Thanks to @gleek007wattpad on Twitter for the beautiful cover! I had so many submissions of gorgeous covers but felt this one worked best. You can see all of the covers on my Facebook page (facebook.com/Reekles).
Since a lot of you liked Let It Snow last year/year before, I thought I'd have another crack at a Christmasy short story! I hope you guys enjoy it and it gets you in the festive mood a little more :)
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Simon throws a string of scarlet tinsel around my neck like a feather boa, holding onto the ends and waving them up and down in time with the music that’s blasting from the radio. “We’re rockin’ around the Christmas tree, have a happy holiday,” he sings along, loudly and mostly out of tune.
I giggle, and sing, “Everyone’s dancing merrily, in a new old-fashion way!”
Dropping the tinsel and grabbing my hand instead, he twirls me around, and I spin back into his body. He drops a kiss on the top of my head, on the Santa hat I’m wearing. Then I duck out from my tinselly feather boa and step back.
“Come on, we promised we’d have the tree finished by the time your parents get home.”
Simon sighs, groaning exaggeratedly and rolling his eyes. “Fine, spoilsport. So - tinsel first, right?”
I gape at him, aghast. “No! Fairy lights, and then tinsel.”
His brows knit together and he wrinkles his nose. “I’m sure that’s not right.”
“That’s always how it goes.”
“Are you sure? Won’t all the lights just be hidden away by the tinsel?”
I give him a flat look. “Not if you do it properly. Haven’t you ever decorated the tree before?”
“I do the baubles,” he informs me stoutly, and I can’t help but laugh. “My mum always does most of the tree; I help my dad put all the lights up outside.”
The only reason his mum wasn’t doing the tree this year was because she’d broken her arm the week before, slipping on a patch of ice in the high street when she was Christmas shopping. Simon’s dad usually cooked the majority of their Christmas dinner anyway, I knew, so that wasn’t a problem for her; but she’d decided to leave decorating the tree to Simon this year.
I love decorating the Christmas tree; I think it’s probably my favourite part about Christmas. At least, it’s always the part I look forward to the most. Once the Christmas songs start playing in the shops on November 1st, and the Halloween costumes are replaced overnight with variety boxes of biscuits and stockings and offers like “3 for 2 on all gifts!”, I’m itching to put up the tree.
My parents always make me wait until December before we put up the tree, though, and it’s always an afternoon we set aside for the whole family. My little brother consistently insists on putting the star on, because he’s youngest, and my now-nineteen year old sister always argues that she should, because she’s oldest. My mum always makes hot chocolate with mini marshmallows for all of us, and my dad spends most of the decorating stepping back and saying, “You’ve hidden all the lights behind the tinsel!” or “You’ve got too many baubles on that side and not enough over here,” without actually doing any of the decorating himself.
So when Simon phoned me this morning to ask for help decorating his Christmas tree, I said yes before he could even finish asking the question.
Now, I look at him waiting for me to dictate where to start.
“Lights first,” I tell Simon firmly.
“Alright, if you say so...”
“Trust me. When have I ever led you wrong?”
“Well last week, you took us down a wrong turning on the way to the shopping centre, and then the week before that we had takeaway and you told me to try chicken chow mien because you said I’d like it, and it gave me food poisoning...”
“Alright, alright!” I bite my lip sheepishly, realising I maybe could have worded that better. But even if it is true, Simon’s only teasing me. “At least trust me when it comes to Christmas. I’m like, the anti-Scrooge.”
“Why do you think I asked you to come help me?” he says with a grin, and rummages around in the giant cardboard box of Christmas decorations, finally fishing out a tangle of white fairy lights. When I raise my eyebrows at the state of the knots in the wire, he shrugs sheepishly.
“Let me take a wild guess: it’s your responsibility to take the tree down every year?”
Once we finally manage to untangle the clump of fairy lights, it doesn’t take long to wind them around the tree. Simon has to do the top few branches; it’s a six foot monster of a tree and I can’t quite reach all the way around. When he sees me struggling to pass the wire around the top of the tree, he laughs and takes it off me, kissing me on the forehead and smiling.
Then, he shakes out a plastic Marks and Spencer bag, the colours on it faded from years of use, and a mound of tinsel falls to the floor. There’s silver, gold, turquoise, red, bronze, white, and even pink.
“My mum likes to change the tree a little every year,” Simon tells me by way of explanation, grinning at me. “Take your pick.”
I choose a long piece of silver tinsel with stars on, and start to wind it around the base of the tree. I hear the rustle of the tinsel as Simon takes some, too, and he starts to work from the top down. We both carry on, until the tree is covered with tinsel, and step back to admire our work.
