Page 67 of How to Belong with a Billionaire

I snickered. Because you could always trust George with a bit of lit-themed shade.

“Truth time, though,” she went on. “How are you really?”

“I”—I had to think about it—“I’m really not too bad. It’s weird being away from my family but I’ll Skype them later.”

“And your friend?”

“Could…probably be better,” I admitted. “I don’t know. It’s hard to tell. I don’t know what’s a normal level of frustrated, demoralised, and pissed off for someone with a spinal cord injury.”

“Whatever level he wants?”

“That’s fair.”

“Yes. I am terribly fair. It mostly comes from indifference.”

“That or caring more than you let on.”

She made an appalled noise. “Don’t think you’re safe from punishment just because you’re in another country.”

“Aren’t I?”

“Well,” she said slowly, “that depends. How obedient do you think you can be?”

I shivered, pretty much ready to be as obedient as she told me to be. Except then I remembered a night in Oxford when I’d also felt alone, and how Caspian had given me exactly what I needed: kindness and pain and surety and safety. It was easy to be with George when I was with her. But like this, when memories were closer than bodies? I was afraid Caspian would slip between us. And I just couldn’t do that to her. “Can we wait until I get home?”

“Of course we can. After all”—another of those silences that left me imagining her expression—“absence makes the arse grow fonder.”

“You’re the worst. But you should also know my arse is incredibly fond of you.”

“Good. It’s very charming and I’m looking forward to spending more time with it in the new year.”

Suddenly my Christmas Eve was looking way less bleak than it had before. “I’ll see you soon, okay?”

“Count on it, poppet.”

***

Maybe my Holiday Inn Christmas Eve had fucked up my sense of perspective but Christmas Day in a hospital could have sucked way more. I mean, when you got right down to it, holidays were supposed to be about being with the people you loved—and I was. I’d managed to catch my folks in the creepy window between time zones, which meant it was Christmas for me when it wasn’t for them, and the sight of our pokey living room strung with fairy lights had briefly made me homesick. But even that wasn’t so bad, the warm ache of having something worth missing. Someday, I’d have someone to take back with me. Except fantasy and memory were tricksy bedfellows, and kept leading me to Caspian. That weekend we’d spent together in Kinlochbervie. What Christmas with him, and my family, might be like. The games we’d play. How we could walk hand in hand along the beach in the bright chill of Christmas morning and snuggle beneath the eaves at night. All the kisses I’d steal. The smiles I’d coax from him. The way he’d hold me, with such strength and need, it had always felt like love.

Fuck. When was I going to stop doing this?

Anyway, anyway, anyway. The café laid on a proper Christmas lunch, and the staff had done their best to decorate, so we were feeling fairly festive by the time we were heading back to Nik’s room to open our presents. I knew Ellery didn’t Do Christmas, but I’d got her a copy ofRat Girl, which she accepted with enough ill grace that I could tell she was into it. And Nik and I had a gift-exchange tradition from our student days, when we’d had more time than either money or sense, although to be honest I don’t think much had changed since then. It required you to go somewhere, or be somewhere, and find a piece of tourist tat from a different place entirely. This meant Nik got a baseball cap withI♥TOKYOon the front, purchased from a souvenir stall in London, and I got a T-shirt with the New York Yankees logo on it that Nik had found in a bin on one of his therapeutic walks.

“Do not,” Ellery warned me, “even think about wearing that here.”

The box from my family turned out to mainly contain a quilt for Nik that Mum had made him. We laid it over his bed, and the room seemed instantly less antiseptic, while he had some emotions he felt obviously more comfortable sharing with the window.

“She really didn’t have to do that,” he muttered finally.

I smoothed down the edges of the quilt and made sure it was hanging evenly. Mum had gone for geometric patterns in shades of blue—very bold, and subtly masculine. “Yeah, it’s a present for you, so definitionally she didn’t.”

He snuffled.

“Listen…” I flipped open the card, which had a picture of a polar bear on it:

Dear Nik, Thank you so much for taking such good care of our Arden at Oxford. You deserve a medal but we thought this would be warmer, and the Internet tells us it’s very cold in Boston. Lots of love and Happy Christmas, Iris, Hazel, and Rabbie.

“You’ll say thank you for me, right?” said Nik, still to the window.