Chapter 2
Carol
I pour. Humbug drinks. I move because that’s safer. I refill a beer, shake a martini, wipe a ring of sugar from the bar. But the biker’s presence stays at the corner of everything, an off-screen howl.
The regulars watch him from the edges of their eyes, too. He’s not just mean. He’s mesmerizing. A couple of tourists whisper the way people do when they want to be seen whispering. The woman beside him spills her drink. It splashes in front of him. He doesn’t notice or pretends he doesn’t.
I go to sop it up as the woman apologizes to me instead of the scary biker. But she wants him to notice her. He’s stoic.
I can’t help but talk to him again.
“What’s with you and Christmas?” I ask him before my better judgment can build a fence around my mouth.
“What’s with you and Christmas?” he fires back with a growl. “You humming it like a prayer.”
“Didn’t even know I was doing it. My mom says I came out singing carols. Hence the name. I love it,” I say, topping off a hot toddy. “The town, the lights... the hope.”
“Hope,” he says, like the word tastes bad. “You selling that, sweetheart?”
I glance at the line of shot glasses waiting for a decision. “By the ounce.”
“Then pour me some more,” he says, and I'm unsure if he’s mocking me or asking for help. Maybe both.
“Don’t call me sweetheart,” I say, my eyebrows up.
“Okay, Peppermint.”
My phone buzzes under the bar, Blake’s ringtone, sharp and insistent. Something I picked from the phone while my friends have Christmas Carol’s assigned.
I let it go to voicemail. Humbug watches that too, the way a cat watches a window. I busy my hands with garnishes, twist an orange peel until the oils mist the air.
“Boyfriend,” he says. Not a question.
“Mm,” I say. He doesn’t get the truth. No one does. Saying it out loud would make it too damn real. The waiting, the maybe, the someday-that-never-comes.
A group of carolers spill in, red-cheeked and loud.
Their breath fogs into the warm bar and tire tracks of snow slush onto the floor.
They line the back wall and launch into “O Holy Night.” The high note reaches up into the rafters and comes down with a shiver.
The whole place softens. Even the regulars lower their voices.
My heart swells. But Humbug stares into his glass and doesn’t blink until it’s over.
“You should go easy on yourself,” I tell him, and I don’t know why. “It’s just a day.”
“Days turn into years,” he says. He drains the whiskey like he’s putting out a fire inside him. “And then you wake up, and you hate the music.”
“Maybe the music’s not the problem,” I say before I can stop myself.
He turns his head just enough that I see the scar tugging by his jaw. “Maybe you don’t know what the problem is,” he says, calm but lethal.
“Maybe not,” I say, and smile because smiling is my armor. “But I know how to pour another.”
He huffs something that’s not quite a laugh and taps the bar twice with two fingers. I notice the grime around his fingernails. Nothing like Blake’s polish.
I pour again.
It should be easy. He’s just a customer, a shadow under the twinkling lights I love. I’ve dealt with worse, namely, grabby hands, slurred compliments, boys with expensive watches and cheap souls. Humbug isn’t any of those. He’s quiet. He tips cash.
Yeah, he looks at my ass when I lean into the cooler. And my chest tightens like a fiddle string before it snaps every time, I feel him watching me.
“Bathroom?” he asks.
“Back hall, second door,” I say. “First one sticks.”
He doesn’t say thanks. He doesn’t need to. He moves like a man who’s already fought his wars, solid and sure, like the room will move around him if it’s smart.
I lean on the bar for half a second and feel the night settle. The carolers leave with a flush of cold air and laughter. The TV changes to some football game. Sugar Plum slides past me, hip to hip, and waggles her on-trend, full eyebrows.
“Executioners in the house,” she murmurs, speaking of the biker. “You okay?”
“Peachy,” I say. I lick peppermint dust from my thumb. “That one’s Humbug.”
“Don’t name him to his face. He hates it.”
“He hates everything,” I counter.
Sugar Plum smirks. “Not the whiskey.” She scans my face. “You good, Caroler?” We have our nicknames here. Sugar’s really her last name.
“Define good.”
“Not about to climb the counter and make a mistake.”
“Please,” I scoff, even as heat climbs my neck.
“He’s thirty-five. Way too old for you.”
“I’m a lady,” I say, as I mull that information over. Age is just a number after all. “If I jump the counter, do you think he’ll catch me?”
“He’s married.”
“Ew.” Now that bursts my sex bubble.
Sugar Plum laughs and disappears toward the taps.
“And I have a boyfriend,” I whisper to myself when she’s out of earshot.
Two teenagers in puffy coats order fries and a Sprite and stare around like the world might start happening to them any second now. I want to tell them it already is. I mop a spill. I align the bar mats. I tell myself not to turn toward the hallway like a compass that just learned a new north.
A scream cuts the room in half.
It’s not a big scream. Not cinematic. It’s the startled sound someone makes when reality hooks left.
Then the front door slams too hard, and three figures boil in with the storm, faces obscured under ski masks, guns up and wobbling in hands that don’t look steady.
The tallest one’s breath rattles through the knit like a dog about to bite.
“Everybody hands up!” Mask One shouts, voice cracking. “Phones on the bar!”
