Chapter 1 #4
Oh my God! She was being attacked! Carrie fought back on instinct, landing another punch that hit a cheek that did not feel like skin.
Was he wearing a mask? But the man, significantly shorter than her own unremarkable height, kept coming at her with those obscene hip movements.
She kicked him right between the legs, that’ll teach him!
. . . And he sailed backward like he weighed almost nothing, into the stand of fake trees.
Uh, what? She watched in horror as they toppled, like giant, twinkling dominoes.
Her attacker was now on his back, struggling .
. . rhythmically? And . . . singing . . . Elvis?
It took Carrie several long moments to understand that she’d unknowingly triggered and fallen into the gyrating embrace of a life-sized dancing Santa. “Santa Claus is Coming to Town” poured from its tinny speakers.
“What the H-E-Double-Hockey-Sticks!” Carrie yelled, finally extricating herself from the fake sparkle snow entangling her feet to turn and glare at Buck who was doubled over laughing.
“This is NOT funny!”
He clutched at his sides. “Yeah, it is,” he gasped, looking like he was about to cry. “So good.” Gasp. “You should have seen your face!” Gasp. “Plus, all that and you still can’t swear!”
“I work in a children’s toy store!” she hissed, unable to come up with any other explanation for her pathological inability to curse. She grabbed the nearest tree, half its twinkle lights not working now, and slammed the bedraggled thing back upright.
She was grumpily trying to coax it to stand on its own when Buck took her arm and turned her toward him.
“It’s cute.”
She snorted her disbelief and began to turn away. He touched her chin gently to bring her back. His face was serious, sincere.
“No, it's really cute. You keep surprising me with how adorable you are. You don't know how refreshing that is in my line of work.”
Santa Elvis chose that moment to slow his floor show and started crooning, “I’ll, uh have, uh uh a blue . . . Christmas . . . without you.”
“Oh, geeze.” Carrie couldn’t help it. She joined Buck in laughing till tears ran down her cheeks.
She wiped at them with her palms to observe the hopeless wreckage around her.
Poor Tracey. First Halloween, and now someone had broken into her store and decimated her meticulous Christmas display. Someone.
After a minute, still laughing weakly, she found herself standing a smidge too close.
She caught her breath and froze, looking up to see the twinkle lights reflecting in his eyes from the fallen trees.
His laughter faded to softness as he gazed down at her and for a moment, she thought he might kiss her.
But instead, he swallowed and stepped back, lifting her cart out of the mess for her and putting it back down on a clear section of aisle. “Let’s get what we need and get out of here before someone calls the cops, huh?”
Buck, it turned out, had found the sewing section, which must have been near the candles because it smelled strongly of pumpkin spice again.
At least they were out of the faux evergreen section.
Without all the sparkle lights of the Christmas trees, it was hard to see any more than the pillowy shapes of plastic bags of stuffing as they packed as much as they could into the rolling carts.
“Out of curiosity,” he broke their companionable silence as they rolled the carts back through the warehouse to the backdoor, “what were you thinking so hard about earlier? At your station in the Toys-A-Lot warehouse when you stopped pulling the goods out of the toys? I thought you were flipping, gonna rat us out to the fuzz the first chance you got, but that wasn’t it, was it? ”
Carrie stiffened. She wasn’t going to tell him. Nope, that was none of his business. But then she glanced over at him and saw his cajoling, handsome face in the dim light.
Oh, fine, what the heck?
“I’m supposed to go to Thanksgiving at my aunt’s house today.
My perfect Aunt Melinda, with her perfect daughter, and now perfect grandbaby.
I’m supposed to bring a special side dish that I don’t have time to cook, and make nice conversation while everyone asks me about my stupid, boring job, and lack of boyfriend, and why I’m not a lawyer or doctor or whatever.
You had so much potential, Carrie.” She pitched her voice into a high imitation of her most irritating aunt.
“We just want to see you happy, Carrie. And then, I swear, one minute later it will be, are you dating anyone, Carrie? Why aren’t you settled down with a nice man yet?
And then, Isn’t Sarah’s baby just the sweetest?
Don’t you want to hold it, Carrie? Don’t you want one of your own?
