Thiswas the Connor she’d hoped she’d find for her videos.And this is the kind of man I had hoped to find for me, a voice in her head whispered.
I am working!she hissed back to the voice. But it didn’t stop the fluttering that was going on in her heart and the buzzing in her mind.
The boys sounded like they were finishing up, so she quickly asked their mom if she could call her about using the footage.
As she and Connor neared the community center building, she said, “You’re really good with kids.”
“You said that with an awfully straight face for someone who saw me in all my frustrated glory yesterday.”
Katie lifted a shoulder in a shrug. “This feels more authentically you than yesterday did.”
Connor studied her for a moment, but she couldn’t read the expression on his face before he opened the door and they walked inside. The mayor and his eleven-year-old daughter, Breanna, were waiting to greet them and walked them to the room with the gingerbread houses. He explained that one of thetables had entries from elementary school-aged kids, one from middle school, one from high school, and two tables contained entries from adults. Connor needed to pick a winner from each age group.
Without even getting closer, an obvious winner from each table stood out as being way more impressive than the others. If he wanted to, Connor could’ve pointed out those four, been done in thirty seconds, and headed back toward his hotel in Denver moments later. She could kind of picture the Connor from the school yesterday doing exactly that.
But he didn’t. He listened as the mayor explained Mountain Springs’ tradition and how hard everyone worked. The mayor gave him a stack of cards that he could write on if he wanted to take notes on an entry to refer back to.
Connor looked down at the cards. “And what happens to these after?”
“We typically give them to the person who created that gingerbread house.”
Connor tapped them against his hand a couple of times. “How long do I have to judge them?”
“We announce the winners at eight-thirty, but the doors open for people to come in and look at them at eight. So…” he looked down at his watch, “you have about thirty-seven minutes.”
“And how many entries are there?”
“Forty-one.”
Connor looked up at the ceiling for a moment. “Okay, so about forty-five seconds each, and that still should give us a few minutes at the end.” He pulled out his phone and went into something. Then he turned to the mayor’s daughter, who had been looking kind of bored but was trying valiantly to patiently wait for her dad, and held his phone out to her. “Do you mind being my timer?”
“Sure!”
“Okay, when I get to the first gingerbread house, push this button. When the timer goes off, say ‘Next!’ and press therepeatbutton. It’s up to you to keep me on track to get through all of them. Are you up for it?”
“I sure am.”
The moment Connor got to the first one, Breanna pressed the timer, and he spent a few seconds studying it, then he wrote the entry number on the card and started writing something about the gingerbread house. When Breanna said, “Next!” he moved on to the next one and did the same thing. Was he really going to write a note about the gingerbread house to every person who entered?
Yep. It looked like he was.
She’d thought she’d gotten a good sense of who Connor was that night at her parents’, but everything at the school made her question it. Was this who the man really was? He did seem at home, natural, outside with the kids just a few minutes ago and now as he wrote on each card, where he hadn’t at all yesterday at the elementary school.
She got some good footage of the houses in focus in the foreground with Connor blurred in the background and plenty with the focus on Connor as he studied the gingerbread houses, noticing details, and writing on cards.
A few times as she was filming, he looked right at her and smiled, and she wasn’t entirely sure if it was a smile meant for the camera or for her. It wasn’t just a happy smile or an “I’m enjoying helping out in this community” smile. If she read it right, it was an “I like you and I’m glad you’re here” smile. Maybe even an “I’m attracted to you and really want those lips of yours on mine” smile.
But she could be imagining it. She would definitely be spending time rewatching some footage tonight.
When he had finished the final one, the mayor said, “Well, did you decide which ones are the winners?”
“I guess. There are four that definitely could be called ‘the best.’ But look at this one over here. It arguably isn’t ‘better’ than that one, but look at all the details they put in. All the creativity. And check out the backside— there’s a ladder leaning against the house, with the string of lights hanging off, like they weren’t quite finished yet. And look at this one over here. Same thing— so much uniqueness and so many fun details. This one, too. There’s a second one in each category that also deserves recognition.”
Katie owned a business in a creative field. She worked part-time for her roommate in a creative field. Watching Connor notice creative details and appreciate them was doing things to her heart that she couldn’t explain. Maybe because she’d never quite had it do that. All she knew was that she was glad she had the camera rolling at this moment because she would definitely be watching it over and over.
And when he offered to personally donate prizes so that a second “Creativity Award” could be given to the entries that were clearly showing it in abundance, the buzzing in her heart and the buzzing in her mind seemed to click into sync.
eight
