Write Before Christmas, page 8
My shaking fingers grazed Matt’s thigh and walked forward, hunting for his knee. His hand found my knee right away, and he gripped it with his warm, strong hand. A flutter of excitement stirred in my core.
I let out a hopefully inaudible gasp.
“With the next inhale,” Una said, “straighten your back some more, and then with your exhale, deepen the twist, using your partner’s knee as leverage.”
Matt’s back pushed harder against mine, as I gripped the hard ball of his kneecap. His breath continued to move with mine, a little faster now, as we strained into our mutual twist.
“Now relax into the pose.” Easier said than done, Una. “Take a few more deep breaths.”
We did. My left eye met Matt’s, and he winked, diffusing the very palpable tension. I struggled not to laugh.
“On the next inhale, return to center.” Una waited a few beats. “On your exhale, twist to the left and find your partner’s right knee.”
Matt’s back muscles rippled against mine, as we turned to the other side. “This is the strangest thing I’ve ever done,” he whispered.
“Oh, I think this is just the tip of the iceberg.” I giggled.
“Shhh!” the person next to me hissed.
I turned toward them. “Sorry,” I said, but now I’d broken the dam. I tried to choke back a laugh, but it came out as a snort, which sent Matt into a laughing fit, too.
Other people in the room turned toward us, to shush us or to see what all the commotion was about. Matt attempted to hide his face.
“Shoot.” I felt around our mats and found his hat, which I handed over to him. Our fingers brushed once more. “Come on,” I said, reaching for his hand. “Let’s get out of here.”
“Really?” he asked. “You sure?”
“Definitely.” My old joints creaked as I got up. Way to be smooth, Dani. “Let’s grab that coffee instead.”
He lowered the brim of his hat over his face, and we quickly packed up our things. I waved in apology to Una, the phantom sensation of Matt’s body still haunting my skin.
…
Matt
December 9th, still eleven days before deadline
Outside the yoga studio, the main lobby area of the Wackernagel Resort & Spa’s owners’ club had been transformed into a winter wonderland, packed wall-to-wall with hot cocoa stands, cookie exchanges, and crafts for sale. I barely registered any of it. Dani’s sweet scent of cinnamon and sugar lingered in my nose, and I could still sense the pressure of her body against mine. I hadn’t been that close to anyone in months, and I worried that, when we were sitting back-to-back, she could feel my heart racing.
She spun around, frowning. “It’s crowded in here. Do you want to head back?”
What I wanted was to take her home for a more private couple’s yoga session. But since that was off the table, I said, “Nah, let’s get that coffee.” I lowered the bill on my cap. “I’m feeling a bit bold with this disguise.”
Dani and I grabbed a couple of lattes and found a secluded table near the fruitcake display. People streamed past me, eyes focused on other things, not even noticing M.C. Bradford in their midst. The baseball cap was working, and so was the fact that no one would ever expect to see a semi-famous person here, in this remote resort.
After we’d laughed our way through our coffees, rehashing the partner yoga disaster, Dani picked up her gigantic bag and hoisted it over her shoulder. “Well, we should probably get back. I’m sure Jane has put out an APB on you by now.”
I glanced at the clock. Almost six. Jane had taken most of the afternoon off to look at wedding dresses with her sister, which was why she missed yoga, but she was probably back at the house by now. “I texted her before we left to let her know where I was.” She texted me back sixteen hearts, a doughnut, and an eggplant.
Very mature.
Though not far off. That yoga session, if Dani and I had been able to make it through without making giggling jackasses of ourselves, might have indeed ended in doughnuts and eggplants.
Dani stopped at a table on our way to the exit and examined a hat covered in red and green sequins. “This place is maybe a little too Christmasy, even for me.”
“Normally, I’d agree with you,” I said, “and maybe this is the years of my ignoring the holidays talking, but I’m kind of digging it.” The yoga, the whole concept of drinking coffee out in the real world like a regular person, and okay, the company had put me in a refreshed state of mind. I could even see myself enjoying an eggnog or two. Jane was right—maybe not about me having sex with Dani but about me taking some time for myself out of the house and away from the computer. I started walking toward the festivities.
Dani planted her feet. “You have to get home,” she whispered, “to write. You’ve been gone for an hour and a half. That’s way more than your usual run.”
“I know, I know,” I said. “Five minutes.” I picked up a set of Russian nesting dolls painted to look like Santa. “I think this place is giving me all kinds of inspiration.”
She plucked the tchotchke from my hands. “You’re planning on putting a lot of Santa references in your book, are you? Is the king going to sit on his lap and tell Santa about how he poisoned his wife and seduced his niece?”
“Wait,” I said. “How do you know about that?” She’d said she had no clue who I was, and now she was talking about stuff that happened in book two?
She blushed. “I may have started reading your books after I found out who you were.”
“Really?” Now it was my turn for my cheeks to go hot.
“Fantasy’s not normally my thing.” She examined the nesting dolls. “But I’m really enjoying the series.” She looked up at me, her eyes wide. “I think I like how they’re mostly realistic. I’m not big on dragons and elves and stuff.”
I smiled. She got it. Not that it mattered, but I was relieved she saw things my way. “That’s by design. I’m not, either.”
Her eyes were back on the Santa dolls. “That scene with Markys, Danyl, and Tatyana, though…”
Shit. That scene was both the bane of my existence and the reason I was where I was today. “It’s a bit over-the-top,” I said.
“It’s…” Her eyes widened. “There’s a lot going on there, let’s say.”
