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🍪
He works the old olive wood spoon through the dough and can’t help but frown at his own train of thought. There’s hardly anything about this experience that his brain should be able to shape into the memory it’s so promptly supplied him with, but there it is: the weight of the knife in his hand as he made precise cuts through warm shortbread, the cool, coarse surface of the pastry boxes as he folded them up for the week.
It’s been over half a year, and he hasn’t thought about that much at all, but now that he is thinking about it, he finds it a little weird how such a steady habit can fall right out of your head when there’s nothing for it to hold onto. He doesn’t cook in that kitchen. If he bakes at all, it’s more traditional American fare like chocolate chip cookies or snickerdoodles. He doesn’t box anything up for anybody. He doesn’t see the person he’d be boxing it up for.
His eyes scan the countertop in this kitchen, in this apartment in Wichita, and he supposes it sort of makes sense that these circumstances would have mentally propelled him across the pond. There’s a whole spread of gift boxes scattered around, though they’re adorned with nutcrackers or Santas or snowmen rather than a sweet shade of pink. The buttery scent of the snowball cookies he’d just finished up with still hangs in the stuffy room. He feels a bit of a thrill, too, because he’ll be giving all these goodies away to Henry’s teachers and to his coaching staff, and he’s hoping they’ll like them.
No matter how many times he‘d handed Rebecca a box of biscuits in the morning, some small, giddy part of him was still just hoping she’d like them.
🎶
At this point in her life, Rebecca truly hardly gives a fuck about being single for the holiday season. She gets to spoil Nora at the shops, get sloshed with Keeley at the Kent Hanukkah party, and spend a mint fulfilling the wish lists of London’s underserved children, and no one can say a thing about any of it. But if there is one thing, one occasion, that could make her wish for a moment that she had someone—someone in her corner, a built-in plus one whose gaze she could meet across a crowded room with her own screaming eyes—it would be her mother’s annual winter dinner.
She stands at the edge of the gargantuan living room of her childhood home, watching as the rosy-cheeked woman herself waltzes jovially with the vicar. The old gentleman from next door is banging out “Silver Bells” on the baby grand, and Deborah is a bit wobbly but doing her best to keep step. Her mother certainly enjoyed more than her share of mulled wine today, and so has Rebecca, for that matter, but in her own case, she’d argue it’s medicinal.
“Sausage,” Deborah croons happily, shimmying toward her, “what would it take to get you to sing for us? Hmm? Like when you were little?”
Rebecca gives her a humoring smile but shakes her head primly. “I couldn’t, mother.”
“Oh please, darling? Couldn’t you?” She turns abruptly back to their accompanist for the evening. “Arthur, play that one that’s so fun. You know—Christmaaaaas! Christmaaaaas!”
As Deborah endearingly gropes for the proper key, Arthur picks up the tune with ease.
“Sausage?” she calls brightly back to her, blinking expectantly.
Rebecca sighs, pushing off the wall and taking a few hesitant steps toward where her mother has stationed herself by the piano bench.
“The snow’s coming down, I’m watching in fall…” Rebecca contributes softly. She's not putting her full power behind it, but her mother still beams at her, swaying and joining in for the next couple of lines before Arthur’s booming voice cuts in.
“They’re singing deck the halls!”
Rebecca startles at the sound of him, sloshing a bit of wine out of the crystal glass she’s gripping with both hands. The sense of deja vu curls in her chest like smoke, an unsettling melancholy seizing her.
Arthur and her mother soldier on happily through the lyrics. “I remember when you were here! All the fun we had last year…”
If she’s honest, she’s been trying not to think about him. She’s also been trying not to think about trying not to think about him. And now she’s a bit drunk, and a bit sad, and stuck in this time capsule that is her mother’s house, which makes it all feel that much worse.
That is what Christmas is all about, she supposes.
She ought to stick to singing in the shower.
🌬️
After six months of living in Kansas again, Ted’s feeling like a pretty good dad. His schedule is full of practices of all kinds, and he helps as much as he can with homework even though it seems like math has gotten a heck of a lot harder than it was when he was in the sixth grade. He’s also attended every performance of It’s A Wonderful Life Junior, Cast B, in the last two weeks. Four in total, which is a whole lot of minutes spent wading through some very heavy themes with some ten- to sixteen-year-olds as one’s guide.
He doesn’t know where Henry caught the theater bug. It wasn’t something Ted and Michelle prioritized in his cultural education, but it found him, somehow, and he got it in his head to try out for the Chisholm Community Players Youth Program over the summer. It really is sweet, and Ted is awfully proud, but by the time tonight’s intermission rolls around, he’s decided that helping out with the silent auction is just as respectable as sitting through the last act again, each line digging into him like a thumb in an old bruise.
