The traffic had worsened by the time they left the hospital, immediately caught in a traffic jam that had slowly inched forwards, a twenty minute drive turning into forty-five by the time they passed the sign to welcome them to Coalden Valley, proudly announcing that it was twinned with an obscure village in Germany. Connor glanced over at Posy, her head lolled against the window and her mouth hanging open a little as she snoozed, and he made sure to drive carefully down the bumpy road that was desperately in need of being resurfaced.
It was only when his car came to a stop outside number 105 that Posy stirred, rubbing her eyes and letting out a yawn.
"God, did I fall asleep?" she asked, her voice scratchy before she coughed to clear her throat, peering out of the window at her own house.
"Yeah," Connor said with a chuckle. "About half an hour ago, actually." When he had first noticed that she had slipped out of consciousness, he had turned the radio down and it had remained at little more than a low murmur ever since. He tended to prefer it that way anyway, quiet enough that he could just about hear it over the rumble of the engine and the tyres on the road.
"Sorry," Posy said, unclipping her seatbelt. "It's so hard to sleep these days, I take anything I can get." She yawned again, and Connor got out to help her. It had been quite nice having her asleep next to him, with no pressure to make awkward conversation and no chance of him putting his foot in his mouth.
"No, it's fine. You're a very quiet sleeper though. A little bit disconcerting."
Posy laughed, giving him her hand to help her out of the car, and she trod carefully on her damaged ankle. "That's only because I'm upright," she said, heaving a sigh as she steadied herself on her feet, one arm locked with Connor's. "Ever since about four months ago, I've been snoring like a freight train."
He guided her towards the door, at which point she looked through her pockets and came up empty.
"Shit," she said. "I don't have my key."
"Oh." Connor frowned. "Any way in?"
"Um, yeah. The back door's open," Posy said. She let go of him and leant against the front door with a sigh. "Do you mind?"
"Of course." He trudged around the side of the house until he came to the back door, pushing it open with his elbow and frowning at the ease with which he could get into Posy's house. The village was quiet, rarely anything worse than a missing cat, but that wasn't reason enough to take such a risk. He was a paranoid locker himself, and he would never dream or storing a spare key outside. When Cass had moved in, one of the first things he had drilled into her was the importance of keeping her key on her at all times, and making sure the doors were locked even when she was inside. She had laughed and told him he had trust issues, but she had complied.
Flipping on the first light switch he came to, he saw that he was in Posy's kitchen, a few boxes still on the table that she had yet to unpack and a few plates in the sink. The place didn't have a fraction of her personality, none of her bubbles translating onto the bare walls or the plain china, and Connor was surprised to find himself mildly disappointed. Once he found the hallway, yet again without a single painting or photograph on the wall, he opened the front door and she toppled into the house, falling against him with a heavy shoulder jabbing into his chest.
"Shit, sorry," he said, catching her by the elbow. "You really should lock your back door. I know the village is pretty safe, but, I mean, I don't think it's worth the risk."
"I know, I know," Posy said. She pushed the front door shut, the Yale lock automatically shutting them in. "I just keep forgetting, and I'm always losing my keys so it's convenient. But yeah, I know I'm a bit of a target." She laughed at herself as she gripped Connor, using him as a support to walk, showing him through to the sitting room where she dropped down onto the sofa. "It takes me forty minutes to walk a mile at the moment, and a full minute to stand once I've sat down."
"You have a good excuse," Connor said. "It's not like you're lazy or anything. I mean, you're growing a human. That's pretty impressive."
"Pretty terrifying, more like," she said, widening her eyes at him for a second before she relaxed her expression. "Do you want to stay for a drink? I don't have any alcohol, I'm afraid, but I do have tea and coffee."
Connor pondered it for a moment before he nodded. "Um, yeah. That'd be nice."
Posy tried to stand but he stopped her, holding up his hand, and she rolled her eyes at him.
"I like that you want to help, I really do, but you don't know where everything is," she said. "Give me a hand and I'll show you."
