Chapter Text
Wednesday, December 1st
Nikki doesn’t feel especially good about lying to Jack. It’s not even really a lie, per se, only by omission. She told him that she wouldn’t be coming straight into the Lyell today, that she’d see him this afternoon, that she would catch him up. All of which was entirely true. She just neglected to mention how she’d be filling her morning.
He’d been mopey about it in a strange, sweet, little-boy way that made her stomach swoop. Nikki had stood in her kitchen with him, barefoot and warm, the air perfumed with the coffee still dripping from her fancy espresso machine and Jack’s cologne. She’d felt foolish to be wearing only his discarded flannel shirt from yesterday while he was fully dressed in another of his wonderful jumpers and a pair of dark trousers. The bashful feeling had left her quite quickly, as soon as Jack had slipped his hands beneath her shirt to grip her bare thighs and keep her against him.
She likes the way he kisses her. She likes it a lot. He has this way of surrounding her, holding her whole head in the splay of his hands, leaning down to meet her. He kisses her like he’s astonished, every time. Maybe when they get more than a handful of weeks into this thing between them that will begin to fade, but for now she luxuriates in it.
“I’ll see you later, then?” Jack had grumped at her.
Nikki laughed and lifted up on tiptoe to kiss him again, her palms flat against his chest. “You’ll see me.”
As soon as she was sure he was really gone, she’d begun. It took her several hours, and she got so hot and bothered that she had to have a fast shower before she left for the Lyell, in time to join Jack for lunch.
He meets her getting off the elevator, his wide warm smile right there as the doors slide open. Nikki grins, thrilled just at the sight of him. In those first few days, every time she caught sight of him her whole face broke open with happiness, and it really hasn’t gone away yet. She says hello, and Jack tells her hello back and takes the paper bag of sandwiches from the cafe around the corner out of her hands.
They eat together in the break room, smiling like fools around their mouthfuls. Nikki got a packet of crisps for them to share, and Jack leaves her most of the bag, keeps nudging it across the table to her. She crunches cheerfully and reaches across to wipe a little smear of sauce from the corner of his mouth. No one is here to see them, so she lets him lick the pad of her thumb, lets him scrape his teeth. It makes her shiver, and she presses her thighs together.
“So, how was your morning?” His voice is light in a way that sounds hollow and thin, and he’s reclining in his chair like it’s the most casual thing in the world.
“It was great, thanks. How was yours?”
Jack stares her down, but she won’t budge. It isn’t time yet. After a beat he shrugs and starts telling her about the fibre analysis he’s been working on all day. She likes to watch him talk, how animated he gets, the way his hands move. She gets so swept up in their conversation that she forgets her scheming for a while. Now that she knows all the colours of his voice, how he sounds first thing in the morning when he opens his eyes to her, when he’s over her in the bed breathless and punch-drunk, late at night when he reads aloud to her from the stack of novels on her bedside table, she finds her pulse picking up at the most innocuous things. The way his accent shifts and sussurates, how much more pronounced it gets when he’s talking about Cara or his father.
The rest of the afternoon passes slowly. Nikki’s trying to read a paper recently published by one of her peers, a pathologist she admires and has met at a handful of conferences. She has a difficult time keeping her eyes on the computer screen, finds her gaze wandering over to Jack again and again. He always notices her looking, and lifts his head to give her a small, pleased smile before he refocuses on his work. At least one of them is having a productive day.
It grows dark outside. It grows closer to home time, and Nikki starts feeling queasy with anticipation. When it’s time to go, Jack makes a show of turning off his computer and standing up, stretching like a hound. He’s always the one to decide that their day is finished, but Nikki rarely argues. She likes when he comes to stand next to her desk, her bag over his shoulder and her coat in his hands, ready to help her into. She likes leaving work together, Jack’s arm around her or his hand in hers.
“I was thinking—” Nikki starts, and then has to clear her throat because her voice catches in a way that is both humiliating and revealing. Jack turns to look at her in the lift and his fingers, tangled with hers, twitch slightly. “I was thinking we could go to your house tonight?”
Since Conor died, they’ve spent most of their time at Nikki’s house. She let Jack construct a charade, let him talk about how much work his house needs and how hers is showhome pristine. After a little while, he’d confessed to her that he can’t stomach being in his house now that his father is gone, that he can’t bear the quiet even when Nikki is there with him. They’d been in bed—Nikki had thought he was already asleep—and she’d tucked herself in closer against him and kissed the bare, warm skin of his chest.
“Okay,” Jack says slowly. “Any particular reason?”
“Just fancy a change of scenery.”
He doesn’t push her on it any further. She knows he’s growing suspicious, that his forensic training is kicking in, but she tries to keep her face smooth and not give anything away. She’s being too quiet on the drive home, but she relaxes against the seat and tries to play it off as exhaustion. It’s not entirely inaccurate; she has never been a champion sleeper, and now her evenings and her nights are occupied.