As the audience files back into the theater, Ted sidles up to a trio of other parents who are frowning down at the sign-up sheet for a gift basket from the botanical gardens. “Can I give y’all a hand out here?”
“Oh, sure,” one tells him, holding out the paper. “Can you make out that name? It’s either Singh or Singer.”
Ted gamely squints down at the sheet. “I think that’s Becky Singer. Clarence’s mom.”
“Oh, duh!” The woman gives her head a little smack. “Thanks. You wanna verify the sheets over on that side of the room?”
She gestures to the other side of the lobby, and Ted gives her a nod and a tight-lipped smile before heading toward the table with the aquarium tickets, the spa basket, and his own contribution of Jaime Tartt’s signed, match-worn cleats and a Richmond women’s goalkeeper kit. He spots his basket out of the corner of his eye, and he can’t help but frown at it, starting instead at the opposite end of the table.
He has no beef with that particular pair of shoes, and Jaime was very kind to ship them halfway around the world on short notice. The new kits look great too, and he’s tickled pink about the expansion to the women’s league. It’s just… all of it. It’s the halfway around the world, and to be perfectly honest, it’s Christmas. The season has been a tough one for him since he was sixteen, when he hardly noticed it passing him by. It wasn’t until Michelle and even more so Henry that he started coming around to it all again. Actually feeling something for it. But now he’s divorced, and Henry’s going through the motions in the way tweens do, and it seems like every time he turns a corner, there’s another ghost waiting to get the drop on him.
Part of him wants to just go to sleep and wake up in January, on the other side of all the festivity and merriment and self-improvement schemes. Wake up in the cold, hard depth of winter, when everything’s dead, but the sunlight’s coming back.
He’d had to ask Rebecca for the kit. That’s how exclusive it is, not even in the team store yet. He’d been so nervous, pacing around his living room, typing and re-typing as he tried to get the wording right for the text message. It shouldn’t have been any trouble at all, but the thing is, they don’t talk much. He hates it, but it’s true. Somewhere between time differences and new jobs and new teams, reaching out to Rebecca turned into something awkward and nerve-wracking, like calling an ex. Heck, even that’s easier these days.
He finally reaches the sheet for the Richmond basket, which is going to a name he doesn’t recognize. He carefully peels the paper from the table and adds it to his stack.
Rebecca had seemed just fine when she got back to him. Downright blasé. Her reply had been quick and casual, not like she spent hours putting it together. She offered to send along the new kit and asked for his address, and it showed up at his house a few days later.
Ted taps the edge of his stack against the table to line it up neatly and sighs grumpily at the shirt she’d pulled from their samples, folded up, and packaged with a note that said Hi Ted.
He resents it a little. How quickly it traveled from her to him. How easily it seemed to cover the distance between them.
🎁
Her Christmases over the last few years have been so… different. From the depths of bitterness and misery to making careful room for the people she loves where there never has been room before. The latter, thankfully, has continued. She can’t remember a busier December than this one since her twenties. But there is something almost comforting about settling down onto the floor of her sitting room with a glass of wine, half a dozen rolls of gift wrap, and a heap of shopping bags, all by herself. A tradition that’s all her own.
She had loved sharing part of it with Ted, of course, and he was a natural at it. Now that he’s gone though, she doesn’t really feel like bringing anyone else into the fold. She likes it being what it used to be—before Ted, before divorce. Something that was hers, that she did in silence, in secret almost. Something she protected and maintained even as so many other parts of herself were snuffed out.
She breathes in the bright scent of her tree and the warmth of a cinnamon candle that had shown up on her desk earlier that week, a mildly considered gift from a sponsor, and she picks up the first in the stack of letters to Santa that she’d retrieved from a volunteer coordinator at the end of November.
Lily, age 9, in Hackney. Rebecca had adored young Lily immediately, with her precocious tone and her wishlist of cat toys, lipstick, and a necklace for her mum.
She takes a sip of wine and shifts onto her knees with a grunt, stretching out an arm to riffle through the pile for the right bags. Her knees can protest all they want; dear Lily will have her bloody cat springs.
She’s selected eight families this year for hand delivery, and a sizable donation to the program should cover many more letters. It’s always agonizing to thumb through the binders of sweet scrawlings and select her batch. The supplementary check she writes has gotten bigger every year.
James, age 6, would like three Lego sets. His mum Maryann, age 39, would like gloves and a scarf. Julia, age 10, would like a guitar. Henry, age 7, would like a football Barbie and his own ball to match.