He acquiesced, helping her to her feet once more and she hobbled into the kitchen where she rested against the table with a sigh. Moving was clearly an effort, and Connor couldn't help the guilt that flooded him, no matter how much she had insisted that it wasn't his fault and that she could only blame her own clumsiness.
"The mugs are in the top cupboard, the one on the right," she said, pointing in the right direction, and Connor followed her finger to take out a couple of mismatched mugs. "Milk's in the fridge, and the tea and coffee are on the side."
Connor located the empty kettle and filled it from the sink, putting it on to boil before he looked for the teabags. "What d'you want?"
"I'll have a coffee," she said. "One of those jars should be decaf. White, no sugar. As for tea, I think I only really have Earl Grey or builders, I'm afraid. And there's some sugar in the cupboard next to the one with the mugs."
"Earl Grey is perfect," Connor said. It was all he drank at home, unless he ran out and was forced to dip into the mountain of PG Tips that he didn't remember buying.
Posy folded her arms over her stomach, watching Connor as he made himself at home in her kitchen. "You really needn't do all this, Connor," she said. "You can't be around twenty-four seven. I need to be able to make my own coffee."
"But right now, I'm here," he said. "And I will be here, any time you need me." He spooned coffee into one of the mugs and dropped a teabag into the other, filling each eighty percent of the way when the kettle boiled and adding a splash of milk. He followed Posy through to the sitting room once more, and once she had sat down, he handed her the coffee, which earned him the warmest smile.
"I have to warn you about something right now," she said. "This baby's got my hormones all out of whack, so you'd better not be uncomfortable around women who cry a lot for no apparent reason."
Connor chuckled and plopped down beside her, almost sloshing his tea over the side of his mug. Cass was the opposite of emotional, hard as nails. In twenty years, he could count on one hand the number of times he had seen her cry. "I guess I'll just have to get used to that." He sipped the tea, grateful for the warmth that spread through him, and glanced around the house. It was with a sliver of relief that he noticed not a single Christmas decoration, the room bare of a bauble or a tree, or even a string of tinsel. No fairy lights hung around the mirror, and the mantelpiece was empty of cards.
"What're you thinking?" Posy asked, narrowing her eyes at him. "I know, the place is pretty pathetic. Moving in is a pretty long process when you're as slow as a tortoise and as big as a house."
"I just noticed there are no decorations," he said, thinking out loud. "Not a Christmas fan, I take it?"
Posy spluttered a laugh. "Are you kidding? I look forward to it all year. My favourite season, hands down. It's just had to take a bit of a backseat." She let out a long breath, rippling the surface of her coffee. "I haven't had much time to decorate, and I was going to do that this week, but that's probably going to be difficult."
Connor's chest seized as he weighed up the options in front of him. He was prepared to help Posy in any way she needed, he just hadn't predicted that that would mean Christmas decorations. Most people had theirs up already, and those who didn't had no plan to do so. Except her, it seemed. Biting his tongue, he glanced over at her. "We can decorate," he said, already kicking himself. Decorating was the last thing he wanted to do, and he only hoped that doing it for someone else wouldn't be as painful. "I told you, I'm here to help."
The more he told himself that he owed it to her, the easier it was to digest. It was his moral duty to help her, and he had promised to do so.
"Thank you," she said, her voice soft. "That'd be great. It was going to be stressful enough doing it on my own, and my family's coming over on Christmas day so I kind of need to get a move on." She took a sip of her coffee and sighed. "Really, though, don't feel like you have to stick around. I don't want to ruin your Christmas."
He lifted a shoulder and let it drop. "I don't do Christmas," he said. Posy's eyes popped out of her head and she leant forwards, a look of utter disbelief on her face.
"You're going to have to back up there," she said, shaking her head. "You don't do Christmas? That's it, you just don't do it?" She stared at him, her eyes wide and her pupils huge in the semi-light.
"Yeah." The blunt word fell out and lay between them like an open wound that Connor wanted to cover, and Posy wanted to poke.
"How come? How can you not do Christmas? Is that, like, a religious thing?" Her questions poured out at a mile a minute, her words toppling over each other as they spilled from her lips.