Jack parks the car on the street outside his house, and Nikki follows him up the path to the front door. He unlocks it. Her heart feels enormous in her chest. For a moment she thinks about turning around, about going home to her own house. Alone. She doesn’t want to do that; she wants to be here with him. Nikki steps over the threshold after Jack, and has to close the front door behind them because he’s stopped moving in the hallway.
“Nikki.” His voice is so soft.
She steps up beside him and takes his hand, and together they move into the living room.
The lights on the tree are set up with a timer, so they’ll come on in the evenings, ready for them to get home. The room is bathed in soft light. It’s an artificial tree she got down from her attic this morning as soon as Jack left for work. She wound a couple of strands of lights around it and hung a variety of ornaments, and she’s pleased with how cheerfully festive it looks now that it’s dark outside.
“You. . . you did this for me?”
Now that he’s actually here seeing it all, Nikki's face feels uncomfortably warm, her palms clammy. It’s a big swing, she knows that. It’s a big step for them. She says, “It’s alright if you hate it. I won’t be offended.”
“Course I don’t hate it.” He blinks at her, and then his face breaks open with that lovely wide smile she sees so often these days, the one that shows all his teeth. “I can’t believe— Nobody’s ever done anything like this for me before.”
Nikki takes his hand in both of hers, her thumb tracing over his knuckles. “I know you haven’t really been feeling like getting into the festive spirit this year. But it’s your first Christmas in your new home. And it’s our first Christmas together. I didn’t want to let it just pass us by.”
“Can I kiss you?”
“You don’t have to ask.” She chuckles, and then Jack leans in to kiss her and she stops laughing so she can kiss him back properly. They stand there for a long while, in each other’s arms in the tree’s warm, shifting light. Eventually, Nikki says, “I didn’t decorate the whole house, because I thought it would be fun for us to do that together. If you’d like to?”
Jack shakes his head slowly and blinks at her. “Of course I would. I can’t believe you did this. I love it. Thank you.” He leans in again and kisses her, slow and careful. “I can’t wait for our first Christmas together.”
“There’s something else.” Her voice is coming out so small, because there’s a wet clog of emotion in her throat that she can’t seem to shift. Nobody has ever cared for her the way Jack does, in the whole of her life. She just wants to take care of him too.
“Is there now?”
“Mm-hm.”
Nikki leads him by the hand into his own kitchen. This morning, after she wrestled with the tree and got it decorated, she set up an advent calendar for Jack. It’s a wooden one in the shape of a triangle, populated with several rows of little houses numbered one to twenty-five.
Jack whips around to look at her. “This is for me?”
“Who else?” Nikki tucks her fingers into the back pocket of Jack’s trousers and stays close at his side as he inspects the calendar. He makes like he’s going to start pulling open all the drawers and Nikki tuts and bats his hands away. “Don’t open them before their days, Jack! Don’t spoil it.”
“Sorry, sorry.” He shows her his palms, suitably contrite. “Can I open today’s?”
“Yes, of course.”
She got a box of Heroes to distribute among the days because she knows they’re Jack’s favourite of the Christmas selection tins, and he grins widely when he opens the drawer and sees the chocolate inside. Nikki shakes her head when he offers half of it to her, and she watches him close his eyes and savour it.
“The drawers are quite small. I couldn’t fit everything inside. So some of them have a number that corresponds to a wrapped present.”
“Nikki, this is. . . this must’ve taken so much time and effort.” Jack’s face is slack with amazement. He scrubs a hand over it and blinks down at her.
“Not every single one has a gift. Don’t get too excited.”
“Doesn’t matter. I can’t believe you’ve gone to all this trouble for me.”
They stare at each other, neither of them brave enough to say the unsayable thing. Nikki feels her pulse at the base of her throat, the insides of her elbows, her ears. Jack is the first to break. He kisses her again and it’s deeper, more insistent than it has been all day. He backs her up against the cabinets and she opens to him, lets him have her. When they separate, he leans his forehead against hers.
“I feel like the luckiest man in the world.”
“Do you want your present?”
It makes her laugh to see how quickly he catapults from sincerity to boyish eagerness. He follows her eagerly back into the living room and waits for her to find the gift beneath the tree that corresponds to the number he found in the drawer, written on an ornament-shaped gift tag with a fancy gold marker pen she bought especially for this. Nikki leans against the arm of the sofa while she watches him unwrap it, which he does more methodically than she anticipated.
“You want to do the honours?” Nikki asks once Jack has the tree topper out of the wrapping. She got a star, because she couldn’t find an angel that wasn’t tacky or vaguely haunted-looking. Jack looks down at the ornament in his hands, and then back up at her face, before he moves to position it at the top of the tree.
When he’s finished, he wraps his arms around her from behind, and Nikki leans back against his chest. They stand together, looking at their tree, and Jack kisses her cheek. He says, very softly, “Can I spend the whole of Christmas with you?”
“I’d really like that.”