She blushes slightly at that one, knowing exactly why she’d selected it and wondering fleetingly what Henry Lasso is getting for Christmas. If it would be completely weird if she sent him something from the new merchandise line. She almost threw something in with the kit for that auction Ted had reached out about, but maybe he doesn’t have the same interest now that his father doesn’t work here anymore. It was such a quick exchange of messages. She didn’t know how to ask.
Regardless, for this Henry, in Wandsworth, she ties bright red ribbon around a shiny new football and a gift-wrapped Barbie doll.
Placing them in one of her Santa bags, she can’t help roll her eyes at her own familiar antics. As much as she loves this tradition on its own merit, it’s always been something of a nicotine patch as well, letting her buy for Noras when she couldn’t see Nora, letting her buy for children in general when there were none in her life. Thankfully that’s not the case now, but she supposes old habits die hard.
She gives her head a shake and takes a long sip of her wine before returning to the stack.
🪩
After the last few years away, being back at a Keller family Christmas party is a little nice and a little weird, but mostly loud. He’s walked into a wall of conversations and laughter and background music, and he feels his brain already shrinking in on itself.
“Ted!” Michelle calls with a wave from her position at the counter in her sister’s kitchen.
Ted gives her a nod, and she picks up her conversation with some cousin whose name he’s blanking on. He drops his coat on the overflowing rack by the door and moves toward them through the throng that’s gathered around the appetizers, meeting her with a limp side hug.
“Henry’s in the back with the cousins,” she informs him. “Auntie Sheila, you remember Henry’s dad?”
The older woman nods, frowning at him thoughtfully. “Are you two back together?”
Ted winces, but Michelle laughs brightly. He told her this might be hard for her more distant relatives and family friends to wrap their heads around.
“No. Exes can be friends!”
That’s exactly what she’d said to him.
Aunt Sheila lifts her brow, sizing them up with an appreciative nod. “That’s very evolved, honey.”
Michelle shrugs. “Well, we share a ten-year-old.” She turns to him then and gestures toward the fogged-up sliding glass door. “There’s beer in the coolers out back.”
“Alrighty,” Ted says, pursing his lips with a nod. “Nice to see ya, Shiela. Hey, that rhymes sorta.”
Sheila smiles blandly, and Ted moves on through the crowd, shaking hands and exchanging greetings here and there. It’s strange—he knows everyone here, but he’s not a part of them anymore.
He slides the back door shut behind him to keep the warm air in while he fishes through the cooler. Between the humidity and the wind, it feels damn near freezing, but it’s also quiet, which is a bit of a relief.
He pulls out the first glass bottle he gets a hand on—some cinnamony Christmas ale—and takes his time drying it off, opening it, taking a sip. Stalling before he returns to the fray.
The last Christmas party he went to was probably Christmas Day at the Higginses’ two years ago, he realizes. Last year, he holed up with Beard for strategy sessions intermixed with FaceTimes with Henry. Rebecca had asked what his plans were, like she might make an offer if he didn’t have any, but he didn’t let her. Looking back now, he wonders if he already had one foot out the door then. Maybe he always does.
He sips at the beer, appreciating the sweetness, and wonders if life here will ever stop feeling like this. Like it’s haunted. By his marriage, by his father, by London. By Rebecca. He feels like an alien, spit back out onto his home planet after a faraway journey to some distant one, and how’s he ever supposed to be the same after that?
He doesn’t know how to make it all fit in the same space, not like ghosts that follow him around but like things that aren’t dead yet. Heck, Michelle is just inside. His marriage doesn’t look the same, but it still is. He doesn’t live in London anymore, but London’s still out there. Folks are taking the same trains he took, sitting on the same bar stools. It’s all just a phone call away, really.
Maybe he should just make the damn phone call.
It is dang cold without his jacket, but he wonders if Michelle or her many aunts and uncles and cousins would notice if he just didn’t come back in. His icy fingers fumble in his pocket for his phone and navigate clumsily toward her contact.
📱
By the time she stumbles through her front door, she’s really not drunk anymore, despite Keeley’s best intentions. She’s very pleasantly buzzed, turning the deadbolt and leaning back against her front door with a sleepy grin on her face.
She chuckles at the feeling of her clutch vibrating, fishing her phone out of it and pushing off the door toward the kitchen as she swipes. “I made it back. The door is locked. I’m cut off for the night—well, there is that spiced wine my mother sent me home with, so perhaps—”
“Oh, shoot, it’s like 1 am there, huh?” comes a distinctly male, distinctly twangy voice that makes her stop dead in her tracks, jaw falling open.
She frowns and pulls the phone away from her ear to confirm that yes, it is Ted Lasso on the other end of this call.
“You’re not Keeley,” she tells him, abandoning her frozen state and moving further into the kitchen to plop her things onto the island. “Is this a dream?”