Mask Two bangs his gun’s butt against a tabletop, and a mug does its own little death rattle. “Do what he says!”
The room freezes like we practiced. Evervale hasn’t.
It’s a tourist town. We rehearse for weather, not this.
But it happens more often than I like to admit.
The teenagers start crying without sound, and I move without thinking, my body putting itself between them and muzzle flashes that might happen. I lift both palms.
“It’s okay,” I say. My voice goes soft, the way you talk to skittish horses and drunks. “Just take the register. We’ll help you. No one has to...”
“Shut up,” Mask One snaps, gun swinging to me like it’s magnetized. “Open it.”
“Okay.” My hands don’t shake. I learned how to keep my cool years ago. “I’m opening it.”
I walk backward to the register, punch the code, and the drawer kicks out, blooming with green. I slide it forward. “Take it.”
He hesitates, then leans in across the bar. The gun follows his hand like it doesn’t want to lose its friend.
“Faster,” Mask Two says, coming around the end of the bar like he knows the terrain.
He’s sloppy, jittery, the worst combination.
“No one’s being slow,” I say. “See? I’m helping. You’re doing great.”
“Shut up,” he says again, and now I hate the words like I hate hangnails. His gun is pointed at my face, and I won’t cry. That’s the rule.
Then the hallway breathes, and Humbug appears.
Everything tightens around him, the room realizing it’s been missing a center. He takes in the scene the way a storm sucks in the air, fast, precise. One mask. Two mask. My hands. The kids. The angle of the gun to my mouth.
“Don’t,” he says, and it’s almost gentle. The word drops heavy anyway.
Mask Two laughs a little, high and terrible. “Or what, Grandpa?”
The gun tips toward Humbug. That’s his mistake. His last easy one.
Humbug moves the way men move who’ve had to.
Clean. No wasted reach. He’s on Mask Two before the laugh lands, jerks his wrist, cracks the arm across the bar edge so the gun clatters like a coin.
The second sound is flesh on wood. The third is Mask Two’s breath leaving his body in a whoof that says this hurts forever.
Mask One swears and points his gun at Humbug, and I don’t even think. My hand is already closing around the heavy glass ashtray we keep for tourists who lie about quitting. I slam it into Mask One’s skull as hard as I can.
It’s not cinematic either. It’s ugly, but it works.
He wobbles, and Humbug takes the rest. Two punches, one knee, decisively cruel.
The third guy, I hadn’t even noticed until now, backs out the door and disappears into snow like a ghost that never mattered.
The other two, tougher than they seem, resurrect and follow him.
Silence falls in a mess. Someone starts sobbing like they just remembered how. Sugar Plum curses in a whisper. The TV keeps playing like it’s in denial.
Humbug stares at me, breathing hard, knuckles split and red. His eyes are winter, cold depth and dark water. Without warning, I experience the oddest thing. Relief, like a fever breaking.
“You okay?” he asks, voice rougher now, like he’s swallowing rocks.
“I’m fine,” I answer, and then realize I’m crying. “I’m... yeah.”
He reaches across the bar and wipes a streak of peppermint dust from my cheek with his thumb like he can’t help it.
His hand smells like motor oil and smoke.
But the warmth of his touch finds every nerve in me.
My body answers faster than my brain with a low heat that pools deep in my belly, a fire I’m too smart to feed and too weak to smother.
Sugar’s saying something. Cops will be here in mere minutes.
I can hear them coming. We’ll do statements.
There’ll be forms and questions and the humiliating march of fluorescent lights.
I know all that because I’ve been held up before.
The script is carved into me. But right now, it’s just me and the man who hates Christmas like it owes him an apology.
He rescued me anyway.
“Thank you,” I say, and mean more than the words let through.
He lifts a shoulder. “Didn’t like his tone.”
I huff out a laugh that shakes. “Me neither.”
His gaze drops to my mouth, not polite. Not apologetic. My hands grip the bar edge, so I don’t float away. He looks away first, and that feels like a gift too.
Sirens loop in from the square, wrapped up in sleigh bells and cheers like this is just another part of the holiday show.
The teenagers are still crying, but softer.
Sugar Plum’s already corralling witnesses like a rodeo queen.
Humbug pulls his gloves on slow, flexing his fingers like he’s reminding them they’re not done.
“You’ll ride with me,” he says, not a question.
“I have to talk to the police,” I say, though the idea of him leaving feels like a door slamming in my face.
“After,” he says, and nods to the back. “You’re shaking.”
“I’m not,” I lie. My knees choose that second to wobble like they’ve been waiting to embarrass me.
He comes around the bar, all that leather and heat in my orbit, and puts a hand at the small of my back, careful, steady, a brand I might dream about later. The room shifts to make space for him because that’s what rooms do.
I tell myself I’m a good girl. I tell myself this is adrenaline. I tell myself the music swelling in my chest is just the choir outside. I hum “O Holy Night” under my breath like a charm against everything burning up inside me.
“You’re humming again,” he says, and God help me, the corner of his mouth lifts. “Quit it.”
“Make me,” I say, half laughing, half daring.
For one heartbeat I swear he might. Then the police blow in with their cold, their lights, their questions, and I step forward to do the part of the script I know.
Behind me, Humbug waits like a problem I need to solve.