chapter six

s i x

*

We've only just left town when Casper gets a call and turns down the radio to answer, twisting towards the window as that will silence his conversation. I try to focus on the near-silent radio and not on what he's saying but that's pretty hard when it's just the two of us in the car and while my eyesight may be pretty shit, my hearing's impeccable.

The call doesn't last long. Casper bounces his foot when it ends, phone clutched in his palm. He doesn't say anything for a moment and when I glance at him, his jaw is set, his eyes dark. I'm not going to sit here and pretend I didn't hear every word he and Eric just spoke.

"Want to go and get your stuff?"

"I guess I don't have much choice," he says, lifting his phone.

I've never met Eric, and that phone call is the first time I've heard his voice. Not the best first impression, considering he sounded stressed and clipped as he asked – no, told – Casper that he'd boxed up his things and he should come and get them. There was no emotion in his voice. If anything, he sounded cold. Not at all like he was putting the nail in the coffin of a two-year relationship.

"Better to get it over and done with," I say. It sounds hopeless and pathetic, but what else can I say? There's no point filling him with empty sentiments; I'm pretty sure they're not going to get back together and it's not up to me to decide whether or not he's going to be ok. Considering he's now technically homeless, I guess, and he doesn't get on with his parents, maybe he won't be.

"Yeah."

He doesn't say much for the next ten minutes, until I pull up on the kerb outside Eric's flat, and I hear a low groan next to me. Casper has sunk down in his seat, his hand over his face. He looks like he's about to cry, his lips pressed together and a shine in his eyes.

"You okay?"

"I don't want to go in," he says. The words come out quietly, almost a hoarse whisper. "Ugh. I can't do it. God, this is so fucking shit. Let's just go back to yours."

"No, you need your stuff. I have a limited supply of clothes from exes that you can borrow and I don't plan on doing laundry every day." I put the car into neutral and switch off the engine. "Want me to go up?"

He nods meekly. "Number five," he says. "Sorry. I just can't face it."

I pat his knee as I get out of the car and look up at the building. It's one of those old houses that used to belong to one family and at some point got chopped into six different flats. Outside, there are six buzzers; I press the fifth. A moment later, a tinny voice says, "Come in."

The door opens. I head up two flights of stairs to the top floor and take a moment to catch my breath and regain my composure before I knock on the door with a gleaming number five nailed above a peep hole. There's a sound on the other side before the door opens a couple of inches, enough for Eric to look me up and down through the gap.

"Who're you?"

"Casper's friend. I'm here to get his stuff."

Eric frowns. "I know Cas's friends. I don't know you."

I guess I should give props to the guy for not giving his ex's stuff to the first person who rocks up, but I can't be bothered to go through some big rigmarole of proving who I am or dragging Casper up here. Eric's eyeing me like I'm some mangy dog. This guy gives me bad vibes, though our interactions have been pretty limited.

"I'm Beth, from Java Tea. Cas is staying with me seeing as you kicked him out in the rain last night. Now I'm here to get his stuff for him because, understandably, he doesn't want to see you." I give him a pointed look, my eyebrows raised. "So let me take his shit, because I don't feel like putting up with any of yours, all right?"

Okay, so maybe I'm going in a bit hard. But my instincts are to protect Casper and I don't like Eric, and it's getting close to four o'clock which, way up here in Saint Wendelin in the middle of December, means the sun has already set. I want to get home and light a fire, and find a place on the wall for my new piece of Emmy art, and I need to get back to wrapping.

"Beth?" He says my name like he's testing me. Maybe Casper's never mentioned me. But then Eric says, "Oh. You're Bethlehem."

"The one and only."

He scans me again. I hate the feeling of his eyes on my body. His judgment is silent but powerful, and there's a moment that I half expect him to feign care for my health as an excuse to call me out on my size. I've come across my fair share of guys like that in the past – and women, too, but mostly guys – but I hope Casper wasn't dating one of them.

Eric says nothing. He disappears, and then unlatches the door to roll out a full-size suitcase. "The case is his too," he says.

"That's everything?"

"He doesn't have much stuff. I'll let him know if there's anything else."

There's something so acutely sad about the fact that all of Casper's belongings – according to his ex, anyway – fit inside one case. I know he whittled his stuff right down when he moved in with Eric almost a year ago, but this is ridiculous. I'd probably need fifty of these, if not more, to pack my life away.