Ted chuckles, and it’s warm and deep and she can’t help but grin out into nothing at the sound of it. “I don’t think so.”
“No,” she agrees softly. “I don’t either.”
They’re both quiet for a moment as she patiently waits for him to introduce whatever topic he wished to discuss. Eventually, he just says, “So how’s it going?”
Rebecca scoffs. “You called me at 1:30 in the morning on December 23rd just to ask me how’s it going?”
“Well, it’s only 7:30 on December 22nd over here. Very reasonable time to ask someone how it’s going.”
She smirks wryly and dares to wonder, ever so briefly, if he might be flirting with her. “I see,” she says coyly, pulling down a mug and seeking out her mother’s mulled wine because there’s no chance she’s going to bed now. “It’s going smashingly. I’m just back from Keeley’s for a little pre-Christmas girls’ night thing. Tomorrow—or today rather, I’m spending the day with Nora for some last minute shopping and spoiling and pastry-eating and such. Christmas Eve with my mother. Delivering gifts on Christmas Day. How’s it going with you?” She does her best twangy American impression of him and beams when he laughs out.
“It’s goin’ alright. I’m at this big shindig at Michelle’s sister’s. I’m hiding out in the backyard. Back garden, I guess.”
She stills at that, wondering if she’s missed something that she really ought to know before this conversation continues.
“Oh,” she offers after a beat, and maybe he catches on to her uncertainty because he clears his throat.
“She wants us to be friends, ya know. For Henry. We are friends.”
“Of course.” She breathes out finally. “That’s very mature.”
“I guess, besides the hiding part.”
She actually snorts at that, making her then dissolve into giggles. “Yes, in the back garden you said? Are you not bloody cold?”
“Oh, I am.” She can hear the smile in his voice. “But it’s loud in there, and I’m on the phone, ya see.”
“So you are.” She shakes her head with a fond roll of her eyes, a habit that seems to belong to him. She’s surprised that the muscles of her face even remember how to do it after all this time.
They sit in silence. She takes a sip of her wine and runs a manicured finger in slow circles over the rim of the mug.
“Why did you call, Ted?” she asks eventually. As fun as this is, it’s not something they do. They don’t call out of the blue. They don’t chat. There are no biscuits.
She wants to hear him say it, and she wonders if he will. If he'll tell her that he’s missed her as much as she’s been missing him.
He sighs out. “I wanted to talk to you.”
The roughness of his voice sends her heart straight to her throat. “What about?”
“Doesn’t matter.”
She hums thoughtfully. “Just tonight?”
“No,” he says succinctly, and it almost feels like an admission.
“Why?”
He let out a soft, humorless chuckle. “Suppose it’s ’cause I miss you. And I think about you a lot, and I think I’d be happier. If I got to talk to you.”
She skates her front teeth over her bottom lip, a smile blooming. “I feel the same.”
“Yeah?”
“Of course. I don’t want to encroach on your life, but I—”
“Can’t encroach on something you’re a part of, boss.”
The slip of the nickname has butterflies erupting in her belly. This really is Ted, her Ted, and she’s giddy like a teenager. It could spell disaster, but frankly, she‘s sick of trying not to think about him. Of trying not to think about trying not to think about him.
“Okay. Good. So we’ll talk,” she affirms.
“Often.”
She grins. “Often. And we’ll—”
“FaceTime?” he suggests, which sends her absolutely reeling with visions of sleepy morning-Ted and unwinding just-got-off-work-Ted.
“Okay,” she agrees.
“Okay. And we could—”
“Visit?” she says boldly, because she is still rather tipsy and rather taken with him and they’ve already come this far, haven’t they?
The beat before he answers seems to last a year, but before she can fret too much, he’s saying, “I’d really love that.”
She sighs out in relief. “Good. Me too.”
He chuckles softly again. “It’s like we’re friends or something.”
“Or something,” she tells him, feeling brazen, and maybe it’s just the static but she thinks she hears his breath catch.
There’s a commotion on his end side of the line then and she hears him tell someone he’ll be right there as she waits patiently for him to return to her.
“That was Henry. He wants me to head in and play some Mario Kart.”
“Mm, best not keep him waiting,” she teases. “Call me tomorrow.”
“Same time?” he quips, and she can’t help but think how much lighter he sounds than when she’d first heard his voice.
“Absolutely bloody not,” she says with a laugh. “Two can play at that game, sir.”
He hums into the phone, a warm, rumbling thing that has heat blossoming in her belly. Definitely spells disaster, she thinks.
“Alright, truce,” he murmurs coyly. “Just for now.”
“Deal. Good night, Ted.”
“Night, Rebecca,” he says through a smile. “We’ll talk tomorrow.”
She grins dopily into her wine. “Tomorrow.”