“You know, if you’d simply told me that you could cook, then I wouldn’t have you spending so much money on me,” Cara teased as Kai put a plate of fettuccine pasta with his homemade marinara sauce in front of her and Cian. He just rolled his eyes at her as he brought his own plate over before sitting down. Because Cara and Cian didn’t have a fancy dining table and the kitchen counter only had two seats, the three of them decided to sit down on the wooden flooring around their coffee table. 

“I thought Arin mentioned that to you?” Kai asked as he rolled the fork in his pasta. 

“Yeah, but I didn’t know that she meant you actually cooked!”

Kai snorted. “If someone says they can cook, what else do you think it means?”

Cian laughed around a forkful of pasta, and Cara scrunched her nose at his disgusting display. One would think that after twenty-one years of exposure to this slob, she’d get used to it, but she never did. “She thinks she can cook when she chops up vegetables and stirs the pot once.”

“Hey!” Cara protested.

“That’s called assisting, Cara,” Kai teased, and Cara ignored him, instead choosing to eat more of the delicious pasta. “My ability to cook is what happens when you’re forced to live alone and do everything alone.”

“And this is what happens when you don’t,” Cian continued, using his fork to point at Cara.

Cara grabbed a hold of Cian’s wrist tightly, and her twin brother winced before jerking his hand away. “You point that fork at me again, I’m going to shove it up your nose.”

“Please take her away from me,” Cian begged Kai, and Kai laughed loudly, clearly amused by the twins.

Cara let out a snort, and if she were in front of any other boys, she would’ve been wildly embarrassed, but she supposed that they were so used to her, that it didn’t matter if she snorted. “For someone who was wildly against our relationship, you sure are on board with him whisking me away.”

“That’s only because I know he’s going to return you as soon as he realizes what a menace you are.”

“I really hate you, you know that?”

“You really don’t.”

She had noticed that Kai had quietly watched the two bicker the entire time, and he seemed content in observing rather than participating while he ate his dinner. Even though Cara knew that Kai probably wouldn’t really care if that’s all they did for the rest of the night, she wanted him to feel somewhat involved in the conversation.

“Anyways, thank you for dinner, Kai,” she said. “It’s honestly really, really good.

“Why, thank you, Cara,” he happily responded as he threw an arm out in front of him and bowed at the waist the best he could considering they were sitting on the ground. As he straightened up, she watched as his eyes roamed around their living room before landing back on the twins.

“Your apartment is awfully bare for this time of the year,” he commented with another forkful of pasta. “It’s December 7th, and not even a single string light.”

“I mean, we have our tree in a closet, but we don’t take it out till after finals,” Cian replied with a shrug of his shoulders. 

Kai looked at Cara for confirmation, and she just nodded. “Yup.”

“But…finals don’t end till the 23rd!”

“Yeah, so?”

“So that gives you only two weeks until January comes around and all the lights come down!”

Cara looked at Cian out of the corner of her eye, knowing that the next words that Cian spoke would not be well received by her fake-boyfriend.

“Is it going to make things worse if I tell you that we take it down on New Year’s Eve?”

Kai’s mouth dropped open, and the man looked so appalled, it was kind of funny. Cara tried to smother the laugh building in , but it escaped anyway. Kai glared at her, but the reason he was so mad was just so funny to her that it ended up making her laugh even harder. 

“I’m sorry,” she tried to apologize around giggles.

“You don’t sound sorry.”

She took a breath to calm herself as she responded, “It’s just that we don’t celebrate Christmas.

“What?! How?” Kai protested. 

“You aren’t Christian either, though,” she pointed out. She was pretty sure Kai was an atheist, or something. It never really came up in conversation, but if he had been spending his Sunday mornings at the Church, she would’ve (probably) known. 

Kai let out a dramatic sigh. “That doesn’t matter! It’s about the holiday vibes! The semester’s ending, there’s lights everywhere, people are happy and excited, and it’s just all around so much fun. We need to change that in this apartment.” Looking down at their nearly empty plates, he urged the twins to eat a lot faster while he stood up, put his plate away in the sink, and then emerged looking like a man on a mission. 

“Where’s your tree and string lights?”

Cian just looked at Cara with a defeated gaze before shrugging, and he stood up to show him the location of the tree while she finished eating and got up to clear up the rest of the mess they had made during dinner.

When Cara emerged from doing the dishes and cleaning up the kitchen roughly forty minutes later, she almost didn’t recognize the apartment she was in. The Christmas tree was up in the corner of the room behind their TV, completely covered in ornaments that Kai was still fixing. The regular boxes of ornaments that looked like a mess when she and her brother would put on every single year did not end up in the same way that it did right now with Kai’s touch to it. The red, green, and golden ornaments were placed in such a way that it created an illusion of the ornaments circling down the tree, and there were glittering snowflakes scattered throughout with a small star on the top of the tree. 

Cian had clearly been given the job of taking the measly one box of string lights that they did have to decorate the outline of the balcony in such a way that they dipped down at an interval to look like a wave. Normally, they just wrapped it around the tree, but she had to admit, it looked really quite pretty, and she was excited to come home to look at this everyday for the rest of the month.

“What do you think?” Kai excitedly asked, turning around to look at her with a bright smile. 

Cara simply shook her head. “I have no words. It’s beautiful. You turned our sad five-foot tree into something beautiful, and you even got Cian to do something for once.”

“Hey!” Cian protested from his perch on the step-stool.

“Hey yourself,” she countered, watching him reach up to fix the placement of a light carefully. “Don’t fall and break your neck.” Cian chose not to respond and instead stuck the final pin into the wall to make sure the lights stayed up and climbed down the perch. 

“Happy?” he asked, pushing the step-stool out of the way. 