"Okay. Thanks." I take the handle, relieved that at least the case is heavy, and roll it towards the stairs. Eric watches me for a moment, before he eventually closes the door, and I hear him slide the latch across again.

It takes a few minutes to get down the stairs with the suitcase, which is almost half my height, and I burst onto the street with a huff. Casper's still huddled up in the front seat, facing away from the place he used to call home, and he doesn't notice that I've emerged until I yank open the back passenger door and heave the case onto the seat.

"You don't have much stuff," I say when I get in next to him, taking off my glasses to clear the sweat-induced fog.

"That's everything?"

"Yes. According to He Who Shall Not Be Named."

"Voldemort was there?"

"Shush!" I turn on the car and pull onto the quiet road. "I didn't check inside, but I'm assuming he didn't fill it with shit and rocks. Do you really have that little stuff?"

Casper shrugs one shoulder. "I don't know. I guess? Most of it's probably clothes. I don't have much stuff and we shared everything else, but it was all stuff he bought. Music, films, all that." Another shrug. "I don't buy much."

"Wow."

"Who knows, though. It could be rocks and shit," he says. "But that would be totally uncalled for considering he broke up with me. Only the dumpee gets to retaliate with a bag full of pebbles and poo."

"We can work on that tomorrow," I say. "Right now, I want to get home and get a fire going."

He gives me a small smile, one side of his mouth lifted up ever so slightly. "Thanks for doing that, Holy City."

"Any time, Ghost of Christmas Past."

*

While I make a fire and get back to wrapping presents, Casper takes his case upstairs to sort through what little he owns. I have a Christmas playlist playing and I'm making do with the coffee table in the sitting room as my wrapping station, so I can keep an eye on the crackling wood. When the fire's still young, sometimes the logs get into the habit of jumping out of the grate, with a patch of singed carpet as proof.

I'm well aware that I don't have the best singing voice, but I can't help belting along to the tunes that come on. This list is a compilation of all my favourites, so it's hit after hit that I'm warbling along to, from Wham! to Wizzard; Bing Crosby to Brenda Lee, and I'm right in the middle of a major Leona Lewis singalong when I catch sight of Casper out of the corner of my eye. He's halfway down the stairs, staring at me with a look of abject horror etched into his face.

My singing dies down. I reach for my phone, one hand holding down paper that I've yet to tape, and I pause the music. "Hey. Sorry, am I too loud?"

"It's your house, Beth."

"I know, but still ... anyway, what's up?"

"Just came down to check you weren't murdering cats," he says. His lips twitch as he descends the last few steps.

"Ha. Ha. You wound me."

He awkwardly crosses the room, as though he doesn't know what to do with himself. For a moment he seems like a video game character without direction, hovering on the edge of the room, until I nod at the sofa and he drops onto it.

"You actually have a really nice voice," he says, resting his elbows on his knees. "Terrible taste in music, though."

My cheeks go warm and pink at the first part. I ignore the second part. "Cheers. So, what's the verdict? Was your case filled with shit and rocks?"

"Funnily enough, it wasn't." He sounds genuinely surprised. "Just my clothes and books. And, you know, my toothbrush and my Benadryl, all the really important stuff."

I can't imagine having so few books that they would all fit in a suitcase along with everything else. One of the first things I did when I moved here was to trawl the local charity shops for bookshelves, and I got lucky when someone donated an entire collection of IKEA shelves; I took home all four for twenty quid and it didn't take long to fill them. Every November, one of my sisters will come over, ostensibly for tea and a catch up, and will end up not-so-sneakily inspecting my shelves to report back to my family, to make sure none of them buy me a book I already have.

"Feel free to make yourself at home up there. Everyone I know lives too close to warrant using the spare room, so it's all yours for however long you need it." I tear off a long strip of tape, too long for the present, and it curls into itself as I'm pressing it down. Now there's a lump of tape all stuck to itself and the paper, and nothing I can do except tape over it.

"Hey, Beth, can I ask you something?"

"Of course." I look up at him, but his eyes are on the box I'm wrapping.

"Do you have any clue how to wrap a present?"

"Let's just say practise does not make perfect."

