Mate Hunt: Dasher: A Horny Reindeer Story

1. Chapter 1

Ho, Ho, Hell No

Meredith

“To hell with this. I’m not doing this bullshit again,” I muttered.

I fucking hated Christmas. It wasn’t like I was going to avoid it, like I could cilantro (thanks genetics for that gene inheritance).

I could avoid that by ordering around it, and never think about it again.

But no. Christmas came for you. And not even once a year!

That damn Christmas in July, a marketing ploy for consumerism and overconsumption.

When I was a little girl, the Christmas season was maybe a month long.

Now, it had grown into a multi-month commercial assault that started in October before the Halloween candy markdown, and didn’t release its grip until the grey week between New Year’s and when people took their wreaths down.

It had music that followed you into grocery stores and waiting rooms and once a dentist's office, as if the thing you most needed while someone scraped your molars was Mariah Carey.

Along with it, there were societal and social expectations.

Warmth, togetherness, and joy that I had stopped being able to locate in myself a long time ago and had made my peace with not finding.

My peace looked like this: a clean kitchen table, a full coffee pot, a true crime podcast at moderate volume, and absolutely zero tinsel anywhere in my house.

The decorations were in a plastic bin in the attic. They had been in that bin for a dozen years. I was not getting them down. Not this year, not next year, maybe not ever.

And now, my brothers began their annual Christmas push.

I had no plans on decorating again, and they knew it.

It never stopped Jake or Cole from trying though.

The wreath showed up on my door on December first, which told me exactly how much say I was going to have in any of this. Our annual Christmas argument.

I ripped it down before my coffee finished brewing, tossed it in the bushes by the porch rail, and went back inside to pretend the day hadn’t started with a fight I hadn’t even gotten to have yet.

My phone buzzed on the counter. Cole.

Don’t toss the wreath. It’s rude and I did my best. It’s just like one Mom would have made. I tried.

Of course he did. My brother took up wreath-making the way some people took up day drinking. I appreciated his reasoning, and I loved him for it, but I did not want pinecones and ribbon anywhere near my door in the first week of December, or ever, for that matter. I typed back:

I appreciate the effort and none of the follow-through.

Up yours. I’m not as good as she was, but I’m trying. Dinner Sunday.

I rolled my eyes. As if the three of us hadn’t stopped our ritual of dinner once a week since I’d moved to this house. As long as we lived in the vicinity of each other, our weekly meals would keep going until one of us died, probably from Jake’s cooking.

I wrapped both hands around my mug and looked out the window at the back field, where six inches of fresh snow had come down overnight and made everything look temporary and clean.

I loved the fresh start after a snowfall.

The tree line at the far edge of the field stood dark against the white sky, birch and pine and the big old oaks that had been there longer than the farmhouse, longer probably than anyone had lived on this land, loomed skeletal and unbothered.

Four years ago, I bought the farmhouse because it was eleven miles outside of town and my nearest neighbors were a retired couple named the Hendersons.

They were the best, waving when they saw me, but otherwise left me alone.

I loved the house because the back field had a trail cut into it that ran along the creek for about two miles before it hit the state forest, and because the bones of the place were good, even if the plumbing had required a few separate conversations with a contractor before he stopped sighing at me.

I’d done most of the interior work myself starting with new floors.

The walls were a shade of warm white I’d looked at after half a dozen color swatches before I committed.

Thanks to the help of online tutorials, I built the bookshelves in the front room with my own two hands.

At the end of a long weekend, I stood back and stared at them with an unreasonable amount of satisfaction blazing through my chest.

Maybe my independent streak came from growing up the youngest, and the only girl.

When my parents were alive, they used to say my brothers came out of the womb looking for someone to protect.

Unfortunately, they never grasped the fact I’d grown up.

Cole was thirty-four. Jake, thirty-two. I was twenty-eight, capable of starting my own truck, holding my own job, doing repairs and construction in my house, and generally not dying without supervision.

Yet, neither of them had gotten the memo.

My phone buzzed again, this time, the group chat with my brothers.

Cole:We’re going hunting today, Mer. It snowed.

Jake: Meredith, you coming

Jake:Meredith

Jake:MEREDITH

Cole:She’s not coming

Jake:She might come

Cole:She’s never coming

Jake: Optimism, Cole

Cole: It’s not optimism, it’s delusion

Jake: …

Cole: Open the door, Merry. I’m here.

For fuck’s sake. I put the phone face-down on the table and raced to the door, opening it to find my brother there with a shit-eating grin on his face. “Don’t call me Merry, asshole.”

“Told ya she’d hate it,” Jake laughed through the phone. “See ya soon.”

Cole planted a kiss on my forehead. He sniffed the air. “Oh good, you made coffee.”

“Enough for one. Don’t be a dick.”

“I’m not.”

Cole walked past me into my own kitchen, opened my fridge, and made a face at the groceries inside. As if he had any right.

“You’re not eating enough protein,” he said.

“I’m eating what I want to eat.”

“There’s a difference between what you want and what your body needs, Mer.”

“There’s a difference between advice and being a pain in my ass, and you’re standing real close to the second one.”

He grinned at that, because needling me was a sport to him and he was undefeated.

Cole had our dad’s build; he was broad through the shoulders, built like a door frame, and our mom’s mouth, which meant he could say the meanest things with the sweetest smile, and somehow make you laugh before you got properly mad.