"Nope. I just don't do it." He focused on his lungs, the steady in and out of his breaths, as he sensed Posy's questioning heading towards the kind of territory he'd rather stay away from.
"But why?" She rested back on the sofa, still shaking her head. "I'm sorry, I don't mean to grill you. I've just never met someone who doesn't like Christmas. Wow." She put her feet up on the coffee table, crossing her ankles. "You'll be a believer by the time I'm done with you."
Connor sipped his tea and shook his head. "I doubt that."
"Do you actively not like it? Or you're just kind of disinterested. Maybe you have some kind of repressed trauma."
His heart clenched, and so did his jaw. "Something like that," he said, and Posy went silent.
"Oh. Shit. I'm sorry, Connor," she said, covering her mouth with her mug. "Look, I mean it, you don't have to stick around. I can do it myself. I don't want to force you to do something you don't want to do. It's only a sprain. It won't get any worse."
"But it won't get any better if you don't rest," he said. "You're not forcing me, Posy. I owe it to you, and I want to help. The doctor told you to stay off your feet, so you're going to."
She gave him a look, her eyebrows raised. "I don't think you realise what you're getting yourself into. I am literally the world's least prepared pregnant lady. I have about four percent of the stuff I need for the baby, and I don't have a Christmas tree, or anything to decorate it with. And I can't even fit behind my steering wheel anymore."
Connor let out a dry laugh at the image, the moment's tension dissipated. "Well, you're in luck. I have a car, and I have no plans for the foreseeable future." He then stood, and put his mug on the coffee table before he went over to the window and pulled back the curtain. Tapping his knuckle on the glass, he pointed at his house, a little way down the road. "It's not like I live miles away. That's me," he said. From the street lights, he could make out Cass's silhouette, trudging around the patch of lawn with Duke.
"Is that your sister?" Posy asked, craning her neck to look out of the window from where she sat.
"Yup."
"What's her name?"
"Cassandra," Connor said. "Although no-one calls her that. She's just Cass. She's twenty." He turned back to Posy, letting the curtain fall shut again. "D'you have any siblings?"
Posy pursed her lips and nodded, resting her mug on her stomach. "Two sisters. Heather's twenty and Poppy's seventeen. And I'm pretty sure both of them are far more mature than me," she said with a laugh. "I might have to employ them to raise this." She patted her bump and rested her head back on the sofa cushions, turning her cheek against the fabric to look at Connor.
"Poppy, Heather and Primrose?" he asked. "I smell a theme."
She smiled. "We're a floral family, yeah. My mum really wants me to call the baby Willow or Lavender, or some other hippy flower name."
"Is it a girl?"
She shrugged one shoulder. "No idea. But if it is, I'm not calling her Lavender." She snorted. "I kind of like the idea of it being a surprise, anyway. Almost as much of a surprise as it was." She met Connor's eye, and for a second she just looked at him. "I have a tip for you."
"Ok," he said, drawing out the two syllables.
"If you ever have a girlfriend who tells you she's pregnant, don't tell her that it's you or the baby." Her eyes darkened, and she finished her coffee. "Chances are, she'll choose the baby, and she'll fucking hate you, and she will not let you anywhere near your child."
Connor's eyes widened a fraction as Posy's words formed a picture in his mind, the story unfolding. "Oh, shit."
"Oh shit alright," she muttered.
"So that's why he's out of the picture?"
Posy gave him a definitive nod. "He said he would pay for me to get rid of it. I told him I would pay someone to get rid of him." She closed her eyes for a moment, and Connor felt pent up rage radiate off her. "As my best friend so eloquently put it, he's a cunt of a prick who needs to go fuck himself. Because I certainly won't provide him that service anymore." She tapped her fingers on the side of her mug. "We weren't together long. Probably only two months, and I was about six weeks along when I found out."
"He sounds like an arsehole," Connor murmured.
"Oh, he was. Just took me a little bit too long to realise," she said, and she gazed down at her bulging belly, fond hands clasped around the bump. "But that's all in the past now, really. I haven't spoken to him since . . . God, it must be May, now."
