Page 37 of I’ll Be Home for Christmas

Ryan grinned. “Of course I do.” Removing his gloves, he reached into his breast pocket and pulled out a small silver key with a length of green ribbon threaded through the hole at the top.

“Where have you kept that all these years?”

“In Dad’s workshop. He never throws anything away, so I knew it would be safe. Do you want to do the honors?” he asked, handing her the key.

“Are you sure?”

“Absolutely.”

Pushing the keyhole cover to the side, Fred slipped the key in and turned. There was a small click, and the lid bounced free. She turned the box toward Ryan. “You open it.”

“Let’s do it together,” he said, his eyes sparkling with a mischievous excitement that made her stomach tickle.

Fred shifted around in the bunker until she was kneeling beside him, by now her knees almost numb to the damp freezing sand. With a hand each on the lid, they pushed it open. On top of the pile of treasure were two sealed envelopes, one addressed to each of them.

“Our letters to our future selves,” Ryan said, with a look of trepidation and curiosity that mirrored her own.

“I’ll look at this later,” she said, shoving hers deep into her coat pocket. She couldn’t remember what she’d written, but given that she was twelve when she’d written it, it was bound to be super embarrassing.

“Good idea,” Ryan agreed, doing the same. Beneath their letters was a CD of S Club 7. “That must have been yours,” he said quickly.

Fred laughed and batted his hand away. “No way, that was yours. Here, this was my choice.” She picked up a CD single of Nickelback’s “How You Remind Me.”

“That doesn’t make you cool or anything,” said Ryan.

“Cooler than you.” She smirked.

“Oh man!” Ryan gasped delightedly as he pulled out a Beyblade complete with its plastic launcher cord. “I loved Beyblades.”

“More than your shiny Pokémon cards?” she asked, holding up three cards with holographic pictures that glinted in the torchlight.

Ryan let out a whispered squeak of delight and took the cards from her. “I have regretted burying these for YEARS!”

While he busied himself with his treasure, Fred picked out her long-dead pink Tamagotchi.

“RIP Tammy-Lou,” she said. “You were a good pet.” She noted she’d also seen fit to include one of her beloved Nancy Drew books and several handmade friendship bracelets.

“How did I do that?” she wondered aloud, studying the neatly woven bands.

“You were obsessed with making those things. Your pockets were always full of strings so you could make them wherever we were,” said Ryan.

“Oh yeah, I’d forgotten that. It was very satisfying.”

“Your hair was ridiculous,” Ryan sniggered, handing her a photograph from the top of a thick pile.

“It was crimped; I liked it that way.”

“Looks like crinkle-cut chips.”

“Oh, like yours was any better! What was that long greasy side fringe about? You can only see half of one eye.”

“That’s gel, not grease—and I’ll have you know, it was that hair that got me my first girlfriend.”

“Susannah Brindle.” Fred nodded, recalling the cool girl with the high ponytail and spiky fringe.

“Blimey, even I didn’t remember her surname. She dumped me when a boy in the year above brought her some sweets back from Spain.”

“It’s hard to compete with that,” Fred said, sympathetically.

She picked up a handful of the photographs and began leafing through them.

They’d written on the back who was in each picture.

There were some of her with the aunts and her mum.

A couple of her and Ryan’s families together.

And a lot of them with their friends from school; daft, often blurry photos taken on her old Polaroid camera.

She was surprised to note that she remembered almost all of their names.

But mostly the pictures were of Fred and Ryan, swiped from family photo albums—from embarrassing baby pics, through primary school and into secondary.

“I always thought I’d have my relationship shit together by now,” said Ryan, taking the photographs as Fred passed them to him.

“Don’t complain, at least you’ve got all your other shit together.”

“It sounds like yours is getting there.”

“Maybe.”

“But you’re over Tim?” he asked.

“God, yeah! I can’t believe I ever found any of his pretentious bullshit appealing. I was dazzled by him to begin with. He was very charming. And then after a while, when I’d realized he wasn’t…I guess I didn’t think anyone but him would want me.”

“If you don’t mind me asking, why was your bar set so low?” Ryan asked.

“It didn’t feel low at the time. If anything, when we first met, I felt as though I was punching above my weight, I couldn’t believe my luck…He was an absolute catch on paper.”

“And a complete dick in reality.”

She shoved him with her elbow, smiling.

“Why would you think no one else would want you?” Ryan asked.

Now wasn’t the time to delve into the myriad tiny ways her self-esteem had been corroded. Maybe one day. For now, she countered with, “Why would I assume they would?”

