‘Twas the Love Before Christmas

9. Catherine

Chapter nine

Catherine

I had been looking around the Christmas Market for about an hour now. There were plenty of homemade gifts to see this year, and those were the kinds of gifts I liked to buy. A bit unique and not mass-produced. There were shelves with knitted hats, homemade quilts, cookie mixes, hot cocoa mixes in glass jars, and even wooden ornaments that had been painted to look like the coast of the lake.

The last few stores had been full of wonderful gifts, but nothing that fit the description of what I wanted to give my parents. It changed every year, but this year, I was looking for something not necessarily practical but useful to them instead of something they would just sit on the table and have to dust. What do you buy for people who don’t need anything?

Now, I was stumped. What else could I look for?

A dog’s loud bark grabbed my attention. Plenty of people brought their dogs to the Christmas Market, so I wasn’t too surprised to hear the bark. However, I soon recognized the sensation of something pawing at my legs as I attempted to walk.

I laughed as I turned around to look, only to find Wally and Noah there.

“Well, this is a bit of a surprise,” I said as I bent down to pet Wally. “Seems your dog likes me, Noah.”

“Oh, Wally likes everyone,” Noah said with a bit of a blush. “But he does seem to have a knack for sniffing you out of a crowd. I don’t know what it is about you. Guess he just likes the way you pet him.”

I laughed at this. There was probably nothing more to it, but the way he said it meant that I was particularly special to Wally. Or, at least, that’s what it sounded like. I hadn’t even known the dog for longer than a few days. How could a dog take such a liking to me? I guessed I’d never know, but I was thankful that Wally liked me.

“You know, Wally seems happier to see me than you do,” I joked as I stood back up. “So what brings you to the Christmas Market? What are you looking for?”

Noah seemed to be trying to find a way to answer that while also attempting to ignore the joke. At least, that’s what I was gathering from how he shifted his weight from foot to foot.

“Well, I was looking for something for my parents, but some time with you is always appreciated, Catherine,” he said. “Why don’t we look together? I’m sure there’s something more we can find together than on our own.”

“That’s a fair point. A second set of eyes is always helpful.”

With that, I walked beside Noah. We were silent to start, but that was all right. It gave me time to reflect on how much time I had spent with him while I’d been home this year. I'm sure it wasn’t nearly as much as it could have been. But somehow, I’d managed to see him every day.

Then again, our parents did live next to each other. So it was natural. Perfectly natural.

“I remember walking around the Christmas Market our freshman year of college,” Noah said as we walked. “We were both so worried about our relationship that I don’t think we bought anything at all that year. Or we were too busy fighting about how to make the relationship work that we didn’t notice anything on the shelves. Oh, how youth refuses to compromise on anything in its stubbornness…” He shook his head.

“I think you’re right,” I replied. “We talked so much about where we wanted our relationship to go. I think we walked around all the shops without so much as glancing at the merchandise. We were far too worried about how things were going between the two of us … and for good reason. I was a fish out of water my first year at college and with a long-distance relationship to boot… a man who didn’t want to try out for the team at my university the next season, and no good writing programs out here for me.”

“Would you ever come live here again?” Noah asked.

The question came out of nowhere, but there had to be a process behind the question, how he had gotten to it. I pursed my lips. He wouldn’t have known I was considering it already. My life was in California now, not Indigo Lake, despite all my current misgivings about the former. All my best friends were there. I was still hesitant about starting over here even if I had the chance, the money, and the time.

A cross-country move had been difficult to pull off after college. Now that I was grown up, it’d be less strenuous since I could easily rent a trailer and drive it across the country. Something about that was cold and disingenuous. If I was going to move back home, there had to be a strong pull. Stronger than any reason to stay in Indigo Lake. So far, I hadn’t come across any reason strong enough, but…

Was there any way that Noah was thinking about the two of us? No. Let’s not get carried away.

I couldn’t deny that while I was home, something reignited. Old feelings sparking to the surface, waiting to be rediscovered. It mainly happened when we discussed our relationship in high school and our freshman year of college. But I also couldn’t deny that just being around Noah had a part to play in it. My heart raced simply by being near him.

