Chapter 9
CHAPTER 9
GABE
I cannot believe I let myself get roped into this. I’m supposed to be lying on my incredibly comfy new sofa, watching whatever National Geographic wants to teach me about the animal kingdom, making myself whatever non-festive food I want for dinner, and talking to absolutely no one.
But here I am, standing on the half of the Warm Springs theater stage that still appears safe, aside from the hole that has orange cones on either side of it, surrounded by the scattered remnants of burned scenery, props and costumes.
“Oh my God,” Natalie says for the one-hundred-and-sixty-seventh time since I got here five minutes ago. “I can’t believe it.”
From a partially melted plastic bin she pulls out what looks like an old brown curtain and holds it up.
“The nobleman’s cloak,” she says. “Ruined. ”
“Since you’ve said that about everything you’ve encountered so far, I’d expect you to be getting less surprised.”
She scrunches the cloak into a fist that she slams onto her hip as she sucks her teeth and stares at me. A chunk of the crisp fabric snaps off and floats to her feet.
“Also,” I add, “if it’s all useless, wouldn’t it be quicker to stop sorting through it and just trash everything and start from scratch? Certainly seems the most logical option to me.”
“It might be more logical, but a lot of people put a lot of time and effort into making these things, so if anything can be salvaged, I’m salvaging it.”
“Shame about the trees.” I poke my toe at the pile of half-burned cutout plywood trees that Nat was stacking up on the stage when I got here. “Someone sure made a fuck-ton of them.”
“That’s because this year I set it in a forest.”
“You set it in different places each time?”
“Yup. That’s one of the points of it. Telling the same story in a new and original way each year.”
“Where else have you set it?” Why the fuck am I asking? I couldn’t give a shit where this play’s been set—this year or any other. But I guess it might help to focus her on something other than freaking out about every individual ruined item.
Nat’s face lights up, like she’s suddenly forgotten we’re surrounded by the charred remains of her Christmas dreams. “My favorite was three years ago when we set it in the 1960s. We did it Grease -style. All greasers and girls with those full circle skirts.” She holds her arms out and swings her hips from side to side, presumably to demonstrate an action that is compulsory to make when wearing one. “It was very cool,” she says. “Two dads made the most brilliant wigs.”
The hip-swinging might have been entirely unnecessary, but I could have watched it for a couple of hours without losing interest.
“So it’s not just different locations, but different time periods?” My instinct to be sarcastic faded about halfway through that sentence and morphed into something vaguely resembling interest.
“Yup. Last year we did it with a Shakespeare vibe. It was all ‘forsooth this’ and ‘thine that.’ That was pretty popular. Oh, and my predecessor did a version of it set on the moon. I’ve seen a video. It was pretty good.”
She unfurls the crumbling cloak and folds it neatly. “I was thinking. Since we’re doing it on ice, it could be set in an icicle forest instead of a regular forest.”
“I’m pretty sure there’s no such thing as an icicle forest.”
“Only if you have no imagination. We could dress all the townsfolk up as icicles.”
She tips her chin up with indignation and, clutching the folded cloak to her chest, pauses to gaze up at the blackened ceiling. “Wonder what the new person will do next Christmas?”
“The one replacing you when you move to New Orleans?”
“Yeah, they’ve hired some old Broadway actor to start in the new year.” Natalie doesn’t seem particularly excited about moving to a new job in one of the world’s most vibrant cities. She sounds like someone who might be doing it only because she thinks it’s what she should be doing.
“Anyway, let’s see what we can salvage for this year.” She drops the cloak on the garbage pile and bends over the bin again to resume rummaging.
The upside of this activity is her backside. She’s wearing tight jeans tucked into furry calf-high boots and a purple puffer jacket that stops at her hips and, conveniently, rides up as she leans over.
Her ass is the perfect balance of roundness and grabbableness. Just right for sinking my fingers into as I lift her up and she wraps her legs around my wai?—
“Look. See?” And suddenly she’s upright again and facing me. An accusatory expression under a bright green beanie fixes itself on me. “It is worth going through everything. Wendolyn’s veil. Totally survived.” She’s holding up a long piece of seemingly undamaged netting.
“Oh, good. I mean, how ever would poor Wendolyn cope without a veil?”