"Is that when you told him?" he asked. Posy didn't seem to mind sharing, and his questions no longer felt like such an intrusion when she was so willing to spill the beans.
"Yup. I told him he didn't have to be involved, after I said I was keeping it, and he said he didn't want to be, and he told me not to contact him again." She let out a short laugh. "Then he blocked me on Facebook and I think he got a new number, so I'm pretty sure we're over."
"Wow," Connor said. He wasn't sure what an appropriate response would be, not after the barrage of information she had thrown at him after just a few hours of knowing who she was.
"I'm sorry, I sound really bitter," she said. "I'm not. We weren't together long enough for me to even really care about him, let alone be bitter about a breakup. I just feel sorry for the baby, for letting it have such a twat of a father."
"Yeah, but that's only DNA," he said. Posy looked up at him, questioning him in the way her eyebrows pulled together. "He's only the father through biology. That hardly counts. I never met my biological father and he means nothing to me," he explained. "My step-dad is my real dad. Always has been, always will be."
Posy smiled, her features softening and her eyes watering. "That's really nice," she said, and then she turned away as she laughed at herself. "God, I'm sorry. This is what I mean. Bloody tears, all the fucking time. I swear, I'm not usually this emotional." She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand and let out a long, slow sigh. "I should probably head to bed."
"Ok," Connor said. "What are your plans for tomorrow?"
She paused, midway through trying to heave herself off the sofa. "Well, I was going to see if I could get a tree delivered."
"Alright." He planted his hands on his knees and stood, resigning himself to this new role. It was a part he hadn't played for seven years, the last time he had looked forward to the season, and he was a little rusty on the lines. "Then I'll pick you up tomorrow and we'll go to the garden centre and pick one out." He held out his hand to help Posy up, and her grin widened.
"Thank you, Connor," she said, her fingers digging into the back of his hand as she steadied herself on her feet. "Don't worry, I can get myself to bed. You really are going above and beyond."
"Well, this is supposed to be the season of goodwill, isn't it? Wouldn't be very goodwill of me to let you just sit around helplessly all day." He led her to the stairs, where she leant on the bannister and pulled herself up the first couple of steps. "Hold on a sec. Have you got your phone on you?"
She dug into her pocket, pulling out a slightly battered mobile.
"You should have my number," he said. "You can text me when you're up." He took the phone when she passed it to him, keying in his number and saving it as a new contact before handing it back. "Whatever you need, you let me know."
Posy leant forward to hug him, wrapping her arms around his shoulders in a tight embrace, and for a flicker of a second, he felt as though he had known her for a long longer than just since earlier that evening.
*
When Connor got home, shuffling through the front door with a scuff of his feet and a sigh as he was greeted by the warmth of the central heating, he found Cass and Duke curled up together on the sofa, watching a Christmas film on TV. When Cass spotted him, she instantly dug out the remote from under the dog, who was sprawled across her lap, and changed the channel. But Connor had already let his guard down once that evening, and he struggled to care.
"You don't have to change it," he said, shedding his layers as he made his way over to the sofa. He sat down next to his sister, and stroked the dozing dog. During the day, he was a bundle of energy, but after nightfall, he was like a tired baby. Cass changed the channel back, but she lowered the volume from fifteen to five.
"Where've you been?" she asked. "You were kind of weird and mysterious earlier. Something going on?"
"No," he said. "Not really. Just had to take someone to A&E."
Cass's eyes bugged. "What? So something did happen?"
Connor stretched out his legs before he tucked them up under himself, his pulse regulating itself as he stroked Duke. He had been through more than his fair share of therapy in his life, but he had found that nothing had worked so well as having Duke by his side, a reliable companion who didn't possess the capacity to judge him, someone to accompany him when he needed to go for a long walk and lose himself in his thoughts.
"I was coming back from the walk with Duke and he scared a pregnant woman and she fell over, and she hurt her ankle so I took her to A&E."
"Oh," Cass said. "She alright?"
"Mmhmm," he said. "She sprained it, and the doctor told her to rest it for a while but she lives alone and her baby's due in two weeks, so I told her I'd help out."
His sister glanced at him, doubt in her eyes. "You'll help out? With what?"