Simon sputters with laughter, and I sigh, glancing at the clock: this is taking way longer than anticipated. The bottom half of the tree is in silver and turquoise; the top in gold and red. They both look good individually, but as a whole, the tree’s a total mess.
I start to pull it all off.
“We could have planned that one better, I think,” he laughs next to me, carefully unwinding a string of gold tinsel so as not to disturb the lights we’ve placed so carefully amongst the foliage.
“You saw me start using silver,” I argue.
He shrugs. “To be fair, you didn’t look to see what colours I was using and stop me.”
I just shake my head, trying to bite back a smile and failing completely. Once the tree is stripped back to just the fairy lights, glowing soft and gold from the branches, Simon runs a hand back and forth through his mousy curls and says, “So which colours are we going to use?”
We use the gold and turquoise, alternating the colours as we go. The end result is much better than our first attempt. The music is still playing on the radio – now a Michael Bublé cover of ‘White Christmas’, and I bounce on the balls of my feet to it, bobbing my head in time.
“Now the baubles?”
I laugh, and go on my tiptoes to give Simon a quick kiss on the end of his button nose. “Yes, now the baubles.”
Like with the tinsel, I find that Simon’s family have a huge and varied collection of baubles with which to decorate the tree. I pick up a silver one, made of glass, just like a mirror. My reflection is a bit distorted: my face more round than usual, my curly blonde hair seeming to be even more huge, my blue eyes too close together.
I look away from the bauble and up to Simon, who’s poised ready to drape a red teardrop-shaped bauble from the tree. “Um, I think we should decide which ones to use first, so we don’t make the same mistake as we did with the tinsel.”
He pauses, and then takes the bauble away from the tree, nodding in agreement. We divide out the blue and black and gold baubles, and put the others back in the bag.
As we hang them on the tree, stepping back every so often to see how it looks and see where needs more baubles, I start singing along to the radio again. I haven’t got a great voice, but I’m better than Simon; and anyway, who doesn’t like to sing Christmas songs?
“May your days be merry and bright... And may all your Christmases be white...”
“You’re not actually that bad a singer.”
I cut a glance his way. “Gee, thanks.”
Simon rolls his eyes, sighing. “That’s not how I meant it. I just don’t hear you sing much unless it’s Christmas. Or unless you’re singing ‘Happy Birthday’, but that doesn’t count.”
“Everyone likes to sing Christmas songs.”
“Maybe not everyone should,” he quips with a cheeky smile.
“Tell me about it. You make my ears bleed every time you try and hit that high note in ‘Santa Claus is Coming to Town’.”
Simon gapes at me, aghast at how I could insult him so, and shoves at my arm playfully. I can’t help but laugh, and bat him away. When I raise my arms to fend him off, though, he takes advantage and jumps at me, tickling my neck and sides.
I shriek, squirming away from him and running across the room, but he stays in hot pursuit, until I try to vault over the arm of a sofa and trip, tumbling onto the cushions. Simon falls down on top of me, sitting on my legs and his fingers burrowing into my neck and waist.
Gasping for breath from laughing so much, I give up trying to fight him off and hold out my hands, palms facing him. “Okay, okay, I surrender!”
Laughing almost as much as me, Simon stands up and gives me a hand to my feet. I scowl, and straighten my woolly blue and white jumper with the reindeer on. “That was mean.”
“That was funny.”
“I’ll get you back for that.”
“I’m not ticklish. You know that.”
I pout, and twist my mouth into a tight line. “I’ll find something.”
Simon just smiles at me, and kisses me on the top of the head again as he moves past to pick up another bauble to hang from the tree.
“Okay, I think that’s enough baubles,” I say, trying not to sound too horrified by the amount of decorations Simon’s hung on the tree. He clearly takes his role as bauble-hanger very seriously: there’s hardly a branch that’s not got either a fairy light or a bauble on it. But it’s Simon’s tree, so I resist every urge to start taking off at least twenty baubles to make it a little less of an eyesore.
“See, it looks great,” he says, stepping back to admire his work. “I told you, I always do the baubles.”
“You told me,” I agree. He takes one look at my expression though – the worried line of my mouth, the pucker in my forehead between my eyebrows, and the repressed objection he can just tell is on the tip of my tongue, and he smiles.
“Too much?”
“A little.”
So we take off a few baubles, until the tree looks much nicer – less something that will blind you if the light hits it just right.
“There, that’s better,” I say, satisfied. “Now for the star?”
