A Christmas Pageant
A Sequel to 'A Night Together' and a prelude to 'A Dinner Together'
Jericho Fan fiction by Moo Chapman
Gail Green had spent a week trying to convince her son to help out with the Christmas pageant. The pageant had always been a big deal in Jericho and anyone who could help did.
However, when Heather Lisinski bit her lip and shyly asked Jake if he would help her out with the pageant, he immediately agreed. Heather was ignorant of the amount of times that Gail had asked him of course Gail suspected that if she had known how many times Jake had said no, she would have never asked him.
Heather had been coming over almost nightly since the night that she and Jake had got caught out in the storm when Liam McCormac went missing. She always brought something with her as a gift for her hosts, the first night it had been jello.
April had been so thrilled to see to see the elementary school teacher and her gift that she had very nearly kissed her. Apparently she had been having some intense sugar cravings and Johnston, who had always had a sweet tooth, was hardly less happy see her.
The next night she had brought a record player. It went on like that, with Heather always bringing by some luxury item, usually something so incredibly simple that none of the Greens had thought to even look for. And at the end of every night Jake would walk her home. But before that moment came the two of them often ended up laying together on the couch in the den taking turns reading to each other from a book or just talking quietly. It certainly wouldn't have been called dating before the bombs, but in this new world it was probably as close as it was going to get.
The couple had too many responsibilities to find the find the easy peace that other couples in the town had found. Mary and Eric spent most of their days together now and even Johnston and Gail were now able to spend quiet time together.
It had been just as she and Jake were preparing to leave to walk Heather home that the young woman looked down bit her lip and looked at him with wide eyes through her lashes at him. Her words were halting, uncertain and hopeful.
Within a minute Jake was practically begging to be allowed to help. Heather's response to this was to excitedly throw herself into Jake's arms and kiss him. This lasted only a few seconds before she realized that they weren't alone, at which moment she jumped out of Jake's arms, blushing and apologizing
Gail couldn't help but find the girl adorable, she alternated between timidity and bravery and was with out a doubt one of the most intelligent people Gail had met in the longest time. Emily had been a part of Jake's life since Jake had realized that girls weren't walking cooties and Gail was a little disappointed when Jake hadn't fought for Emily when Roger came back. Gail was sure that he could have won her if he had tried. It wasn't so much that she wanted her son with Emily, but that she hadn't wanted him alone.
It was when Gail had gone to collect Jake from the Medical center the night after Jake and Heather had gone out searching for the McCormac boy that Gail had realized that just because Jake wasn't with Emily didn't mean that he would be alone.
When Gail had received word from the runner that April had sent she had immediately set out to the Med Centre to pick up her son, but all the same she hadn't arrived until nearly two hours after Heather had driven them both back in to town. She opened the door to the exam room to find Heather, who was clearly wearing men's clothing, Jake's by the look of it, lying in Jake's arms and against his chest.
Jake was looking down at her with a nervous expression, no doubt all the more concerned by the fact that Heather's eyes were on her hand which was employed with fiddling with the button on Jake shirt.
"You made the right choice Jake," Heather said. "You did the right thing even though you knew it would cost you dearly." She still wasn't looking up at Jake but her expression was honest. Gail could only guess that Jake had told her about his past.
"The right choice would have been to act sooner, the man you think I am would have." Jake insisted.
"The man I think you are? Jake do you really believe that you changed that much when you returned to Jericho?" Heather asked, pushing up onto her elbows and looking at him.
"You didn't know me Heather," Jake told her, trying to make her understand the difference between whom he had been and who he is.
"No, you're right I didn't know you, but as you were driving in to Jericho on the day of the bombs which man were you then? The one who left Jericho or the one here with me now?" If Jake had a ready answer neither Heather nor Gail would ever know, because Heather continued. "People don't change. Not the way we think. Our perceptions of them and of ourselves change, the way you see the world changed because of what you saw of the world." Heather put her hand on Jake's cheek "Would the man who left Jericho have kept walking when he saw two second graders alone in the Kansas dusk?"
"No, Heather, I'm not the same man that I was before the bombs, if only because I want to be a better man."