"Fucking hell." He slides off the sofa and thumps onto the carpet on the other side of the table. "Stop. Seriously, stop. Stop." Batting my hands away, he takes the half-wrapped box and carefully unpeels the tape, managing to get it off without tearing the paper. "This is how you wrap? The queen of Christmas can't wrap?"

"Hey. Don't come in here criticising my wrapping and undoing my hard work, Ghost boy. What're you doing?"

"Fixing this." He undoes all of my work on the box – the chutneys for my dad – until it's sitting on top of a slightly creased piece of paper, which he trims down when he digs my scissors out from under a pile of tags and cards. I don't want to jinx the moment, so I sit in silence, watching as he works so carefully: he tears off short strips of tape that he sticks to the edge of the table, ready and waiting for when he needs them as he folds crisp, perfect corners.

Neither of us say a word until he's done. The box looks like a box, no strange lumps of mis-measured, over-folded paper or bunched-up tape. Casper looks up.

"It was looking like a toddler had wrapped it," he says.

"You kept that skill quiet."

"It's not a Christmas-dependent skill. Many a birthday requires wrapping," he points out.

"Except," I say, suddenly remembering our interaction at the market earlier, "you bought Christmas presents for your sister. Right? So you do do Christmassy stuff."

"My sister happens to like Christmas, yes," he says. "As I think you know by now, I don't. It works out fine: I give her Christmas presents and she gives me birthday presents. Usually at some point after my birthday, because she's down in London with her own family."

As he talks, he absent-mindedly takes the next box-shaped present from my pile and wraps it. I feel like this moment is under a spell and I want to preserve the magic, so I need to keep him talking before he can realise what he's doing.

"What's her name?"

"Jemima."

"Is she older?"

He shakes his head. "You'd have thought, but no. She followed in the Boutayeb family footsteps and started the whole family thing early. Though I guess she's a Daoudi now. She's twenty-three; she married her uni sweetheart two years ago."

"Are you an uncle?"

"Mmhmm. Omar's three and Faiza's one." There's a hint of a laugh in his voice when he says, "I'm kind of banned from seeing them around the actual holidays, 'cause Jemima's worried I'll ruin the spirit for the kids. I'm not so much of a grinch that I'd tell a toddler that Santa doesn't exist. They'll figure it out themselves soon enough."

He keeps wrapping, as though his hands are set on automatic to tear tape and fold paper. "It won't be long before they realise Christmas is A, originally a Christian holiday celebrating the birth of Jesus as the son of God, which is totally antithetical to Jem's beliefs, and B, that Santa is a capitalist creation invented to sell more useless shit and propagate rampant consumerism."

How do Casper and his sister come from the same family? She sounds like my kind of person. Yet I know from experience that Casper's also my type of person, else I wouldn't be so happy to have him in my home. With a laugh, I say, "I think you'll find that the religious aspect of Christmas is antithetical to the beliefs of fifty percent of the population. I certainly don't buy it, but I'm still a Christmas ho."

"Ho, ho," he adds.

"Hey! A joke! You're doing well, bud," I say with a laugh. He scowls and sticks his tongue out at me, two expressions that don't work together and end up making him laugh too. "Do you see them much?"

"I try to go down to London when I can, but it's ridiculously expensive to get the train and I don't drive. She brings her family up here at least once a year, but..." He trails off as he finishes the wrapping and seems to snap out of his daze. "Hey, did you put something in my coffee?"

"What? No. Why?"

"I think you may be a witch. Some kind of potent powers of persuasion." Pushing the present away, he scoots back a bit, towards the fire. "It must be your singing. You're a seasonal siren: I came down here because you were singing and you got me to wrap Christmas presents."

"Actually, I think you'll find you chose to do that because apparently I'm shit at it."

"You are. Unbelievably so." When he turns towards the fire, the orange flames cast a warm glow over his face, and for the moment that he closes his eyes, he looks like some kind of bronze god. The light forms a flickering halo around his midnight-black curls and bathes his smooth brown cheeks in honey, highlighting his endearingly crooked nose and his elegant fingers draped over one knee.

The fact that Casper is attractive isn't new information. Or cute, perhaps. I think cute fits better. He has a bit of a baby face, clean-shaven and round-cheeked with an endearing boyish smile. But in this moment, when he's so perfectly still and his eyes are shut, there's a twinge in my chest when my pulse skips in its efforts to speed up and my palms feel clammy all of a sudden. Goose pimples flush my arms despite the heat and the back of my neck itches, and he opens his eyes. I swallow hard. He lets out a heavy sigh.

