sure how to assign him a proper species category. It’s one of those things you don’t want to think about too hard.”

“Just when I think I understand women, something new confounds me.”

“I’m glad to do my part to keep you on your toes,” she said, suppressing a smile and looking out the window at the passing scenery, which was extremely picturesque at the moment. Rolling green hills. Winding roads. They’d turned off the A road a couple of minutes earlier, and were now driving along the sorts of roads that, in America—well, they wouldn’t exist, because people would not be able to squeeze two oversized SUVs down them. Even in Graham’s Mini, it felt a bit dicey. But, slight fear for her safety aside, it was all very adorable. There were even sheep! A whole flock of sheep! A rather large flock of sheep, actually. And was it her imagination, or did they seem to be—

Graham slammed on the brakes. “For fuck’s sake.”

“There are so many of them,” Charlotte said as she watched the spectacle unfolding before her. “Like, so many.”

There were, truly, an astonishing number of sheep. It looked to her (entirely untrained and lacking in any shepherding knowledge whatsoever) eye to be an entire flock of sheep, all of whom needed to cross the road precisely where she and Graham were attempting to drive.

“This is the problem with going to the countryside,” he muttered darkly, shifting into neutral and pulling up the hand brake. “Goddamn sheep everywhere.”

“They’re very fleecy,” Charlotte said, impressed. She was not what you might call a nature girl, but she was an appreciator of a nice sweater. She wondered if she could find a friendly farmer and convince him to shear a sheep just for her.

“That’s the idea, yes,” Graham said. He glanced in the mirror. “I wonder if we’re better off turning around—”

“ Baaaa! ” came an excited bleat from behind them. Very close behind them. Charlotte craned around in her seat as best she could manage.

“Hello, sir,” she said, nodding coolly at the sheep who was now peering in through the rear window of the Mini. “Or ma’am, I suppose. You’re not a ram. Don’t want to misgender anyone.”

“Very considerate. Do you think you could politely ask her to get the fuck out of the way so I can reverse the car?” Graham asked.

“Um,” Charlotte said.

“Baaa!” “Baaa!” “Baaa!”

“I don’t think so,” she said, unclicking her seat belt so that she could fully rise up onto her knees, pushing down the headrest so that she could rest her chin atop it. “She seems to have a lot of friends, and it would appear they’ve chosen this spot to have a catch-up.”

“Where’s the bloody farmer?” Graham muttered irately, giving up and turning the car off. It was obvious they were going to be here for a while. “Can’t he come herd them?”

“Why don’t you give it a try?” Charlotte asked sweetly. “Wholesome country boy that you are?”

“Why don’t you ?” he shot back. “Since you seem to be on such good terms with them?”

“They have trouble understanding my accent,” she said somberly. “A tragic tale of cross-cultural miscommunication.”

“That would honestly make half of the conversations I have with you make more sense.”

“Do they send out a book to all young English lads at a certain age? How to act like you’ve got an enormous stick up your ass?”

“ Baaaa! ” said a sheep outside her window, a bit severely.

“I don’t think it liked your language,” Graham said smugly.

Charlotte eyed the now-empty paper cup of takeaway coffee she’d bought before leaving London, wishing she’d rationed it better. She was fairly certain they were going to be here for a while.

“A three-hour tour,” she sang, two hours later. “A threeeee-hourrrrrrr touuuuuuuur .”

“It was less than two hours, you psychopath,” he said through gritted teeth as they—at long last—continued their journey down the country lane. It had taken a long—long— long time for a shepherd to materialize—one who had not seemed terribly contrite about the fact that his entire flock had made a break for it, and then congregated on a road, stopping all traffic in either direction. “And we’d have been better off abandoning the car and walking the rest of the way to the village.”

“Not in these shoes,” Charlotte said, nodding at the heeled leather booties she’d found in a vintage store in New York, which were not remotely suited to country walks down muddy lanes that must contain, at this point, a metric ton of sheep shit.

“Well, thank god your shoes were preserved. Perhaps I would have been wiser to fashion some sort of sedan chair for you out of branches from a tree, so that you might be carried to your destination?”

“When would you have had the time, though? You were very busy doing your little cell phone signal rain dance.”

Said dance had primarily involved him circling the car several times, waving his phone in the air and muttering darkly to himself, and at one point growing so desperate as to climb atop a stone wall and come perilously close to toppling over the other side into the muddy field below. Charlotte had laughed herself sick when he’d stalked back to the car, jaw set, and had to rather forcefully shove a sheep aside to open the driver’s-side door.

Charlotte, all in all, was growing rather fond of the English countryside.

All this meant, however, that it was nearly dark by the time they made their way into the charming village of Lower Hankering.

“Well, this is nauseating,” she said, staring out the window as Graham somehow maneuvered the car into a parking space that barely looked large enough to fit a toy pedal car like the one she’d loved when she was four. The village high street, where they currently found themselves, was a narrow, winding road flanked on either side by an assortment of half-timbered buildings with steeply angled roofs. Now, at dusk, it was lit with a cozy glow from a number of the windows, and there were holiday lights strung along the eaves, greenery adorning the occasional lamppost. “How do places look like this? It’s absurd. I feel like I’m about to get murdered in an Agatha Christie novel.”

“A delightful prospect,” Graham agreed. He turned the car off. “Shall we go draw your cottage?”

“Yes,” she said. “If we hurry, we can get there before I lose the light entirely.” They were already pushing it; the sun had just set, and the light of dusk was rapidly fading.

He looked skeptically out the window and sighed wearily, pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose. “I think you should draw it in full daylight.”

“Oh, okay, what a helpful suggestion, Apollo. If you could just bring the sun back at”—she checked her phone—“four o’clock in England in December, that would be great.”

“We could stay the night,” he said, nodding; following his gaze, she realized that they’d parked directly opposite an establishment that bore the sort of swinging sign she associated with Disney World (except considerably less terrifying and nightmarish), which read, THE DUKE OF YORK * INN AND PUB * FINE CASK ALES * EN SUITE ROOMS .

“What is it with this country’s obsession with advertising the presence of bathrooms on all their hotel listings?” she wondered aloud.

“If you’d spent your childhood staying in Victorian-era bed-and-breakfasts with a single bathroom for every floor of the building, you’d understand,” he said darkly. “Listen, I’m hungry, and tired of sitting in this goddamn car, and don’t feel like facing the drive back to town tonight. Why don’t we just stay? You can visit the cottage in the morning and make your sketch and then we’ll be on the road back to London before lunch.”

“Well,” Charlotte said slowly, considering. She was starving, it had been a long, annoying afternoon, and the Duke of York looked extremely cozy, like something out of an Anglophile’s fantasies of a countryside visit.

“Fine,” she said shortly, opening the car door. “But if they only have one bed, all bets are off. I am not romance novel–ing this shit.”

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