Stir Me Up by Sabrina Elkins

Author:Sabrina Elkins
Language: eng
Format: azw3, mobi, epub
Publisher: Harlequin Teen
Published: 2013-09-17T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Nineteen

I like Christmas food. It’s more fun and flexible than Thanksgiving food, and just to be nice, Dad lets me spend most of my time working for Natalie, our pastry chef. To get things rolling, Natalie, Dad and I spend an entire weekend working with the pastry staff to create a gorgeous turreted, frosted and candy-coated gingerbread castle for the front entrance. It’s fantastic, has been photographed for a food magazine, and this year includes a drawbridge and bright green marzipan dragon.

I text a picture of it to Estella and Julian. Estella writes back that it’s gorgeous and the trip is going well. She calls Dad every day, but it’s still nice to hear from her myself. Julian doesn’t send a response.

Of course somewhere in all this I have final exams to study for, but I’m a senior now so really teachers have stopped pushing us so hard. Plus, it’s Christmas, so there are the lights to go up on the house and the wreath to hang on the door. Dad decides to get a second, smaller tree for the family room this year so there can be one especially for Estella’s collection of red-and-white snowman ornaments. Together, we get both trees up and decorated so everything will be ready when she and Julian return home. We don’t send her pictures of the trees, because we want them to be a surprise for her. Meanwhile, at work, I’m put on what is literally the most fun job I get to do all year—holiday chocolates.

Each meal at étoile always ends with a little silver tray of chocolates, and the ones we have for Christmas are unreal—eggnog truffles laced with cognac, hazelnut pralines, glacéed red currants on chocolate-dipped spun sugar nests, and just to be whimsical, little red-and-white-dyed white chocolate Santa hats filled with crushed candy cane-laced peppermint cream. Making them is kind of like performing surgery. That’s the job I’m put on—the hats. It’s amazingly cool—very intricate work. I take a picture of them with my phone and forward it to Julian:

Do you like my hats?

Very nice, he texts back. My only communication from him since he left. At least I get my old bed back while he’s gone. Even if it reminds me of him. I’m asleep there a few days later, when something―a soft noise, maybe―wakes me. I flip over, open one eye, and see a figure in a wheelchair in the far corner of the room staring at me. “Julian?” I gasp, clutching the covers.

“Yeah, sorry to scare you.”

“I thought you were coming home on Thursday.”

“We decided to leave early. Estella left your dad a message.”

“I don’t think he got it,” I say, fairly certain Dad would’ve mentioned it to me if he’d known. “How was your trip?”

“All right.” He turns to peer out the window into the blackness that is a Vermont winter night.

“I’ll go and let you rest.” I reach down to get my clothes, figuring I’ll put them on under the covers and slink out.

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