It worked on everyone but me. I’d had twenty-eight years of immunity training.

“Jake’s bringing in the venison from last month," he said, shutting the fridge. “You want in on that or you still doing your rabbit food thing?”

“They’re called vegetables, Cole, and yes, I am still doing my vegetables thing. And no, I don’t want the venison, because I don’t eat things I don’t personally have to look in the eye and explain myself to.”

"You've eaten venison your whole life.”

“I’ve eaten venison my whole life because you two shot it and Mom cooked it and refusing wasn’t worth the argument. That’s different from wanting it.”

Cole tipped his head at me the way he did when he thought I was being difficult on purpose, which, fair, sometimes I was.

But not about this. I liked animals better than I liked most people, and watching something die because a man wanted a story to tell at a bar had never once sat right in my chest, no matter how many times my brothers tried to hand me a rifle and tell me it was tradition.

“You know Dad would’ve loved to see you out there with us,” Cole said. It wasn’t mean when he said it, it was just true, and his true statements always landed harder.

“Dad loved a lot of things I don’t have to love just because he’s gone,” I said, and that shut it down. Cole let it go. He was better at that than Jake.

Jake showed up a half hour later with a cooler of meat I had no interest in, and a duffel bag that meant he intended to stay the night. He knew better than to ask, because asking implied the possibility of a no.

“Door was unlocked,” he said, letting himself in.

“It wasn’t.”

“It was for me.” He shrugged. “Must have been the spare key I have.”

I gave up on that argument before I started it, because Jake had the kind of face that made giving up feel like a mercy - boyish where Cole was blunt, quick to laugh, quick to worry, and too observant for a man who acted like a golden retriever most of the time.

Jake clocked things, but he waited to bring them up until you let your guard down. That’s when he pounced.

He clocked it now, apparently, glancing at my kitchen table, where I hadn’t quite managed to hide the calendar sitting open to December.

“You didn’t cross anything off yet,” he said. “Is this a sign you’re…”

“I don’t cross anything off. That’s your thing.” I cut him off with a wave of my hand.

“You used to cross things off.”

“I used to do a lot of things.”

He didn’t push it, not yet, but I saw his jaw tighten a fraction. Instead, he set the cooler on my counter with a thud that felt a little like a threat, a little like an offering, the way most things from my brothers did. “Cole wants to know if you’re coming to help decorate the tree next weekend.”

My stomach did a small, hard flip, like missing a stair in the dark. “I have plans.”

“Bullshit. I know you. You don’t have plans.”

“I have plans to not decorate a tree, Jake, that counts.”

“Every year,” he said, quieter now, and I felt it coming, the conversation I’d been dodging since October, “every single year, the second the leaves start turning, you go somewhere in your head and you don’t come back till February.

Are we doing it again this year, or are we doing the thing where we pretend we don’t notice? ”

“We’re doing the thing where you pretend you don’t notice.”

“Mer…”

“Jake.” I forced my voice to remain flat, and in the tone he knew brooked no argument.

I was shutting that door whether he liked it or not.

Something in his face shifted, disappointment maybe, or worry, or both, but he backed off.

He always backed off, eventually. It was Cole who didn’t know how to leave a bruise alone.

I busied myself putting away dishes that didn’t need putting away, and felt both of them watching me with that brotherly concern that made my skin itch.

It was equal parts love and suffocation, and I loved them, I did, more than I had words for most days, but there were things I didn’t dare mention; not even to the people who earned them.

Some doors you keep shut because opening them costs more than staying cold.

“So,” Cole said, once the silence had gone on a beat too long, clapping his hands together like he was trying to reboot the room, “We’re heading up to the ridge.”

“No,” I said, in reflex, the way I always did.

“Wasn’t a question.”

“Bullshit. It’s always a question when you say it like it’s not one.”

“Mer,” Jake said gentler than Cole, using the tone he thought worked on me, the one that used to work on me when I was nine and he could bribe me with candy. “Come on. One last hunt before the snow really sets in. You, me, Cole, like old times.”

“I hate hunting.”

“You hate cold and you hate getting up early, that’s not the same as hating hunting.”

“Um, dipshit, those are the ingredients of hunting, Jake."

Cole crossed his arms, and I knew that stance, the immovable one, the one that meant this had already been decided somewhere in a group text I wasn't included in. “You’re coming. We’re not asking you to shoot anything.

Just come sit in the blind, keep us company, don’t freeze to death alone in this house eating your rabbit food. ”

“That’s a hostage situation with worse snacks, not company.”

“Tomorrow,” Cole said, like I hadn’t spoken at all. “We’ll wake you up at four.”

“In the morning?”

“That’s when the deer are up, Mer.”

“The deer can keep their schedule and I’ll keep mine, which does not include four a.m., or a blind, or a rifle, or any of it.”

But even as I said it I knew that I’d end up in that truck at four in the morning, with a thermos of coffee I didn’t want and a scowl I meant every bit of, because that was my life.

“Fine,” I said. “One hunt. And I’m not touching a rifle.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it, lil sis,” Jake said, grinning like he'd won the lottery, and reached over to steal a piece of jerky off my counter that I hadn’t offered him.

Outside, the first hard wind of the season rattled the window glass, and somewhere down the road I was fairly sure my brother’s wreath was still sitting in the bushes where I’d thrown it, waiting for the next snow to bury it.