After all, we both agreed that we were still in love when we broke off our relationship. There had just been too many dreams we were chasing after, pulling us in opposite directions. Mine took me to California. His dreams were here, but they eventually took him east with the Peppermint Pirates and then south with the Huntington Barracudas – both baseball teams that were based in cities known for something related to the holidays. One had unbelievably good peppermint patties made by a factory in the city, and the other had the most recognizable haunted house for Halloween.

“I’m not entirely sure,” I finally said. “Starting over is difficult at any age, but it’s much easier to do when you’re young and ambitious. What would I do for work out here? I don’t know that there are many places looking to hire writers now, and I’m so far removed from writing that I don’t even know how much of that talent I’ve retained.” I shook my head. “I was always taught that writing is like a muscle. It atrophies if you don’t use it. I’ve not used it nearly enough to feel like I could get another writing job.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Noah said. “I hadn’t realized that it had been that long. You loved writing. Lived for it in high school. You were always jealous when my English class was doing an essay, and yours was still reading the book.”

I laughed a little. It was true. There was little denying that I excelled in writing in school, and it had been enough to get me started at a company I loved. I just hadn’t expected to do so well in my career that I’d be taken away from the very thing I loved to do.

“Well, I suppose there’s always a time and a place,” I said.

We both went awkwardly silent momentarily – both hunting for something to say now that we had run out of things to say – before my eyes were drawn to a quilt in the window of Tulie’s Homewares. I walked closer to the window to see the quilt better and saw a beautiful winter scene with a snowman.

“I used to love making snowmen on our days off of school,” I said. “Never really got the chance to do that in California. It was one of the hardest things to adjust to, honestly. That California never really gets snow. If it does snow where I am, everything shuts down, even with just a couple of flakes. My boss called me in a panic, telling me to stay off the roads for safety the last time it actually did snow.” I laughed a little.

“I was always more of a sledding guy myself,” Noah said as he touched my shoulder. “But I was never one to pass up an opportunity to make you happy. There’s a bunch of snow on the ground. I bet we could find a great place to build a snowman, even in our own yards.”

I smiled a little. That sounded like a lot of fun.

“Maybe the shopping will have to wait, then. Besides, I’ve not seen much of anything else that has caught my attention, and I think we’ve done more talking than shopping. We can always come back later.”

“Yeah… conversation is why we’ve not found presents for our parents,” Noah teased me. “We both know it’s a little more complicated than that.”

He was right. It was more complicated than that. My parents had pretty much everything they wanted, and they had plans for several adventures they wanted within the next couple of years. And they were all paid for. It wasn’t like I could swoop in and offer to pay for part or all of the vacations they had been looking forward to for years.

“So why don’t you have a present for your parents yet?” I asked, mainly out of curiosity.

“Well, they’ve said that they have plenty and that their gift to themselves this year was to go to Florida when the crowds were small and visit some of the theme parks. Mom had so much fun. Dad didn’t enjoy a couple of them, but he said that the smile on Mom’s face was enough to make it worth going again. And the food was good. He’s always loved trying new food on each vacation,” Noah said. “I’m just glad that they’ve found something… but it means that I am stuck trying to find something they would like that they don’t already have. And you?”

“My parents have plans to head on a cruise in March and to the Bahamas in October next year. Both trips are entirely paid for already, or I would have offered to buy them some tickets or something,” I said. “Oh! I could buy them some gift cards, those ones that work basically like debit cards. They might be a little more expensive to buy to start, but I think they’d enjoy that.”

“That sounds like a good idea. Do you need a ride out to Walmart for the gift card? I don’t think you’ll find that here in town at the Christmas Market,” Noah said.

I shook my head.

“I’m sure my parents won’t mind if I run to Walmart with their car, so maybe I’ll head on home to do that,” I said with a laugh.

“Let me walk you home, then, at least,” he said. “I’d feel horrible if I didn’t. I know Indigo Lake is safe, but… you know, old habits die hard?”

I laughed a little. We had stopped at the corner, waiting for a light to change so we could cross the street and head home.

“I would be delighted if you would walk with me,” I said.

We had only gotten perhaps a few yards further down the street – away from the large makeshift Market full of shops of homemade goods – when a snowball hit me square in the back. I stumbled right into Noah.

“Are you all right? Hurt yourself?” he asked.

I shook my head.

“No. I got hit by a snowball.”

“A snowball?”