What the fuck was that?

I know what the fuck that was.

"So," he says. I'm glad he breaks the silence because my mouth has gone dry. "About this arrangement. That's what I actually came down to talk about." He unfolds himself, turning to face me. "How serious are you about it being okay for me to stay for a bit?"

"A hundred percent serious," I say when my words come back. "I mean, if we're talking long, long-term, we should probably figure out some kind of rent agreement, but if you only want to stay for, like, a month or so, then that's fine."

His eyes widen. "You'd let me stay for a month?"

"Of course."

Wrapping his arms around his knees, he bites his bottom lip and smiles at me. "I was going to ask if it'd be okay if maybe I could stay with you until the New Year, but that's more than two weeks. I didn't want to push it. And I'll pay you rent anyway."

Casper wants to stay here for the entire season, I think.

"I've always wanted a housemate," I say.

"How much do I owe you?"

"I'm not charging you rent, Friendly Ghost. Don't be ridiculous. You're a friend in need. One of the rules of friendship is that if your friend's boyfriend dumps him right before Christmas and you happen to have an empty bedroom, you take him in and teach him how to be festive and how to get over his ex."

Casper laughs. "That's a very specific rule. Did you write it, by any chance?"

"I may have. And I mean it."

Is it the fire that's making me hot, or the way he's looking at me right now? I honestly can't tell, but I do know that my cheeks are burning and my heart is thudding hard. This is a terrible time to realise that I'm attracted to the grinch, when the grinch is heartbroken and about to be forced by me to like a holiday he hates.

"You're more than welcome to stay here until the new year. There's just one thing I need from you."

With a grimace, Casper gets up to sit on the sofa again, crossing his knees and clasping his hands in his lap. There's something strangely arousing about him sitting like that, all prim and proper with his eyes trained on me, proving that guys absolutely don't need to spread their legs to sit comfortably.

"Aside from me having to tolerate and possibly partake in and contribute to Christmas?"

"That part goes without saying."

He nods, nose wrinkled. "Okay." Holding up one hand, he says, "I'll try. Because I owe you one. I owe you several thousand. If you want me to watch Christmas film with you, I can."

"I wasn't going to ask that of you, but now that you mention it."

He groans and drops his head into his hands.

"What I was going to say," I continue, untangling myself from a mess of tape and paper and unwrapped presents, "is that you can work of your debts by helping me wrap. You're very good at it, and my sister's very critical of my gift presentation."

"Which sister?"

"India. And Juneau."

"Wait a second." He pauses, pursing his lips and tilting his head as though he's trying to hear a distant sound. "Wait."

"I'm waiting."

"Your sisters are called India and Juneau? And you're Bethlehem?"

I can practically hear the cogs turning in his mind.

"And the youngest is Paisley," I say.

"Oh my god. You're all place names." A laugh bursts out of him, more of surprise and amusement than judgment. "Are your parents world-travelling child-conceivers?"

"Jesus, Cas. That's one way to put it."

"All this time, you let me think you were called Bethlehem because your parents are vaguely religious Christmas nuts." There's a look of pure, unadulterated joy on his face; it's a nice break, so I don't mind that the source of his amusement is my name and my parents' antics.

"You never outright asked," I say. "It never came up; I didn't have a reason to tell you that I was conceived on my parents' Christian pilgrimage in the spring of ninety-five."

"Holy fuck."

"Yeah, I think it went something like that."

He wheezes and clutches a hand over his mouth and I take advantage of his momentary incapacity.

"So, you'll wrap my sisters' presents? Good. Sorted. And you'll watch Elf with me tonight?"

That stops him in his tracks. His hand drops to his knee.

With a dramatic sigh, I roll my shoulders and say, "Okay, maybe not yet. We'll work our way up to that one. We can start with something less outright Santa-ish."

And that is exactly how, as the season's first snow starts to fall outside, I end up watching Die Hard for the first time as I mutilate presents for Paisley and my parents, and Casper quietly finesses the rest.

*

I love writing these characters and this story so much! It's so fun writing their banter, though I'll warn you now there are a couple of heavier chapters coming up later in the week.