“I want to. Plus, I’m not doing anything else today.”
“What about that girl Anna? You aren’t seeing her again?”
His brows pinch together. “Anna?”
“She was asking about you last night.” I stare down at the cookie dough. “I thought, maybe...” I can’t think of a way to finish that sentence without embarrassing myself, so I don’t. “It’s okay. I need to finish the cookies anyway.”
“Okay.” He gets up and goes around behind me in the kitchen to the sink. He turns on the faucet, but I don’t look back to see what he’s doing.
I finish rolling the dough and then begin to cut out shapes with holiday cookie cutters Stella and I picked up on our way to the cabin—snowflakes, presents, Christmas trees, reindeer, gingerbread men and women, candy canes, bells, wreaths...we went a little overboard. Okay, fine, it was mostly me.
Teddy appears by my side, drying his hands on a towel. “How can I help?”
He drops the towel and scoops up a scrap piece of dough and tosses it in his mouth.
He has a boyish grin on his face as I smack at his hand. “No taste-testing until the end.”
“Yes ma’am.”
“You really want to help? Don’t feel like you need to hang out with me just because everyone else left. I’m fine on my own.”
“I really want to, Holly. And for the record, nothing happened with Anna. She stayed because Tricia did.”
“Oh.” It’s all I can think to say. My heart is beating so loudly, I’m certain he can hear it. Glancing down, I ask, “Do you want to use the cookie cutters or the spatula?”
“Whatever I can screw up less.”
I hand him the spatula. “Put the ones I cut out onto the pan. Leave an inch or so between them.”
I cut out more designs and Teddy uses the spatula to lift the cookies onto the pan. He curses as a Santa-shaped one sticks. He tries to help it off with his finger but mangles it.
“Shit.”
“It’s okay.” I step closer to help reshape poor Santa. One of his legs sticks out at a weird angle. Somehow, in trying to fix it, I make it worse and now there’s a bulge between Santa’s legs. Perfect. I just made the cookie anatomically correct.
“Oh well, that one can be our taste-test cookie at the end.”
He nods and tries another, getting a similar result.
“Here.” I hand him the bell cookie cutter and step around him.
He is meticulous in his work, and we get into a rhythm, only stopping when I need to roll out the dough again.
“You really do this every year?” he asks, swiping another scrap of dough to eat.
“Yeah. We make sugar cookies, sometimes other kinds too. I basically live on sugar during the holiday break.”
He laughs. “Sounds nice.”
“What about you? What kind of things does your family do for the holidays?”
“It’s just my dad and brother and me. It’s pretty low-key. Nothing like the Walters’ family traditions. Definitely no cute, shaped cookies.” He holds up a snowflake cookie cutter.
His mom died when he was young. Something I knew from Felix, but have never heard Teddy mention.
“You don’t bake together during the holidays?”
“No. My dad makes two things—spaghetti and steak. The other nights of the week, we eat out or make sandwiches or something easy.”