“It’s actually an important part of the story because?—”
Silenced by me pretending to nod off, she gives me that hard glare again, the one that’s either been honed by years of drama school or been handed down through so many generations that it’s baked into her genes. Talking of jeans…that dark blue denim is clinging to some very shapely thighs that I’m sure would feel mighty fine wrapped around my wai?—
“It’s pointless trying to talk to you.” She puts the veil on the “good” pile, which only contains one other thing—a heavy metal mallet that could probably survive a blast furnace and being driven over a by a tractor—and gets back to the rummaging.
“Are you going to even try to help?” She pops back up, holding two items. I’m clueless as to what the pink one in her left hand used to be, but I’m pretty sure that gold plastic lump in her right was once a goblet. “Or else why are you even here?”
“Because you blackmailed me, remember?” And maybe because looking at her ass might just beat what’s on the National Geographic channel this morning. Though the story of how some Antarctic penguins build nests out of pebbles presented to them by the males as part of their courtship was fairly fascinating and I didn’t want to walk away from it to come here.
“Isn’t it clear I’m here under duress?” I ask. “The team has a whole kids’ hockey thing I’ve always avoided. If I wanted to be involved in stuff like this, I’d be doing it there.”
It wasn’t an unpleasant drive through town to get here, though. Got to admit, Warm Springs is pretty damn quaint. Main Street, with its mom-and-pop stores and their striped awnings, was covered in a fresh dusting of snow that clung to the tops of the black wrought iron lampposts.
Shame they had those hideous colored lights strung between them and every door was adorned with a festive wreath. The little produce shop had even arranged its sidewalk display so the fruit and vegetables formed a snowman, and a thing next to it I think was supposed to be a goat. But why a goat?
“Look.” I move toward her, trying to dodge the daggers flying from her eyes. “How about I just find a construction crew able to take a rush job, you can have the play here as planned, and I can go home?”
And I can put all ideas of my hands on her body out of my head. Out of sight, out of mind—isn’t that what they say about asses you want to sink your fingers into?
“Jesus.” She looks toward the empty seats as if she can’t even bear the sight of me anymore. “You see, this is why I don’t like you.” She tosses the pink thing and the melted goblet back into the damaged bin and flings her arms wide. “You’re the sort of person who thinks, ‘I’ll just throw some money at that and make it go away.’”
I shove my hands into my pockets—it’s fucking freezing in here—and stay solidly calm in the face of her fiery dislike of me. “Is there a reason I can’t?”
“Oh my God,” she cries again. It’s louder this time and accompanied by an infuriated foot stomp that snaps a charred floorboard and sends her teetering to one side, arms windmilling to stay upright.
“Careful. That was your good ankle. And you only have two.”
It’s hard to know if the flush of her cheeks is due to the embarrassment of almost falling flat on that glorious rear end in front of me, or from her internal bubbling fury.
Either is fine by me, because they both mean she might think better of wanting me around.
“Honestly, Gabe Woods.”
At her use of my name, I instinctively glance around the empty room in case there’s anyone in earshot who might have heard it.
“Every construction crew in town is wildly busy trying to complete their jobs before the holidays.” She sounds shocked that I couldn’t have figured that out for myself. “The McAllisters are finishing off a designer vacation home for some Wall Street family. Johnson’s Joinery is tied up with all the woodwork on the same thing. And Construction Suction is dealing with a nasty sewer issue at two apartment buildings. And anyway, no one could fix all this and get a safety inspection in under two weeks. But even if it were possible, you are missing the point—you can not buy the care and love and memories that have been put into this theater over the years and into making these costumes and those trees.”
“Am I supposed to be upset that you don’t like me?”
“Not really. It’s not possible for someone lacking in typical human emotions to be upset.”
“Why would you think I lack typical human emotions?”
She holds up a hand and ticks off items on her fingers. “You hate Christmas. You’re hiding from your parents. In fact you’re lying to your parents, who seem to be your only friends. And you don’t have a compassionate pore on your entire”—she waves at me from head to toe—“big square giant being.”
“My parents are not my only friends.” But she better not ask me to name any or I won’t be able to come up with anyone outside of the team. “I have friends. I used to have a best friend, but we haven’t talked in a minute.”
“Sure, yeah. Some of the kids have imaginary friends too.”
“Gosh, your verbal sparring is so wounding.” I stab an imaginary knife into my heart and wilt a little. “Have you forgotten I do battle every week against half a dozen men, some of them bigger, all of them armed with large lethal weapons and blades on their feet? Compared to that, you telling me you don’t like me is like fighting with a…well, a bunny.”
