‘No. Absolutely not! I just have, um …’ He looks up at the ceiling as if searching for inspiration. ‘I just have this thing where I hate starting something and not seeing it through to the end.’
‘Of course you do.’ I give him my best smile and I know he knows that I can see right through his flimsy excuse. ‘All right, so Santa’s sleigh crashes in Central Park because of the lack of Christmas spirit—’
‘No!’ Stacey shouts so suddenly that one of the customers drops a wooden snowflake she was looking at and it clatters to the floor. ‘You can’t tell him the ending of Elf. It has to be seen.’ She turns to him. ‘So you’ll just have to go over and watch it some other time with her, won’t you?’
His eyes don’t leave mine and his teeth pull his lower lip into his mouth. ‘It’s not the worst idea I’ve ever heard …’
‘She does have a point,’ I say, wondering what on earth has got into me. Am I actively inviting a man over to my house? Again? And not just any man, but the most gorgeous and charming man I’ve ever met? ‘And seeing as you enjoyed Elf so much, there’s a whole host of other Christmas movies you’ll love too …’
I’m still at the till behind the counter so I have to stop abruptly when a customer comes over with a handful of Stacey’s jewellery and a load of my hand-painted wooden baubles for her granddaughters and starts telling us about them as I ring up every item. I expect James to leave, but he wanders instead, still sipping his coffee and looking around as Stacey goes to replace the necklaces from the window display.
‘You do remember our deal, don’t you?’ I ask him when the customer has left.
He looks up from the wooden gingerbread house he was studying, a display model of the build-your-own gingerbread house kits I’ve made, and he looks at me blankly. ‘What deal?’
‘James! You were going to … and I was going to …’
He bursts out laughing and then stops with an ‘Ow.’
‘Of course I remember,’ he says when he comes back over to the counter. ‘I wasn’t that far gone. In fact, I’m pretty sure I remember every excruciatingly embarrassing detail of last night.’
The scent of his cologne has followed him across the shop. He smells of ruby red oranges and cinnamon and ginger. It’s not right that someone who hates Christmas can smell like they’ve just stepped out of a Christmas tree.
‘I studied retail back when I thought I’d be doing something different with my life. I know a bit about merchandising and marketing,’ he’s saying even though I’ve got lost in smelling him. Again.
‘I can see that. Your shop is amazing.’
‘Yours is as warm and homely as your house. It just needs to stand out a bit more.’ He turns and points his coffee cup towards my side of the window. ‘In trying to make the display cosy, you’ve made the windows too dark. And I think there’s too much division between your products. You’re in this together, and you’d probably get more customers if it looked like you were in it together. At the moment, it’s not clear what you sell, and from the outside, you find yourself looking around for another door because it looks like two separate shops.’
I blink in surprise and look over at our cosy little window displays. He’s got a point. And I’d never considered that it looks like two separate shops from the outside, but I have noticed customers hovering out there before hesitantly coming in, like they’re not sure they’re in the right place.
‘And your windows should be a feature,’ he continues. ‘Right now, you just display products in them for customers to come and pick at, but they’re not a showcase. You’re using them as an extension of your shop space rather than a way to make people stop and look.’
Again, I know he’s right. Me and Stacey haven’t had a clue what to do with the windows, and we’ve opted for displaying as many products as possible in the hope they catch someone’s eye. ‘You’re really good at this. Thank you.’
Stacey’s watching us with both eyebrows looking like they’re having a competition between themselves for the World High-Jump record.
‘I should go anyway. Again.’ He still makes no move to leave.
‘Your Santa’s not going to Macarena by himself.’
He goes to agree and then rethinks. ‘Oh, I don’t know, I wouldn’t be surprised if he was possessed by some sort of evil spirit.’
‘Well, nutcrackers are supposed to guard against evil spirits, aren’t they?’
‘Oh yeah, I’d forgotten that.’ He smiles a nostalgic smile. ‘I guess I’ll just have to put more out then, won’t I? Do you want to pop by later and smash a few up for me?’
I laugh and jokingly threaten to hit him but he steps out of my way too quickly. ‘Not that I’d hit someone who’d just bought me plant life.’
‘And coffee.’ He holds his cardboard cup up in a toast and I knock mine against it and he smiles at me and I smile at him and lose all sense of time again until Stacey plonks her empty cup loudly on the counter.
‘I should …’ He points towards the door again and takes a few steps towards it this time. ‘I’ll see you around, right?’
See me around? I’m going to find every excuse possible to go over there today. I’m already calculating how long I can reasonably leave it before taking him a cup of tea. ‘Definitely.’
‘Okay, see you—’ He backs into a table with a clunk because his eyes are on mine and not on where he’s going, and he goes red again and scurries out, and I can’t take my eyes off him as he crosses the lane and has to
