Page 58 of When in December
The moment Aaron turned away again, I reached down to feed him a piece of my crust.
He scampered up to his feet, waiting for more.
Aaron hadn’t noticed as he continued his story, words soft and vulnerable, whether he meant them to be or not. “Then,there was my own heart, still beating like it didn’t even know that anything had happened. That everything had ended in less than a second.”
There was a beat. We sat in silence.
“Told you, not a good storyteller,” said Aaron, his voice void of emotion.
I felt pressure forming behind my eyes. But I wasn’t going to cry. Not for him. Especially since I was pretty sure that he’d berate me if I did.
I forced myself to hold it together. “What was his name?”
Aaron took a deep breath. He peeked over his shoulder at me. “Vassar.”
“Vassar. And Oz was …”
“Yep.” He got back to work, leaving us in the quiet.
I broke the silence. “You shouldn’t do that.”
“What?” he asked.
“You should stop doing what you’re doing right now,” I said, my voice coming out more teasingly than I’d intended, though I still couldn’t look at him.
He dropped the tool in his hand before he glanced up at my small smile, not talking about the bookshelves.
“I don’t want to like you.”
“You don’t have to,” he said. “Professional, remember?”
“Can’t we just get along until I finish this project? Because I do need to finish it,” I said. “And now, you kind of did help me here.”
“Why do you even need to finish this project?” he asked. “Why not move on to the next snooty homeowner’s house?”
“Are you calling your sister snooty?”
He breathed a short sound that sounded a little like a chuckle.
“Because I can’t let myself not finish it,” I tried explaining. “This job has always been my dream, and at the end of the year …”
He listened closely.
“There’s a promotion,” I confessed, testing the waters to see if he was going to use this as another piece of ammunition to shoot back at me somehow. “I was told that the promotion was set to be mine. Now though, there’s a sort of last-minute challenge since there are two of us up for it.”
“And what’s this other girl working with?” he asked.
“A house in the city.”
“Just a house?”
I took a deep breath, setting down my slice of pizza as I laid it out for him. “A well-off family brownstone in the city that also wants to be ready for the holidays this season. Historical integrity, mixed with modern, clean edges and silver trees probably. If I know Alison—the works.”
“The works.”
“Yes.”
“What dotheworksentail?” he asked. “Seriously, what are we talking about here? A fake Santa squeezing his ass down the chimney on Christmas Day and a fancy plastic tree or …”