"Oh that's a relief. I thought you were going to say that 'I make you want to be a better man' or something like that," Heather said, effectively breaking the somber mood that had settled over them.
"The only time a straight man is allowed to say anything like that is when mocking it," Jake said. His tone told Gail that was glad to have the seriousness of their conversation disrupted.
Gail knew then and there, that Heather Lisinski would be good for him; maybe they didn't have the history that Jake had with Emily but in all their years together Gail had never once seen Emily read Jake like Heather had just done. Emily would have continued the conversation, not seeing or caring about Jake's discomfort. Heather saw that Jake was uncomfortable and changed the subject carefully, so that Jake didn't suspect.
When Gail and Jake arrived Heather was standing on the second step of a three step stepladder hanging lengths of greenery and boas of freshly cut pine. Gail smiled at the scene that the church was becoming. Heather and her kids must have put hours into stringing the boas together. The Pageant committee believed that tinsel boas looked cheap, Emily had always bought her boas from some craft market in Hope Rains.
Jake however wasn't smiling and he hardly saw the church decorations. He moved ahead of his mother, heading toward Heather with determined intent.
"Heather, get down," Jake ordered coldly. Heather obeyed quickly, climbing down from the stepladder and turning to face Jake.
"What did I do?" Heather asked, sounding genuinely worried.
"Nothing," Jake said, his voice still cold.
"Jake, I can tell that you are angry with me, but if I don't know what I did then there is every chance that I'll do it again," Heather said. She sounded very close to crying, the tears were in fact already in her voice, "Just tell me what I did, Jake, I'm sure I didn't mean to."
"You did nothing wrong. I'm sorry; it's nothing that you did." Jake insisted, and tucked a strand of hair behind her ear, the same strand that he tucked away three or four times each time that they saw each other. "It's what they did," Jake said, and jerked his head at a group of three teen boys behind them. Heather looked over his shoulder at the teens; all three of them were carefully avoiding Heather's eyes.
"What did they do?" Heather asked, her eye moving from the boys, to the man in front of her.
"It doesn't matter babe, just tell me what you want hung and where and just don't go up there again," Jake told her.
"Jake? Why not?"
"They-were-staring-at-your-ass." Jake said, running the words together, knowing that they were both going to be embarrassed by the words.
"What? Why?" Heather was honestly puzzled at the thought of a guy staring at her ass. Heather lowered her head as though her feet held the answers she was looking for
"You're beautiful and they are teenage boys," Jake said and lifted Heather's head and tucked back the lock of hair that had fallen into her face again. "You're going to let me hang the rest of this stuff, right?"
"Oh definitely," Heather said with a smile. She may have been thrilled at Jake's saying she was beautiful but she was not so happy with the idea of being stared at by a gaggle of teenage boys. How Emily managed to work with them she would never know. "You need to move up about four feet and fix the next part, and so on." She told him, still smiling that shy smile
"So this is your contribution?" Jake asked, gesturing at the wall, "The decorations I mean."
"No, actually this is usually Emily's job, but she's busy with Roger. I usually just run the choir."
"Don't expect me to help with that, I couldn't carry a tune in a bucket," Jake said with a cheeky smile.
"He's lying through his teeth," April said from behind Heather, placing her hand on the brunettes shoulder. "He sings when he's fixes his car and he's actually pretty good."
"Don't make me," Jake practically begged, looking over at Heather. She lifted herself up on her toes and placed a chaste kiss on Jake's lips.
"Wouldn't dream of it," Heather said with the same gleeful mischief that you could often see in her when she was playing with her kids. "Of course you will have to make it up to me." Coming from any other woman that may have sounded like innuendo, but Heather's tone was filled with an innocent playfulness.
"I think that I can handle that," Jake said with a smile, tucking back that same bit of hair. He loved that lock of hair, tucking it back was a constant excuse to touch her. He would let his fingers drag along her cheek as he pulled his hand back. When they would lay together on the couch reading, he would curl it around his finger.
Heather giggled and rested her head on his shoulder just for a second then moved away from him and went about rounding up the kids of all ages into lines for her choir. At first when the singing started the sound was chaotic but as Heather started correcting notes the children started to sing in beautiful harmony.
