I know I shouldn’t touch him again, I’ve already got far too close to him tonight, but it seems wrong not to hold my hand out, and when I do, instead of taking it, he loops his right arm over my outstretched hand so my arm is hooked through his and he squeezes it against his good side.
Neither of us speaks, and I breathe into my scarf to avoid looking up at him because it should feel weird to walk arm in arm down the street with a man you barely know, but it doesn’t.
I love walking home in the dark at this time of year and seeing all the Christmas lights twinkling from every house. All of my neighbours make an effort with their festive decorations, and each house has lights twinkling from porches and roofs; some have twinkly trees outside and others have left their curtains open to show their inside trees and star silhouettes in the windows.
We turn the corner where Stacey meets me every morning and start walking along the narrower street towards my cottage.
‘Why can I already tell which one is yours?’ James says, but he doesn’t sound insulting about it.
I stop at the little wooden gate and unlatch it, letting my arm slip out of his as I pull away to dash up the garden path and unlock the door to let us in out of the cold, while frantically trying to remember if I’ve left bras hanging anywhere or knickers drying on the clothes airer. It’s been a long time since I’ve invited a man home, and he’s suffering enough tonight. He doesn’t need to come face-to-face with my underwear too. When I turn around to invite him in, I’m surprised to see he’s still standing at the gate, looking up at my house with an expression of awe.
‘Your house looks like it should have gumdrops on the roof.’
‘And now I know those painkillers really do make you loopy,’ I say even though it’s impossible not to grin at him. I don’t have many Christmas lights outside, just one string stapled along each angle of the roof, and a string of candle-shaped bulbs wound through the picket fence separating me from my neighbours on either side of the narrow front garden, and I’m suddenly glad I’ve got them on a timer that’s set to come on from five until midnight every night, even though my mother is keen to point out that I’m wasting electricity if I’m not home. I’ve been working late so often lately, and in the last couple of weeks – since it got close enough to Christmas to be socially acceptable to have lights up – it’s made me happy to come home to the multicoloured twinkling bulbs, and I don’t want to be the only house on the cul-de-sac not lit up after dark.
He’s still dawdling so I duck inside to switch the heating on, kick my shoes off, and then go back to the doorway.
‘It’s like a picture-perfect little Christmas cottage. I’m not sure if it looks like it should belong in a snowglobe or like you live alone in the middle of the woods and leave trails of breadcrumbs out for unsuspecting children.’
I laugh out loud and quickly clamp my hand over my mouth for fear of waking any neighbours who have gone to bed early.
At least he looks suitably guilty for making me laugh as he wanders up the paving slab path, his fingers trailing over the holly bushes glistening with frost and leaving lines through the ice covering the wooden railing on the steps up to the door.
I stand back to let him inside while I go through to the living room, turning on the lights and the candle warmer, and wishing I already had my tree up because that always adds to the cosiness of any room. I throw a firelighter into the wood burner and add a couple of logs as it starts to burn, and then squeeze back past him as he’s holding on to the wall inside the door and toeing his boots off. I go into the kitchen to check on the slow cooker and inhale the warm, homely scent of the veggie hotpot cooking.
‘Wow,’ he says from the living room. ‘Do you have anything that isn’t festive? Is there any one thing in your whole house that doesn’t have some formation of reindeer and snowflakes on it?’
‘Not at this time of year,’ I call back cheerfully. I have a chest upstairs that my grandma left full of hand-knitted Christmas blankets she’d made or bought over the years, along with throws and cushion covers. Even the doormat has snowmen on it. ‘It’s only once a year, I like to make the most of it. It’s nowhere near finished yet.’
‘Not finished,’ he mutters. You wouldn’t expect to be able to hear someone rolling their eyes from another room, but surprisingly I can.
I take the lid off the slow cooker and give the hotpot a stir until I’m satisfied I haven’t brought him back here to accidentally poison him. I fill the kettle, and when I go back to the living room, he’s looking at my nutcracker collection on the window ledge.
‘Have you got enough?’ He’s holding a medium-sized soldier with a furry hat and a sword and moving the lever in its back up and down to open and close its mouth.
‘They were a thing. My grandma found one she thought looked like my granddad and bought it for him