My mind flashes back to her trying to stand up in the snow with those giant rabbit feet on, and I have to bite my bottom lip to stop myself from smirking. There’s no way I’m going to let her see any sign that I might be ever so slightly and totally unexpectedly enjoying myself.
If she’s got me pegged as some sort of permanently miserable, unfeeling, unthinking Neanderthal, that’s what she can have. That way, she might want me out of her sight sooner rather than later and I can get back to doing what I came here to do. Which is mainly anything but whatever the hell this is.
“You might think I don’t have a community-spirited bone in my body. But I bet you don’t have a competitive one in yours. I bet you roll over and do whatever anyone wants to make them happy.”
She gapes at me, eyes wide, cheeks flaming, fists clenching at her sides.
“That’s rich coming from a grown man who can’t even bring himself to tell his parents he doesn’t like Christmas. Apparently you can’t even be your real self around them. Clearly you’re happy to have a beatdown on the ice over…whatever it is you guys all fight about. But you won’t take any kind of a stand for things that really matter. Like being yourself around the people you love.”
Her words hit a nerve that sends me stepping around the charred trees toward her. “I do not have to take a character assassination from someone whose idea of fun is covering someone’s house in enough appalling Christmas decorations to embarrass even the Griswolds. Someone who’s twenty-whatever but lives at a retirement home. And someone who has quit a job she clearly loves to move south for some reason that isn’t because she wants to. Maybe because you don’t have enough backbone to stand up for being yourself.”
I’m so close that I can make out flecks of steely gray in her eyes. The frighteningly accurate assessment of me, from someone I met only yesterday, has clearly unfurled something that had been living tightly coiled inside me for some time .
I shove my hands into my pockets. “I certainly don’t think for a single second you’d have the balls to tell my parents I haven’t been totally honest with them. So I’m just going to go and leave you to it.”
Natalie leans back, like she’s in a wind tunnel of my words and I’m way too far up in her business. Which I might be. And that’s not great. Have I been on the rink for so long that I’ve forgotten that yelling in people’s faces isn’t appropriate?
“You think I don’t stand up for myself, Mr. I Sent My Parents On A Cruise To Get Out Of Christmas?” She straightens, thrusting back her shoulders. And the fire in those gray-blue eyes makes my dick reach for the sky.
“Okay then.” Why does this feel like the type of fight you have before you have screaming, throwing-each-other-around, makeup sex? “Bring it on. Show me what you got.”
“I’ll tell you tha?—”
She’s halted by the double doors at the top of the aisle flying open.
Our heads turn as a bunch of kids of various ages and sizes hurtles toward us.
Instinctively I turn away and pull my collar up and my hat down. As I move to the back of the stage, I catch Natalie in my peripheral vision, watching me and sucking in her lips. It only lasts for a fraction of a second, but it’s one of those expressions like someone’s trying to figure out very fast what to do or if they should do it.
The kids are all talking at once, and their chatter and pounding feet get louder and louder, like rolling thunder, as they careen down the aisle toward us.
Time for me to make a swift exit stage left.
“Hey, kids,” Natalie shouts above their din. “Hush a second. I have some news.”
“Is the play canceled?” one kid shouts out.
“Can’t we fix the theater?” asks the next.
“Does this mean there won’t be a party?” says another voice.
“Everything’s going to be just fine.” Her voice is calm and confident and as happy as can fucking be. “You know why?”
“Why?” All the kids shout together in that way only kids ever do.
“Because we have a new and extremely special helper.”
Oh no.
No.
I pick up the pace and am just about to round a lighting rig to the safety of the wings when she says, “Grayson, Matteo, Prema, you’re all hockey fans, aren’t you?”
Fuck.
“Well, look who’s going to help save our show. It’s Gabe Woods.”
I turn at the sound of my name the same way a deer turns to stare at the headlights of a car that’s about to hit it.
“He had the inspired idea of staging it on ice,” Natalie adds. “And he’s coming to the pond this afternoon to help us get started.”
The kids’ gasps echo in my ears as it dawns on me there’s no way out. They’ve seen me. She’s told them I’m helping. How can the famous athlete walk away from kids who need his help without being the grinchiest real-life Grinch that ever lived?
This was supposed to be the best Christmas ever. My first Christmas with no Christmas .
And it’s turned into the worst.
But Natalie just did exactly what I challenged her to do. She stood up for herself against me. She fucking brought it.
Game on, Bugs. Game on.