“Very.”

“For two siblings that were ready to murder each other not an hour ago, you two are quite chummy,” Kai commented with his back to them.

“I’m sure that you’re the same exact way with Arin,” Cara countered.

“It’s definitely not to this extent.”

Cian laughed, and he lightly pushed her shoulder just so that she swayed in her spot rather than go stumbling. “It’s just different because we’ve spent every minute of our lives with each other,” he said, and then he paused for a moment. “Well except for the few minutes that I was alone before she was born.”

“Yeah, the two years that I was the only child really were the best two years of my life,” Kai laughed.

Cian cracked a grin, “Can’t relate, dude.” Cara was going to respond, but she heard her phone ping several times in a row, to which the two boys sent her confused glances.

“It’s probably Misty,” Cara explained as she made her way to her phone. “She’s the only person who spam texts me like this.” Picking up her phone did confirm it was Misty, and as she scrolled through the texts, she was able to make out that it was about the Secret Santa gift exchange. Along with it was a link that was supposed to give her the person she was assigned. Clicking on it, the page loaded for a few seconds before Zach’s name popped up in big bolded letters. Letting out a soft snort, she texted Misty back.

“What is it?” Cian asked, coming to look over Cara’s shoulder. She tried to hide the phone screen before he could see Zach’s name — what was the point of Secret Santa otherwise — but it was too late.

“Damn, Cara. Do you even know what you’re going to get Zach?”

Cara rolled her eyes at him before pocketing her phone. “Can you keep something to yourself for once in your life? And yes, I have an idea.” She didn’t have an idea, but he didn’t need to know that.

Kai laughed and pulled out his own phone from his jeans pocket. “Oh, she texted me too,” he spoke up, his eyes scanning the phone. “Wow she uses a lot of emojis.”

“It’s kind of her thing at this point,” Cara agreed. 

“But I got her, so it looks like we exchanged best friends,” he continued, and Cara threw her hands up.

“Does no one appreciate the sanctity of Secret Santa in this household but me?”

Cian was also on his phone, and he hummed thoughtfully. Cara thought he was going to agree with her and decide to keep his a secret after blurting out hers, but instead he spoke up. “I got you, Kai.”

“Oh my god, Cian, shut up! Now he knows,” she complained with a smack to his shoulder.

“No, it’s perfect,” Cian argued. “Now I can just ask him directly what he wants instead of him getting something he doesn’t want.”

“You guys are impossible, god,” she complained, walking away from them, but Kai caught her wrist to pull her back and ruffled her head.

Curse him and his height.

“You’re such a princess,” he teased.

“What?” she asked with furrowed eyebrows.

Kai just laughed, “You’re really high maintenance, just like a proper royal princess. You look like one too, with your hair curled like that.” Wow, the one day she tries to curl her hair, and it suddenly turns her into a princess.

“I agree,” Cian chimed in.

“I’m absolutely going to murder both of you.”

~~~

It was weird being back at the mall so soon after Thanksgiving, since Cian and Cara didn’t really celebrate Christmas, and instead whatever gifts they would give their friends would just be online gift cards, but because there were so many people involved with the Secret Santa, she supposed it was necessary.

Cian already knew what he was getting Kai (courtesy of asking ‘hey what do you want for Christmas?’), so as soon as they stepped into the mall, Cian bid her goodbye and told her to meet up with him in the food court in 40 minutes. Then he was off to the bookstore to get a book that would be used to be regifted to Arin.

Because, of course. 

Cara just rolled her eyes, and then made her way to the same home decor store as before to look for a miniature rock garden for Zach. She didn’t exactly know what she was looking for exactly, but Kai had mentioned that Zach liked to collect rare stones and gems, and so she figured a small rock garden would be cute, and most importantly, affordable. 

She wandered the aisles until she found the one single rock garden in the entire store. There were two small potted succulents on either side of a stack of different kinds of rocks that was in the center. The bottom rock was a round, smooth gray boulder, and on top of it was a jagged silver rock. Resting on top of it was a yellow rock on either side of a square piece of what looked like granite. Around the stack and the succulents were smaller rocks of different shapes and sizes glued onto the bottom of the box they were in. The entire thing was fake, and yet the simplicity brought it to life and looked gorgeous. She wasn’t sure if it would match Zach’s decor, but she was sure that at least he would like it. 

Carefully picking it up and paying for it, she walked out of the store to head over to the food court, before her eye caught on to a small stand in the middle of the mall selling jewelry for men and women. She knew that Kai wore a stud in his left ear, and so she started perusing different studs on the racks. Cara’s eyes caught sight of a pair of small wave shaped studs. They were plain stainless steel ones, but the silver outline on them made the waves stand out more.

Looking at the earrings reminded her of a conversation they had once while going on (yet another) unintentional coffee date. He was walking her back to her apartment when he had mentioned that he couldn’t wait for it to be summer, so he could go surfing again. He loved the beach, and Cara found yet another endearing quality to him. She wasn’t sure what to make of everything, still. Their animosity had turned into a friendship so quickly that she was still reeling from that. She didn’t want to take into account that the friendship might turn into something more. 

She didn’t know what she would do if she had to kiss him at the party.

Shaking the thoughts out of her head, Cara picked up the package with the earrings, running a thumb over the wave. It was understated, yet standing out at the same time. Kai in a nutshell, essentially. 

The two of them hadn’t discussed Christmas presents, but well, she was dating him, so it was only right for her to get him something. She and Cian never got each other anything, and instead treated themselves to take out for the night, and that would continue this year. 

Cara decided to buy the earrings, and she tucked them away into her purse, so Cian wouldn’t find it when he went to look at the rock garden. Looking a