“Oh, I don’t know, maybe because you’re intelligent and funny; sometimes even on purpose,” he said, smirking. “And you’re beautiful.”

Did he just say I’m beautiful? She chanced a glance at him, but he was still poring over photographs of their shared history. God, how she’d yearned for him to think her beautiful when she was a teenager.

“That’s very kind of you to say. I do recall a time when you said I reminded you of a plague victim.”

“When was that?”

“When I caught chickenpox in year eleven.”

He laughed. “Yeah, you did. You looked like an extra on one of those History Channel docudramas. You had sores everywhere, even in your eyebrows!” He sounded impressed.

“I’ve still got a scar on one of them,” she said.

“Have you?”

Ryan leaned in close, holding his phone torch above them and looking at her eyebrows. She closed her eyes against the light; he was so close she could feel his breath on her face and for a moment she was sixteen again, thinking about kissing him…

“Oh yeah!” he said, triumphantly. “I see it.”

“Excellent,” she said, dryly.

Ryan lay back against the side of the bunker. “God, remember what we were like at sixteen?”

She remembered everything about sixteen-year-old Ryan.

“We were bananas. Hard to believe your mum was expecting you at that age,” he went on.

“I know! We couldn’t even keep our bag-of-flour baby alive in year twelve Health Ed,” she replied.

“RIP Dusty Frost-Hart,” said Ryan, gravely.

“Do you remember the romper suit Aunt Cam crocheted for it?”

“It? How dare you refer to my first-born son as an ‘it.’?”

“Dusty was a girl.”

Ryan frowned. “I don’t think so.”

“ She would’ve survived if you hadn’t capsized the boat,” said Fred.

“I wouldn’t have capsized the boat if you hadn’t thrown a box of bait worms at me.”

“I wouldn’t have thrown worms over you if you hadn’t recoiled in absolute horror when I kissed you!”

The words just slipped out; she hadn’t meant them to.

They’d never talked about that day, even though it had changed everything.

She’d tried to bury her mortification as deeply as their time capsule, but her brain had a way of regurgitating her most cringeworthy moments when she least expected them.

Since moving back and finding Ryan to be all manner of ruggedly Highlands gorgeous, the memory of his rebuff had been playing on a loop.

Ryan’s brow creased. “I wasn’t horrified. I just wasn’t expecting to be kissed. You took me by surprise.” He squinted away into the darkness, as though trying to see back through time. “I’m sure I wouldn’t have recoiled. Not until you’d lobbed worms at me, anyway.”

“You literally reared back like a startled horse; anyone would have thought I’d been chewing raw garlic cloves before I kissed you.”

Ryan laughed. “Did I? I don’t know why. It really wasn’t that big of a deal.”

“It was to me! It took a lot for me to do that. I didn’t just kiss any random boy, you know. I was humiliated.” She felt the familiar embarrassment wash over her. Maybe a sinkhole would open up, and the sand would swallow her.

Ryan looked stricken. “Aww, I’m sorry, I was such a knob back then,” he said, chastising himself.

“I never imagined you’d be so upset about it.

And then you threw the worms, and the boat tipped over, and Dusty got waterlogged, and we never talked about it again…

I guess I thought that was the end of it. ”

“The worms were a knee-jerk reaction because I didn’t know how to deal with the horror of what had happened.

And then you told me that you didn’t think of me that way!

The boat tipping over was a welcome reprieve.

” She wished he’d stop looking at her with those doe eyes.

She wished she could sweep the whole debacle under the rug again.

It was time for some backpedaling. “But it’s all water under the bridge… kids’ stuff.”

“Hold on…” Ryan was suddenly serious. “Is that why we stopped hanging out?”

She shrugged. Apparently, this wasn’t going back under the rug. “One of the reasons.” She sighed and went on, “I couldn’t face the idea that you might go off and tell your stupid other friends. I thought you’d all be laughing at me.”

“Oh, Fred, I never would have. I can’t believe you had such a low opinion of me.”

“We never discussed it, and so it felt like it was always hanging there between us, like this big banner reading I fancy you, but you don’t fancy me . It was too humiliating,” she said, brushing sand off her hands, which was something of a lost cause when sitting in a sandpit.

“Is it too late to say I’m sorry?” he asked. His expression was pitifully contrite, which made her feel embarrassed all over again.

Eurgh! She had never wanted his sympathy. Ryan was too kind for his own good, exactly the type of person who would date someone because he felt sorry for them.