As Heather directed them through several different Christmas Carols Jake finished hanging the boas and sat down to watch Heather with the kids. She was a joy to watch when she worked, either with kids or machines, she just threw all she had in to what she was doing. It was a joy to see someone who genuinely loved what they were doing.
There was something in her that endeared her to children, an honesty that appealed to them.
Emily arrived just as Jake was finishing, helping Roger as they walked into the church. Not that he noticed their arrival, a fact that disturbed Emily. Emily hadn't entered a room unnoticed by Jake Green in over twenty years and she was not happy at the idea of losing that influence over him. That Jake was even there was a shock to Emily, and she was determined to find out what brought him here. Emily settled Roger in a pew, and set off to confront Jake with a very large and very fake smile.
"Twenty years of trying and Gail finally managed to get you here?" Emily said with false cheer.
"That was Heather's work actually," Gail said, having heard Emily's statement and having seen the looks that the blond was throwing Jake and the object of his attention. "It was the cutest thing I'd ever seen, one shy little smile and Jake couldn't say yes fast enough."
"Mom," Jake said in a don't-start-anything-tone. Gail and Jake locked eyes for a moment then nodded and walked away.
"So the two of you are? What?" Emily asked, fully expecting Jake to answer 'Hanging out' or something very much like it.
"I guess that we are dating," Jake said, he had known for some time that dating was the appropriate term though he hadn't said it aloud.
"She won't sleep with you," Emily informed him, "she made 'The Promise' in high school, and she kept it." Emily's tone was unmistakably vindictive.
It took Jake a moment to realize what Emily was talking about, but when he did, a series of emotions ran through him, starting with surprise, then moving on to understanding, and then finally anger. It really wasn't Emily's place to tell him something like that. When and if Heather wanted him to know she would tell him.
The statement itself made sense of things a lot of things; he had guessed early on that Heather was not a person who had a great deal of experience in relationships. The extent of her inexperience was without a doubt a shock to him.
"You shouldn't have told me that Emily," Jake told her, in a tone that she had heard before but never been on the receiving end of. "Keep things like that to yourself, in the future."
"I won't let you hurt her," Emily announced.
"I have no damn intention of hurting her; I've told you that before," Jake reminded her. Their discussion had caught the attention of its subject and Heather was looking over at Jake with a worried and questioning gaze. Jake tried his best to reassure her with a smile. He wasn't sure if it worked but Heather replied with a smile that didn't completely cover her concern. "And if you were so intent on protecting her, what almost happened in Bailey's the night that Roger came back wouldn't have happened."
"You let it happen too," Emily said, as though it absolved her of any part in the event and of course the guilt associated with it.
"I know, and it certainly won't be happening again. I'm promising you that right now," Jake said. His expression changed completely it was now, and was now calm "I just finished the decorating, but Mom could probably find something for you to do."
Jake turned and walked away from Emily. He was angry with her but he was far more angry with himself. Being here, doing this, was his second step in making up to Heather for what almost happened that night, his first had been telling her about his past.
Heather seemed to be wrapping it up with her kids and Jake saw his chance to send a message to Emily. It was a risk because if Heather figured out what he was doing she would be furious.
Jake approached Heather from behind and wrapped an arm around her waist, she leant back against him and smiled, and Jake let out a relieved breath.
"You okay? You didn't seem all that happy talking to Emily," Heather asked, then explained her query.
"It's history. Trouble is sometimes it doesn't stay in the past," Jake explained, pulling Heather close and nuzzling her cheek with his own.
"But everything is okay?"
"Yeah, everything is fine Babe," Jake told Heather, as she turned to face him and buried her face into his neck and breathed in his scent deeply.
Jake had noticed a while ago that Heather took every opportunity to sniff him. It was a little strange but no more so than his obsession with that lock of hair that always fell forward so he said nothing, mostly because he knew he didn't want to explain his particular habit and guessed she didn't either.
"Have dinner at my place?" Heather asked him not looking up from his neck, "Let me cook for you?"
"I'll be there."