Midwinter's Eve: Chapter Twelve
The anticipation matters...
The rain had softened the sound of everything outside. Not dramatic. Just steady enough to mute the usual street noise and make the morning feel half-asleep.
Nicolas sat at his desk staring at an email he’d already read three times. None of it registered. His eyes kept landing on the same sentence while his mind drifted somewhere else entirely.
Into the Woods.
Upside down.
He rubbed his thumb along the keyboard, tracing a small nick near the space bar he’d never noticed before.
“Hey, you in for lunch?” a coworker asked behind him, a menu folded in his hand.
“I’m okay, thanks,” Nicolas said.
They nodded and walked off. Chairs rolled back, coworkers drifted down the hall, the usual lunchtime lull settling over the office like a blanket he couldn’t feel.
Nicolas looked out the window. Rain slid crookedly down the glass. He took a slow breath and tried to pull his attention back to the screen.
He stared at the cursor blinking in the corner of the screen. It didn’t blink with any particular meaning, but his brain kept treating it like a metronome counting down to when he’d finally give up pretending.
He wasn’t eight, holding his breath on Christmas Eve because any sound could be Santa’s sleigh if he believed hard enough. He was an adult at a job, with deadlines, health insurance, and a meeting Tuesday he was already dreading.
And yet here he was, thinking about a post-it. What mattered was that someone had answered him in a way that felt intentional rather than polite. Like she’d met him at the exact weird angle he’d spoken from.
His fingers hovered over the keyboard, pretending he might type something.
He didn’t.
He closed his inbox, pushed his chair back, and stood. “I’m gonna step out and get some air,” he said to no one in particular, pulling on his jacket.
He walked to the supply closet, grabbed a fresh pack of yellow post-its, slipped them into his pocket, and headed out the door.
The air greeted him with a cool slap of dampness. The street smelled like wet pavement and cold concrete. He shoved his hands into his pockets and walked, head bowed just enough to keep the worst of the rain off his face.
His feet knew the route before he admitted where he was going. By the time he reached the crooked sign above the bookstore door, his heartbeat had climbed a little higher in his chest. Not pounding. Just there.
He pushed the door open.
The bell overhead chimed softly, its ring cut by the rain’s constant whisper outside. The warmth inside hit him in layers: the dry paper, the dusty tang of carpet worn down by too many muddy boots.
He moved past the front display without slowing. The birch tree stood where it always did, its white branches reaching upward, string lights wrapped around it like quiet constellations. The glow tugged at his attention, but he didn’t look for long.
He turned toward DRAMA.
The aisle opened in front of him.
Into the Woods.
He stared at it, one book upside down while every other spine stood neat and upright.
Something tightened in his chest.
She had been here.
She had touched it.
Whether she had seen his note, removed it, or rolled her eyes and walked away, he could not know from the tilt alone.
He stepped closer, slowly, as if the floor might change beneath him. He hesitated, then closed his fingers around the spine.
The book slipped free with a soft papery whisper. He eased it open to the first few pages.
His yellow post-it was gone.
In its place: a blue square. Clean edges. Crisp, slanted handwriting.
His breath left him without sound.
Still stuck between the trees?
He read it once.
He read it again.
It sounded exactly like her. Not flowery, not apologetic, with a dry little curve to it, like an eyebrow raised in ink.
A tease.
A callback.
Proof she’d actually listened.
The rest of the bookstore blurred at the edges. His back found the opposite bookcase before he’d decided to move. His knees bent on instinct, and he sank into a crouch, then eased down until he was sitting on the floor, cross-legged, the book open in his hands.
He read the line again, slower this time.
She had written back.
Not with silence.
Not with indifference.
With a question that met him exactly where he’d spoken from.
Eventually, the cold from the floor seeped through his jeans enough to nudge him back into motion. He closed the book, careful with the blue square so it did not slip, and pushed himself upright.
He carried the book toward the birch tree.
The string lights hummed faintly above him, their bulbs reflected in the metal stands nearby. The bench beneath the branches creaked when he sat, but held. He let himself sink into it and exhaled.
He pulled the post-its from his jacket pocket. He peeled one free, and for a moment all he could do was stare at the blank space, the tiny border at the top where the glue waited.
He tried a line in his head.
You have no idea how much this means.
Too much.
I have been stuck for longer than you think.
Too heavy.
Too confessional.
He scratched out a half-drawn letter, then another. Turned the note over. Started again.
All the while, the bookstore moved quietly around him. Soft footsteps in a distant aisle. A chair shifting behind the counter. The rain ticking lightly against the front window.
He closed his eyes for a second and went simpler.
No metaphors.
No speeches.
He opened them again and wrote in his neatest, most careful hand:
My sense of direction isn’t great.
He stared at what he had written. It looked too small on the page. Too bare. It was an admission without being a confession.
He slid the post-it inside the play, tucking it where hers had been.
His fingers lingered on the edges of the pages for a beat longer, then he stood and walked the book back to DRAMA. The aisle looked the same, but he felt different standing in it.
He slid the play into its place, turning it right-side up as he did. The gesture was small, almost nothing, but it felt like the right kind of reply.
He stepped back from the shelf.
For a moment he just stood there, hands in his pockets, the rain whispering against the windows and the birch lights glowing behind him.
Then he nodded to himself, barely a movement, and headed for the door.
Eve arrived later, her umbrella closed and dripping against her leg as she shook it off just outside the entrance.
She did not bother pretending she was here for anything else.
Her feet carried her straight to DRAMA.