"Getting ready for the baby, I guess. And getting ready for Christmas."
Cass's eyes narrowed. "What?"
"Look, I don't want to. Literally the last thing I want to do is freaking Christmas decorating, but I owe her. She's basically supposed to be on bedrest until the new year and it's my fault, so the least I can is help out."
"If you end up liking Christmas because of some woman, I'm going to be majorly pissed off," she said. "I mean, you need to snap out of this at some point, but I've been trying for years and I am not going to be undermined by some random person."
"Snap out of it?" He gave her a sideways look, but said nothing else. He wasn't looking for an argument, and Cass was far feistier than him when it came to a battle. With a sigh, he acted as though the conversation was over, and his eyes fell on the screen. He didn't recognise the Christmas film that was playing. That was a relief: there were too many that filled his head with memories he'd rather not live through.
Her face cleared and she nodded. "Oh. I get it."
"Get what?" He frowned at her, his hand going still on Duke's back.
"You like her," she said. Connor scoffed.
"I only just met her. I owe it to her. That's all."
"Nope. You've got a crush." She pointed at his face, moving her finger in a circle around his eyes. "I can see it."
He pushed her hand away, scowling at her. "No, I haven't. We literally just met today, and she's eight and a half months pregnant."
Cass eyed him, ignoring the film that she had been watching until he had returned. "Be careful," she said at last.
"Of what?"
"You can't fall for a pregnant woman. Too complicated. Plus there's probably some angry baby daddy somewhere, ready to kick your arse." She bent down to Duke, nuzzling her face against the dog's thick fur and kissing the top of his head.
"He's out of the picture," Connor said, and instantly regretted sharing that detail when Cass snapped her head up to look at him, her gaze piercing.
"So you talked about the baby daddy?" She let out a guffaw and shook her head. "Oh, man, you're in deep, Con. I promise you, it is a terrible idea to get attached."
He snorted and shook his head at her. "You're one to talk," he said. "How long've you and Tilly been going out? Like, two years, isn't it? Two years is pretty attached to me."
Cass stared at him, her eyebrows slowly pulling together into a frown, and she slowly played with Duke's fur. "We broke up," she said, as though Connor should have already known that, but it was news to him.
"What?"
"Are you serious? Connor, I swear, I told you this. Didn't I?"
He shook his head slowly, adding a piece to the puzzle of his sister's sudden homecoming. "I think I'd remember if you told me you guys broke up," he said.
"We didn't break up," Cass said, an edge to her voice. "She broke up with me."
"When?"
"End of term," she said, her voice blunt and her face sullen as she focused on Duke, playing with his ears as she spoke. "I told her I was thinking about dropping out of uni, a-"
"What? You dropped out of uni? Jesus, Cass, what else happened?"
"Woah, calm down. No, I didn't drop out. I was thinking about it. But I'm not going to. Christ, Con, let me finish my sentence." She shook her head at him. "But, yeah. I told Tilly and it turned into this whole big fight, and I guess there was loads of stuff she just had to get off her chest, and she broke up with me."
"Shit," Connor muttered. "Sorry, Cass."
"It's ok," she said. "Well, it fucking sucks, but there's nothing you can do about it. Unless you want to drive to Yorkshire and tell Tilly that she has made a terrible mistake." She sniffed, her eyes cast down, and Connor tucked his arm around her. Despite the seven years between them, and the fact that they were technically only half siblings, the two of them had always been close. Like a sea wall, they had clung to each other through everything that life had thrown at them, and Connor had come to rely on his little sister more than he liked to admit. Living alone was fine, but living with her had been a welcome change.
+ - + - +
so I ate my supper and got in my pyjamas and into bed then realised it was only 7pm so I got dressed, got a train to the city, and wrote this chapter in the 24/7 Starbucks. I have a habit of saying 'yes' no matter what the baristas say when they repeat my name back to me. Didn't realise 'hen' was so hard, but today I was Helen. I hope you liked this chapter! this chapter is dedicated to 15_Angels_Of_Destiny for being one of my favourite people on this planet <3
- hen