My next swallow was more difficult than the last, and I reached for the other box, cracking the top open with my stomach in knots over what I might find inside.
And when I saw what was on top, I gasped.
My eyes flicked to River, who watched me with his brows pinched together and frown firmly in place. I let our gazes stick for a moment before I turned my attention back to the box, pulling out the old, worn quilt on top.
“River…” I whispered, shaking my head as I pulled the fabric into my chest. I inhaled the scent, and a flurry of memories assaulted me like the snowflakes falling on the ground outside. I closed my eyes, soaking it in, and when I opened them again, they met River’s. “The Christmas Blanket,” I said softly, a smile spreading on my lips. “You kept the Christmas Blanket.”
He swallowed, and the corner of his lips tugged up just a smidge — almost so imperceptibly that I wondered if it happened at all. Then, he shrugged, his eyes on mine.
Watching.
Waiting.
And with just that look, those emerald green pools took me back in time.Ten Years EarlierIt was our first Christmas Eve as a married couple.
In my head, I’d always imagined what this would be like. I pictured us in our own home, with our own tree, and our own Christmas decorations. I imagined how we would decorate outside — would we put lights around the door and across the roof? Would we have a Nativity scene in the yard? What would the wreath on our door look like?
Blame it on all the fairy tales I’d read, or the fact that my parents were a real-life fairy tale, but my imagination had run wild since I was a little girl, thinking of all the possibilities.
Instead, River and I were in a run down, one-bedroom apartment on the east side of Wellhaven, with a busted heater and a small, sad Christmas tree that we only had thanks to the local tree-seller taking pity on us and giving us one of the rejects still left over just a few days before Christmas.
I stared at that tree from my spot on our old couch, a hand-me-down from my parents, and felt my heart ache a little. There were only two ornaments on the tree — one from my parents, a silver bell, and one from his parents, two little reindeers that said Our First Christmas with our names and wedding date underneath it.
I was eighteen. River was nineteen.
It’d all seemed so romantic, getting married right out of high school. River was everything I ever wanted or needed, and I didn’t care that our wedding was modest, or that we didn’t get to go on a honeymoon, or that we couldn’t immediately buy a big house with a big yard and a big porch and a big white fence. This one-bedroom apartment was fine by me, as long as he was in it.
But now, staring at our barren tree, with my feet so cold I thought they’d fall off at any moment even wrapped up in two pairs of socks and tucked under Moose’s fur where he lay at my feet on the floor, I wondered if we’d rushed it all.
Would it have been smarter to wait? What if we would have gone to college first? What if we would have saved up for a big wedding, and a long, luxurious honeymoon in the Bahamas?
And what would it be like to be in a little house, with a real Christmas tree, and real Christmas decorations?
As it was, I worked down at the supermarket in town — usually only thirty hours a week. River did odds and ends jobs whenever and wherever he could. Sometimes he was a plumber, sometimes a car mechanic, other times an electrician or lawn mower or forest clearer. If there was a job in town, River found it, and he worked it with a smile — even though I knew he was tired, and the days were long, and it wasn’t what made him happy.
But he did it for us.
We saved up every penny we could after the bills were paid, but somehow, that savings would disappear no sooner than we had it saved up. The car transmission would go out, or Moose would have to go to the vet, or someone in town would go through a hard time, and we’d help in whatever way we could.
And now, it was Christmas Eve, barely above zero degrees outside with another round of snow fluttering in, and we didn’t have a working heater or a fireplace or even a single strand of lights on our Christmas tree.
River sat down next to me on the couch once he was out of the shower, one that was absolutely necessary after a long day of work. He couldn’t even afford to take the holiday off. I leaned into his fresh scent, his body still warm from the water. He wrapped me in his arms, and I sighed, laying my head on his chest with my eyes still on the tree.