“Owen, we work at the same place, so we’re on the same schedule,” I reminded him.
He flushed slightly, “I didn’t know if you might have any other plans. As for what you need to bring, well, they tend to be rather formal, so you can expect to dress for dinner, and a church service Christmas Eve night is mandatory. You won’t need to bring anything for the dinner. That will have been planned in detail well in advance.”
“I should probably bring gifts. Any suggestions?”
“You were the one who helped me buy my gifts for them,” he reminded me. I refrained from telling him that his gifts had been far, far out of my price range. Great, now I not only had to find an appropriate gift for him, but it had to be appropriate enough to give him in front of the closest thing he had to a family. And, I had to find something for them that wouldn’t make them hate me on sight. The way he described them, I pictured his foster parents as being very stern and forbidding. Still, they couldn’t be all bad for him to have turned out so nice. It wasn’t like there was a niceness gene. That usually had something to do with one’s upbringing.
“Then we’re set,” he said, smiling so brightly that I was glad I’d agreed to go. If it made him that happy, I was certainly game. “I’ll check the train schedule and let you know what time we’ll need to leave from Grand Central. In the meantime, what do you say to spending the day before that together?”
I blinked, trying to catch up. “Huh?” I said, showing how smooth I was at this male-female communication process. He wasn’t the only one who had a thing or two to learn.
“Well, we have noticed that the one thing that seems to bring Ari out of the woodwork is us together. What could be more tempting than the two of us, spending the day enjoying all the romance of Christmas in New York City?”
“So you mean we’d be doing this as work?”
He gave me that shy smile again. “We could have fun, too. That’s certainly allowed. In fact, it would work even better if we were having fun.”
“I guess if we have to do it to get our jobs done, then I’m willing,” I said with a wink. “I should warn you, though, I think I’ve seen every movie that involves any kind of Christmas scene in New York, so my expectations are pretty high.”