Chapter 16 Staged #2
Everyone around us notices, including Audrey.
“Get a room,” I mutter, nudging Amanda with an elbow, my pretend jab sounding a little more sour than I intended.
Portia smiles, and Amanda shoots me a what-the-hell look that demands an answer I don’t have.
What’s wrong with me?
Seeing the mayor huddled with his family the way people who belong together can, I have a feeling I know exactly what’s wrong with me.
My eyes cut to Audrey once more, standing in front of the tree we both almost took down on my second day in town, and I wonder if she’s already reached the same conclusion I have and she’s too scared to say out loud.
But I’m not.
I may think about aesthetics before practicality when it comes to clothes, and I may overthink everything else, but if there’s one thing I do well, it’s act when I know the answer.
Pulling out my phone, I check the signal. The universe must be on my side because there’s actual service. Not much, but enough to fire off a text.
I type one out now, focused more on speed than accuracy, trying to thread the needle as it were with my limited signal time.
“Whatcha doing?” Amanda, nosy as always, leans over my shoulder.
“Taking on a new client.” And if it works out, I’ll be taking on more than just a client.
“Get out.” She shoves me—playfully but hard enough that I spend a few precious seconds backtracking the smear of random letters it made me type. “Really?”
“Yes, really.” Though I don’t want to say anything more until I hear back.
The piano on the small stage clunks a chord that sounds like it lost a fight with time—a signal the caroling festivities are about to start. A woman in a Santa hat with holly berries skewed like a crown pushes a crate of thin paper songbooks into the hands of anyone within reach.
I hit send on my text just as a book smacks my chest. I catch it on reflex.
Amanda nudges my elbow, her earlier enthusiasm dimming as she looks between me and Audrey, who’s edging into an opening near us—but not with us, if that makes sense. “Are you sure?”
“Yes.” I nod, eyes on the catalyst to my recent decision. “I’m sure.”
Audrey catches us looking and tries her smile again. It still misses, but something settles in my chest.
“I spent years building my career in LA.” Pulling my attention back to Amanda, I reshape my expression into its usual easygoing agent’s smile. “It makes sense to—”
The mic squeals; half the town winces. The beleaguered volunteer at the keyboard clears his throat into it like he’s negotiating with the machine before declaring “Twelve Days” the opening number.
Portia links arms with Amanda, either not caring or oblivious to the stares aimed their way, and Amanda forgets our conversation in favor of her first foray into public caroling.
Mine too.
Buzzing with anticipation from what I just set in motion, I find the first verse of “Twelve Days” low-stakes—everyone mumbling about a pear tree like we’re unsure whether we believe in birds as gifts.
I trace the words in the booklet with my finger because the font is microscopic and the light is romantic rather than functional, wondering if I should shuffle over to Audrey since it doesn’t seem like she’s going to move any closer to me.
Second verse: two turtle doves, and my confidence, which was mostly distraction, is grossly misplaced.
By verse three, though, a problem surfaces.
A different problem than the one I have with the town baker.
I can’t hear myself.
Or rather, I can—but I assume everyone else can’t, because I am a man who has given presentations to skeptical studio heads. I project, therefore I am. I lean into it a little—pure defensive habit.
When you’re not sure you’re blending, you turn up the volume so you won’t get swallowed by the chorus.
I attempt what I imagine to be a warm baritone. “Three French hens…”
Amanda’s head turns slowly. Portia’s eyebrows climb like mountaineers in need of oxygen.
I glance toward Audrey, looking for reassurance and calibration, and while she is finally looking at me, it’s with wide eyes, her mitten pressed to her mouth with horror rather than affection.
This is where a wiser man might lower the dial.
I am not that man.
Verse four. A kid in a beanie pivots like a weathervane in a storm. My storm. A couple near the cocoa stall exchange the look of people who just discovered a faucet leak behind a wall: not catastrophic yet, but there’s a sound—and it’s me. I’m the leak.
I try to soften.
It does not soften.
What happens is that I switch keys altogether and—without consultation with the laws of music—enter a brave new place none of my fellow carolers care to visit.
