Christmas Eve #3
“Thank you,” Charming said solemnly, as if she had great faith in Christmas wishes. “I have oodles of plans for the guests, and at least one requires a foot of snowfall.”
“No worries, my pet,” said Andrews. “We have contingency plans.”
“What are they?” asked Kestrel. “Pretending that there’s snow?”
Andrews looked at her severely. “You think I couldn’t do it?” He bent to the kitchen floor with a scooping hand, mimed patting a snowball, and flung the nothing at her head.
Kestrel gasped. “How dare you?” She mimed gathering snow from the kitchen floor and hurled another invisible ball at Andrews.
“I say, that’s unladylike. Jerome, to me!”
Soon Kestrel and Charming were crouched behind the table lobbing ghost snowballs at the two gents while they took the hits like soldiers, dying an agonizing death on the stone floor.
The ladies joined them there, bringing a chocolate blackberry traybake left over from Christmas Eve dinner. They ate spoonfuls from the pan and traded stories about their worst Christmases. Kestrel kept hers back. She’d already won the dance marathon. She didn’t need to win everything.
As soon as Jerome yawned and left for bed, Kestrel leaned in to Andrews and whispered, “Are you and Jerome together?”
“No, Jerome isn’t interested in men—or in anyone romantically. But we’re best mates.” Andrews sighed, and there was no regret in it. A sigh of pure joy.
“And Charming?”
“She’s my other best mate, isn’t she?” he said, laying his head on Charming’s knee. Charming idly played with Andrews’s hair. “Was ever a bloke so lucky?”
“With two best friends and half a pan of cake?” said Kestrel. “You’re the luckiest guy alive.”
When Charming began to yawn, Andrews popped to his feet and offered to carry Kestrel’s luggage upstairs. He hesitated in the second-floor hallway.
“Er, where is Kestrel sleeping? The staff is off for Christmas, and I don’t know which room they set aside for the new maid.”
“I have a ginormous bed,” said Charming. She thrust her fists into the air and declared, “Slumber party!”
Charming took Kestrel’s hand and pulled her and her luggage down the dark hall and into a bedroom that looked struck by a friendly indoor hurricane.
“Don’t mind the mess,” Charming said, kicking her way in. Clothes and items were stacked and hung over all the furniture and piled on the floor like knee-high stalagmites. “The rest of this house feels like a museum. I tell the maids to leave my room alone. I need one place where I can just relax.”
Charming tore off her robe, tossed it onto the floor, and, in her satin nightgown, dove headfirst onto a king-sized bed topped by a massive pink canopy.
“Hop in,” she said, her face muffled in a pillow. “And don’t worry, I sleep like a toad buried in mud.”
Too tired to worry or brush her teeth, Kestrel shrugged off her travel clothes, pulled on a nightshirt, and cozied under the covers. Charming clapped her hands twice, and the lights turned off.
“Nifty,” said Kestrel into the darkness. “Thanks for putting me up.”
Charming’s muffled voice said, “I don’t like sleeping alone, even though it’s all I do anymore.”
“Bad breakup?” Kestrel guessed.
“The worst. Bobby and I had been together since high school, got married at eighteen. By the time I figured out he was cheating on me, he’d been doing it for years.”
“That sort of breakup feels like a piece of you got torn off, and you’re bleeding out while having to pretend that you’re fine.”
“I’m glad someone gets it,” said Charming. “How pathetic is it that I still miss him? I’m like a drunk raccoon trying to make out with a fire hydrant.”
“Have you done much therapy?”
“Red-light therapy? Loads. I have the collagen of a woman half my age.”
“So . . . half of twenty-eight . . . A woman of fourteen?”
“Abso-frickin-lutely.”
“I meant mental-health therapy.”
Charming spoke through a long yawn. “Headshrinks are not for me.”
“Yeah, they say you have to find the right one, and I guess I never have either,” said Kestrel. “I know I should keep trying, but I lost my health insurance recently, and it’s just—”
From the darkness beside her came a genteel snore.
“Good night, Miss Charming,” Kestrel whispered. “Merry Christmas.”
As she lay in the quiet (apart from Charming’s occasional musical inhales), Kestrel began to fret that this situation was too weird even for her standards.
She’d won a competition for a vacation that was during Christmas, in a foreign country where she was expected to work as a maid, and her accommodations were the co-owner’s bed.
Was this her usual fare of the zany and unexpected—or was it potentially dangerous?
Kestrel rolled over, hugged a pillow, and decided to press pause on the worries till morning.
Somewhere from deep inside the house, a clock struck twelve, and a thrill passed down Kestrel’s spine, tingling into the tips of her toes.
It was officially Christmas in Austenland.
There was sure to be new friends, old traditions, good food, unexpected gifts, songs, dances, intrigues, merriment, and maybe even some Christmas magic.
And she rashly assumed she was ready for all of it.