Page 2 of Karma Kitty Christmas

He’s a polite young man, Isaac told himself, but that line sounded so much like Todd that Isaac was compelled to emotional honesty.Who’s at least thirty and runs his own business and looks stunning without his shirt when his jeans are hanging around his hips.

Oh God. Isaac was going outside to knit on the porch and ogle his neighbor’s grandson. He was going to hell.

Well, maybe Todd’s self-righteous ass will end up in a cold, sterile heaven, and I’ll be spared that at least.

That thought almost did it—almost derailed a ten-year habit of knitting on the front porch in blissful solitude, free to listen to whatever he wanted, doing a thing he loved and refused to give up, watching a happy world go by during the prettiest moments of the seasons.

Because the fact was, he’d rather go watch the neighbor’s unfairly attractive grandson, covered in paint and drywall dust and carpet fibers, finish a laborer’s menial job (as Todd would have referred to it) than spend the afterlife with his supposedly beloved husband, and damn if that wasn’t a big truth to swallow.

In fact, it wassucha big truth to swallow that Isaac couldn’t. In the end that’s what drove him to the porch, to his place of peace, with his hated brown sweater and the audiobook he’dreallybeen looking forward to. He just really needed to escapehis own head right now, and he couldn’t afford to turn down any avenue to help him do that.

Magic Hour

LUCA HATEDto admit it to himself, but he was anticipating Magic Hour more than usual today.

It had started when the job he and his guys had shown up for that morning had been cancelled, because the price of their materials had gone up so much that their client hadn’t been able to afford the project. It had only been a mother-in-law cottage—he and his boys could have done it in a week or two—but the average Joe only had so big a cushion, and in this case, Joe decided mom-in-law could continue to live in the guest room.

Luca had met the old bat, and he had his doubts—and from one glance at Mrs. Average Joe’s face as her husband had given them the news, he thought she did too. Since it washermother-in-law, she should know. But hey, he was neither marriage counselor nor old-bat remover, and he and his guys were just trying to get by.

He’d let the guys go home and had driven to his trailer on the tiny warehouse lot—the “location” of his business, where he kept materials for upcoming jobs as well as the trailer office—to see if he and his office assistant (also known as his little sister, Allegra) could juggle up another job for that week.

They managed to move their next job up a week—but only a week—and he had to tell the guys he had no work for them until next Monday.

So that had sucked.

And then as he and Allegra had been settling gloomily into their lunch—a big triple portion of Chinese dumplings to share—Allegra had confessed tearfully that her shitty boyfriend hadbroken up with her and asked her to move her stuff in the next two days or he’d dump it on the lawn.

Because she was pregnant.

She was pregnant, alone, and wholly dependent on the income Luca was trying to provide with the company that was getting more and more frayed shoestring by the day.

Aces.

But Allegra had been scared, and their parents weren’t speaking toeitherof them (judgy assholes), and he’d been all she had. So what had started as a quiet lunch where Luca could get his head on straight had turned into an angst fest during which he had to hold his sobbing sister and help her pull on her big-girl pants so they could get through the next couple of weeks of figuring out what to do.

Of course the obvious solution—temporary—was to move her into the spare room of Luca’s apartment, but Luca knew that wouldn’t last. Even without the baby, Allegra liked to spread out, and Luca neededsomewhere—a yard, a den, a study, somewhere—to himself in his own home.

His last boyfriend had called him “withholding.” Luca had called himself “recovering from a childhood with parents who wouldn’t let me poop without checking to make sure I wasn’t doing something the Bible says I shouldn’t.”

His last boyfriend hadn’t thought that was funny, and Luca had, and that’s why his last boyfriend was his last boyfriend.

So by the time Luca got to his grandparents’ place to see what new horrors awaited (he’d had to replace the subflooring and drywall in both bathroomsandthe adjoining bedrooms, and don’t even get him started on the dry rot in the kitchen), he’dreallybeen looking forward to Magic Hour.

His grandparents’ neighbor, Mr. Browning, was a quiet man—but cute. So cute. He’d probably been quite a twinkie delight in his twenties, but now, at not yet forty, he was quietly pretty, withpale brown hair and kind eyes with the crinkles at the corners that said he smiled more than he frowned. Luca knew (because his grandmother was a terrible gossip) that the man had lost his husband not too long before they moved to the villa, so Luca had been trying to respect the man’s grief, but oh, that didn’t stop him from enjoying Magic Hour.

Every evening, weather permitting, Mr. Browning would come out and sit on his front porch and knit or crochet. He had a heater for cold days and a light for the fall and winter days when it was dark by six o’clock, and he would simply sit quietly, listening to something on his EarPods, and create… magic.

Luca knew knitting and crocheting because his grandmother still did it. Hell, he’d been the one who’d been responsible for moving half her yarn to storage, with the promise that he’d take her “yarn shopping” from her stores once a month. His parents had told his grandmother to throw it away, and Luca could forgive them for cuttinghimoff for being gay, but he would never forgive them for the tears of hurt and devastation in his grandmother’s eyes when she told him, “Bianca says I have to throw it away. Your father agrees with her, and now….”

Luca could have cheerfully killed them both.

He didn’t do either craft, but when he was a kid, he used to ask his grandmother, in wonder, what she was going to do with all the pretty yarn.

“Anything, Luca,” she’d reply with pride. “This yarn can be anything in the world.”

Allegra puckishly referred to the yarn stash as “Schrödinger’s Hats,” because until you opened the box, anything was possible.

Luca knew that nice Mr. Browning and his grandmother used to plan projects all the time. Sometimes she’d buy yarnforhim, because she said his husband had put him on a“yarn diet” (which sort of sounded like an asshole move to Luca, but hey, wasn’t his relationship, right?), but they’d trade patterns and all the neighborly things that most people probably associated with cooking. As far as Luca knew, they’d traded recipes too, but what he really loved was how much his grandmother enjoyed having somebody to talk about yarn with.