“Fiiiiiive gold riiiiiiings…” I go long on the vowel like it owes me money.
Silence peels off the crowd in a flapping wave. Even the piano hesitates, like sir?
I look to Skippy, my lone male companion in this town, and he gives me a long-suffering head tilt.
Embarrassment pricks the back of my neck. I see myself as they must: a man in a very nice coat thinking he can croon his way through a tradition he didn’t grow up with. Because community and caroling is not me.
They see me as a power tie. A closer. The guy who finds loopholes in contracts, not high notes in a hymn.
And I am—but I can be more.
Yet just as I’m about to prove them right and invoke a caroling loophole—plead the Fifth by lip-syncing—I notice Audrey’s shoulders begin to shake.
Her earlier distance cracks like sugar glass under a spoon.
If my options are her silence or her laughter at my expense—give me the guillotine and call it festive. Aggressively so.
I lean all the way in.
“On the sixth day of Christmas…” I croon, sliding a hand out of my pocket to mime an invisible microphone. The town perks up the way crowds do when a man commits publicly to a bit that might go to hell.
On “lords a-leaping” I put height under it, my loafers hovering just an inch off the ground, and the kids howl. “Maids a-milking,” I pantomime, and a retiree in a tartan scarf wheezes into his cocoa.
Amanda covers her face, peeking through her fingers. Portia leans into her, shoulders shaking.
“Do the rings,” a ten-year-old commands, elbowing his buddy.
I hold up a finger: one moment. Build the suspense.
He beams, front tooth missing.
The carolers vocalize about geese and swans while I vandalize the melody with good faith and poor aim.
Somewhere around drummers drumming, the alchemy happens—the one I’ve seen in rooms where someone risks looking ridiculous without flinching.
You can’t boo a person offering you their whole self with nothing guarded.
By the time I unholster “five gold rings” again, a group has rotated to circle me like a cheap spotlight.
I give them everything: chin lift, shoulder roll, a slide into the note so brazen I can feel my tailor back in LA telepathically begging me not to crack a seam. “Fiiiiiive goooold riiiiings…” I belt until even those with an ironclad grip on carol tradition are hooting in amusement.
“Again!” my young tooth-gap challenger yells as a man appears with a cowbell from nowhere, raising his brows at Audrey in question.
Audrey, shaking her head in disbelief, takes a step toward me. Her nose is red and a bit shiny underneath, and her smile is half amusement, half I-can’t-look-away-from-this-train-wreck.
She’s adorable.
The crowd launches into another chorus, the man clanging his cowbell on “rings” like we rehearsed it. Everyone—including Audrey—roars. The volunteer pianist gives up steering me with tempo and lets me hydroplane. A teenager starts beatboxing badly; I shoot him a grateful thumbs-up.
We—the townsfolk and I—slaughter Christmas with consent.
And when the final line is sung and there are no more choruses to butcher, the crowd shifts, the volume dropping to something like reverence when the piano player begins “Silent Night.”
Couples link arms. Parents gather small bodies close and sway. Warmth stacks on warmth until I can feel it through scarf and coat. I find my way to Audrey, who holds my gaze, her eyes no longer distracted by anything.
“Well,” she whispers, eyes bright as she looks up at me, “that was by far the worst singing I’ve ever heard.”
I huff out a laugh. “I cannot object.”
Her lips quirk. “I loved it.”
Chest tight for reasons that have nothing to do with breath control, I choose to do both myself and humanity a favor and launch into “Silent Night” as God intended me to—by humming. Softly.
When the last chord fades, the square holds that strange, sacred quiet that happens when a lot of voices agree.
On cue, it starts to snow—powder-fine, a sprinkle-sugar flurry that floats rather than falls.
The lights catch it, and everything turns briefly cinematic.
It dusts Audrey’s hair and the bridge of her pink nose. She blinks up at it, then at me.
She’s perfect.
In this moment. In this town. In the life she’s building.
She deserves it all—family, roots, and a man without an expiration date buried in the fine print.