And no! NO, I DO NOT!” She realized she was venting at her ex-high school crush and looked over at him, scared at what she would see.
She was surprised to see him nodding along.
Carrie sighed. “I don’t think I’m going to go, even though my mom will kill me. I’ve got too much to do here anyway.”
“I get it,” he said, digging her phone out of his pocket and handing it back to her. “But, for whatever it’s worth, maybe think about going anyway. Family is everything.”
“I just wish,” she sighed wistfully, but shook her head and turned away. “Never mind.”
“No, what?” He caught her hand and turned her back to him. With his other hand, he touched a finger under her chin, bringing it up so he could look into her eyes. “What do you wish?” he whispered, looking in that moment as though he’d give it to her if he could.
“That I could be someone’s everything,” she whispered, blushing at having admitted such a desperate thing out loud. “Silly, I know.” She turned away in embarrassment, breaking the mood.
“You probably just haven’t shown them your Blue Christmas dance moves,” he said softly. It was probably the lighting playing tricks, but when she glanced at him, the look on his face was . . . tender?
“Oh, shut up,” she said, but couldn’t keep the corners of her lips from turning up at him.
When they got back to the Toys-A-Lot warehouse, Buck’s associates were just about done gutting the mutant, neon monsters. Carrie began the re-stuffing of 900 wrinkly-skinned alien owls.
“Ugh, Buck, did you take one of those awful candles or something?” she asked.
She sniffed the air until her nose brought her to the bag of stuffing she’d just opened.
She looked at the bag’s label and recoiled, before thunking her head down on the table.
Buck picked up one of the bags of stuffing from the nearest cart.
“Huh. Who knew they even made this stuff in pumpkin spice scent?”
Carrie took a deep breath (through her mouth) and kept stuffing and repackaging the now irreparably fall-scented FurrBabies. It was 3am before Thanksgiving Day. She did not have time to stop.
~ 12 Hours Later ~
Carrie felt like her eyelids were weighted with sand as she nursed her third cup of coffee and finished up her phone calls to every radio station in the tri-state area from a floral brocade armchair in the corner of her aunt’s living room.
She could say her spiel by rote now. Amazing news!
Toys-A-Lot location has received a lucky shipment of the fall’s must-have toy!
FurrBabies fully stocked for Black Friday!
Location, hours, blah, blah, blah, next.
But she was here. She’d made it to her family’s Thanksgiving, and as she hung up her cellphone on the last call and looked around her aunt’s trendy forest green and dusty mauve living room, her cousins chatting and playing with the baby just a few yards away, she felt a rush of accomplishment in that simple fact.
Yes, she was surrounded by her annoying aunts and cousins, but she had to admit that her annoyance level may have had something to do with her lack of sleep, and she felt good about making it there after all.
She remembered Buck’s advice: family was everything.
She’d gotten home in time to shower and change into a cute fall outfit, brush her hair, slap concealer under her eyes, and had even stopped at the grocery store for mac and cheese from the deli.
It wasn’t the special casserole she’d promised, but hey, it was food.
She’d firmly told her family she was happy to see them, but tomorrow was a big day for her and she was still working.
And she’d told them no. She didn’t have a boyfriend and didn’t want to hold the baby.
The look on her aunt’s face had been priceless.
Carrie hadn’t said that she wished the boyfriend part wasn’t true.
She still had to go back to work after dinner, but she could see the finish line in sight.
The monstrosities were all miraculously re-stuffed and back in their boxes, the miracle being that Carrie had worked the rest of the night and all through the morning to get them into a semblance of their proper shape.
Now she just had to print up orange labels (thankfully leftover from Halloween) to say, Special Edition: Fall Scented!
and slap them on the boxes to explain their unmistakable stench.
It was going to work and she felt the euphoria of her first, nearly complete heist .
. . caper . . . whatever. She just had to make it through the Black Friday sale and she was home free.
And she owed this feeling to Buck. Two days ago, she’d been going along in slow-motion, nearly asleep at the wheel of her life. Then Buck had jumped in and shoved her foot down on the gas. She felt wild and out of control and . . . alive. She liked it. She liked it a lot.