“We’ll leave that,” he tells me. “My mum can’t decorate the tree, but we can leave her the star.”
The decided look in his eyes makes me smile, and I nod, putting the star carefully back amongst all the unused decorations in the box. I push the box to the side of the room and look at the clock; we still have maybe an hour before his parents get back. The traffic’s going to be horrible at this time of day on a Saturday so close to Christmas for them driving back.
Simon cleans up all of the shreds of tinsel and fake tree bristles that have gone to the floor, and when he puts the Hoover away, I turn up the radio.
“You will get a sentimental feeling when you hear Christmas singing, let’s be jolly -”
“Deck the halls with boughs of holly!” Simon joins in, smiling at me.
“Dance with me,” I say, holding out my hand to him.
He groans. “I hate dancing.”
“You were dancing earlier.”
“Yeah, but I was only messing about.”
I laugh, and shake my head. Instead of asking again, I put his hands on my waist and put my arms around him, and we sway in time with the music. I don’t know that it really counts as dancing, but everyone seems to just rock side-to-side in the movies when they dance with people. Like I’d expected, Simon doesn’t argue now, just pulls me in close and sways with me, even though we’re moving too slowly for the music – but that doesn’t matter. He tucks some of my hair behind my ear, and his eyes seem to sparkle. Then, he rests his chin on top of my head, and I think about how much I like the way we fit together like this.
“Wasn’t this song just on a little while ago? I could’ve sworn they only just played it.”
I shrug. “It’s a Christmas classic. It’s probably on every hour or so.”
“We’ve been decorating that long?” he says, aghast and looking at the clock. It’s pitch black outside, but barely five o’clock. “Guess I won’t have time to run in to the shops and pick up your present.”
I grin at him, pulling away a little so I can look up at him. “What are you getting me?”
He keeps dropping vague hints about my present, and tells me how much I’ll love my present, because he knows how much it makes me desperate to know what it is. I’ve even tried asking him when he’s half asleep over the phone at night, hoping he’ll be so tired he’ll forget it’s supposed to be a secret, but so far I haven’t managed to catch him out. I love surprises, but the more he talks about it, the more excited I am to know what it is.
He presses a fingertip gently into my nose and laughs. “It’s a surprise, don’t make me ruin it.”
I try putting on a puppy-dog expression, and pout, but Simon just shuts his eyes tight. “Nope, you can’t make me tell.”
So I shower his face with light little kisses and he laughs, twisting his face out of my reach. “Aimee, I’m not telling you!”
I drop back off my tiptoes and huff melodramatically.
“Ugh, fine! Fine. I’ll just have to wait.”
“Yes, you will,” he says, still laughing, and kisses me. I’ve known Simon since we were five, and we’ve been dating ever since Valentine’s Day when we were fourteen. We had to kiss over a game of truth or dare, and then he sent me a Valentine’s card; and even though he signed it ‘X’, I recognised the writing.
It was strange, how we went so easily from being friends to being a couple. I’d always thought Simon was cute, objectively – I could see why girls would fancy him, with his big brown eyes and curly brown hair, and the disarmingly sweet smile. But when he sent me that card, it made me sit up and wonder if I was one of those girls who had a crush on him. We went on one cautious, supposedly casual date, after Valentine’s Day had passed, and when he held my hand, I barely even thought about how it was weird because we were friends. It felt so natural to do something like hold his hand, and kiss him at the end of the night when he walked me to my front door.
That was almost three years ago, and his kisses still make me feel dizzy and my stomach fill with butterflies.
When we finally both pull apart, breathing shallowly and smiling at each other, I reach up to ruffle Simon’s hair.
He promptly grimaces. “I hate it when you do that.”
“I know you do.”
“Then why do you always insist on doing it?” he laughs, exasperated.
“Because I know you can’t stay mad at me for it, because you love me.”
His smile widens. “I do love you.”
“I love you too.” I give him another quick kiss then take a stride back, careful not to step on any of the decorations. “Now come on, stop distracting me, and help me finish decorating. We still have to put tinsel out in the hallway and pin up those card holders in the kitchen.”
“Deck the halls with boughs of holly,” he sings again. “Fa-la-la-la-la...”
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Hope you guys enjoyed it! Like I said, it's just a short story, one-shot kinda thing. Let me know what you thought in the comments, and don't forget to follow me on Twitter @Reekles :)
Also, a reminder: my books The Kissing Booth and Rolling Dice are both available worldwide in paperback and ebook format having been published by Random House; if you're having trouble finding a physical copy in your local bookstore, try looking online and via Amazon.
Merry Christmas, and a Happy New Year everyone! xo