She hadn’t planned what she would do if the book wasn’t touched. She told herself it wouldn’t matter, that this whole thing was barely a thing at all, a bit of entertainment in the middle of a week that felt too long already. But the truth sat uncomfortably in her stomach: she cared more than she wanted to.
Not in any dramatic way. Just enough to notice. Enough to feel the wrong kind of flicker when she imagined her note sitting there unread, ignored, or worse: never found. The idea annoyed her. She didn’t like being invested in things she couldn’t control.
She slowed only at the edge of the aisle, pulse flicking up as her gaze slid along the shelf.
Into the Woods.
Upright again.
Of course it was. He struck her as the kind of person who needed things to mean something or nothing, not an uncertain in-between.
She reached for the spine without hesitation this time. The book came away from the other titles easily, pages shifting as she opened it to the front.
A yellow post-it waited inside.
Her eyes went to the handwriting first. She recognized the deliberate letters from the “Hi” he had left.
My sense of direction isn’t great.
Short. Self-aware. A little apologetic even when it was supposed to be light.
She leaned her shoulder against the nearest shelf.
Her first instinct was to roll her eyes at the way he managed to confess without quite confessing, to say something true and still hide inside the shape of the joke.
She reached into her bag and pulled out her blue post-its. She peeled one off, the adhesive giving with a faint tacky sound.
She did not sit. She did not go to the birch bench. She did not run through drafts in her head.
She just wrote the first thing that came to her fingers:
Maybe stop following the trees.
The pen moved easily, the line already in her voice. Direct. Dry. A little bit of a shove.
Without thinking too hard, she added a tiny smiley face at the end.
Two dots. A curve. Nothing elaborate. No little circles for cheeks. Just the simplest sketch of a grin.
The second it was there, she felt a small spike of regret. It softened the edge in a way she did not intend.
She could have scratched it out.
She could have peeled the note off and started over.
Instead, she slipped the blue square inside the book and closed it.
She turned Into the Woods upside down again and slid it back into place between the other books. The upside-down title looked like a little rebellion in the middle of the neat spines.
She pivoted away from the shelf with the confidence of someone who was absolutely done here. Three steps. Solid ones. Then she stopped.
Nothing had pulled her back. No sound. No sign.
Just her own brain refusing to cooperate.
She closed her eyes, exhaled once, and turned back toward the aisle in a quick, annoyed spin, like she’d forgotten something she absolutely hadn’t. One fast glance down the row confirmed nothing had changed. Good. Perfect.
She nodded once, a tiny gesture, and turned to leave again.
Two steps.
Stop.
“Oh, for the love of…” she whispered, pinching the bridge of her nose. A small laugh escaped her, the involuntary kind you let out when you’ve caught yourself doing something absurd. She stared at the ceiling like it was personally responsible, then shook her head.
“Unbelievable,” she muttered. It somehow came out like she was scolding him for a thing he didn’t even know he’d caused.
She turned away again, this time walking with purpose, the determined stride of someone who refused to turn back one more ti...
“No. Absolutely not.”
And she marched herself toward the door before she embarrassed herself again.
Nicolas gathered his things slowly at the end of the day. The office lights had begun their usual early-evening dimming, rows of monitors going dark one by one. He reached for his jacket and felt the faint shape of the blue post-it inside the pocket.
He took it out.
The edges had curled a little from being carried around. The handwriting was still sharp.
Still stuck between the trees?
He just stood there a moment, letting the sentence settle the same way it had earlier, direct, a little teasing, sharper than anything else said to him all week.
He crossed to the corkboard above his desk. Most of it was blank except for a few reminders he never checked. He pinned the note near the top corner. Not centered. Not showcased. Just… there. Where he could see it without it being obvious he wanted to.
He stepped back.
It looked right.
Or at least, it looked like something he wasn’t going to unpin anytime soon.
He put on his jacket and headed out.
The sky had shifted into a gray dusk, the rain thinning into mist that clung to his sleeves. He walked with his head slightly down, the streetlights catching in the wet air as they blinked on.
All afternoon, he’d pretended to function. Emails. Meetings. Scribbled notes he wouldn’t remember writing tomorrow. But every quiet second, his mind drifted back to the bookstore. To the aisle. To the blue note now pinned above his desk. To the yellow one he’d left behind.
He had promised himself he would not go back today.
Give it a day. Maybe two.
Something reasonable.
His feet did not get that memo.
When he reached the block with the bookstore, he glanced across the street. The front window was fogged in patches from the lingering mist, but the shelves inside were still visible in uneven slivers.
His eyes landed on Into the Woods almost immediately.
Upside down.
A passerby brushed his shoulder, murmured a quick apology. A car rolled through the intersection, tires whispering across the wet pavement. The normal world kept moving, unaware of the small signal sitting behind the glass.
He watched the upside-down title through the window.
The mist gathered on his jacket as the world dimmed into that early-evening gray he’d always loved as a kid. When houses began to glow from the inside, when his mother lit the small ceramic village in their living room, when the world felt like it was promising something.
It felt like December.
Not Christmas Day, he’d never cared much for the day itself. That was when everything was already ending, the lights unplugged, the season slipping away.
Standing here now, watching Into the Woods deliberately upside down, he felt a small echo of it. Not the full warmth, just the spark that came before it.
What he loved was the lead-up.
The waiting.
The wanting.
The quiet days where something felt like it was coming.
And that was the feeling standing here now, the sense that if he rushed it, he’d ruin the part he actually cared about.
The anticipation mattered.
So he didn’t cross the street.
He let the moment stay exactly where it was.
He turned and kept walking, choosing wonder over the answer.