Looking to change the topic, I snatched the nesting dolls from her hands. “You know, you got me thinking, I’m not going to put Santa in the books, but there are a lot of religious undertones in the series. Maybe there does need to be some kind of reckoning, like at some point all the bad people do need to be held to account—kind of like Santa’s naughty list, but more existential.” I glanced over at her, and she was staring at me, of course. I’d just changed the topic on a dime from sex to spirituality.
She set the Santa down and moved us along to the next table. “I think it’s pretty cool how you can find inspiration like that. I mean, I just mentioned something random from the book, and you knew exactly where to go with it.”
“I wish it were that easy. I mean, you”—I gestured to her, once again in an attempt to steer the chat away from me—“you’re the one who gets inspiration from nothing. Like those eggs you made for me the other night—”
“Migas,” she said.
“Jane told you I was hungry, and apparently you looked around the kitchen, saw what we had on hand, and whipped that up.”
Now it was her turn to blush. “People always make such a big deal about following recipes, but it’s simply knowing what to do with each ingredient and remembering the principles of taste and texture. Anyone can turn a few humble ingredients into a tasty meal.”
“Not everyone.” We’d stopped at a booth full of holly and poinsettia arrangements. I rubbed a velvety petal between my fingers. “Jane’s completely hopeless when it comes to food. She can barely boil water,” I said. “I’m glad she let you take charge of the menu for the premiere party.”
She raised an eyebrow. “What’s that about, anyway?”
I dropped the flower and looked at her. “What?”
“The premiere party. It doesn’t seem on-brand for you.”
I headed to the next table. “It’s not,” I said. “My publicist thought it would help with my image.”
“What’s wrong with your image?” she asked.
Suddenly, I longed to return to the discussion about Markys’s threesome. “Ah, you know, in this business it’s always about selling yourself.” I picked up an item from the display in front of us—mistletoe—and then dropped it as if I’d been bitten. Now was certainly not the time for that dreaded plant to make an appearance.
“Yeah…” She let that hang there for a moment before moving on to another topic. “What about the holidays? You said you’re here to spend time with a friend’s family, so where’s yours?”
“They’re not around.” This entire conversation was a minefield of topics I never discussed with anyone, and I was utterly out of practice when it came to talking about anything real, anything beyond my word count, running, or television, which was not even an option with Dani. Rather than allowing myself to go deeper, I did what I always did: I turned it back on the other person. “What do you and your family do on Christmas Eve?”
Dani’s whole face lit up, thank goodness. “Yankee Swap,” she said, her cheeks and eyes crinkling into an even bigger grin. “You know, like a grab bag thing. We’ve been playing for decades, and it gets super-heated.”
“Fights break out?”
“More like the silent treatment, which lasts until New Year’s.” She moved along to the next booth, where a man was selling homemade wrapping paper. “We’re supposed to keep the price at around $30, but someone—my dad—always tries to make his gift the best by throwing in extra money or lottery tickets.”
“Ah,” I said, “he likes to see people competing for his present.”
“We don’t open the gifts until after the game, but yeah. By now, everyone knows that my dad brings the best ones, so we all try to figure out which is his. He’s very secretive about that.”
I was totally getting into this story. I could picture her family, situated around a Christmas tree, battling it out for her father’s gift. “If your dad brings the best present, someone has to bring the worst.”
She laughed at that. “My brother. Hands down. We always have to remind him to spend $30 on his gift. Once he brought a toilet bank.”
I cupped a hand around my ear. “I’m sorry. Toilet bank?”
“Literally a plastic bank shaped like a toilet. You put some coins in the bowl and flush them down.” She mimed doing just that.
I chuckled. “Sounds amazing.”
“Not if you’re the one who winds up with it.” Her eyes burned with fury as she recalled this still raw story. “I had my dad’s gift in my hand.” She raised her hands, clutching an imaginary object. “And my own mother, who had the final pick of the game, came along and took Dad’s present from me”—she mimed someone wrenching an object from someone else’s hands—“and gave me Bobby’s.”
“The toilet bank,” I said, laughing.
She glowered at me. “It’s not funny.”
“It is, though. How old were you?”
“Old enough to recognize injustice.”
“Do you still have it?”
She examined a roll of wrapping paper decorated with hand-painted silver bells. “The next year, I brought the bank to Christmas Eve as my present—with some twenties attached. For a few years, we kept regifting it, but I’m not sure who has it now. I haven’t seen it for a while.” She took a breath. “Sorry, that was a long, drawn-out story.”
“I loved it,” I said, honestly. “And now I’m obsessed with this bank. Can we find out who has it now? Is it hiding up in the corner of someone’s attic? Does a Christmas ghost live inside it?”
“It was probably thrown out long ago.” She checked her watch. Maybe I was reading too much into that action, but she’d just shared with me one of the most foundational stories of her childhood, and I’d given her nothing. No wonder she was looking at the time.
I cleared my throat. “So…we were talking about that scene with Markys losing his virginity?”
Her eyes snapped to mine. “Yes?” Now I had her full attention.
“It was not my idea.” I wasn’t quite at the point where I was ready to discuss my parents or the infamous Comic Con video, but I could let her in on this one thing, especially since she’d brought it up. “When my agent was about to send the first manuscript out on submission, he suggested that I spice things up a bit.”
She raised her brows. “That scene goes well beyond spicing things up ‘a bit.’”
I laughed. “Well, I have a tendency to get a little spiteful when people ask me to make changes I don’t want to make.”
“This was a spite sex scene.”
“Exactly,” I said. “Kevin—my agent—asked for a little love making, and I went for full, use-every-position-in-the-book debauchery.”
“So, those positions…”
“Totally made up,” I said. “Well, for the most part. I’m pretty sure some of them are physically impossible.”
She giggled.
I covered my face with my hands. “You thought that scene was based on personal experience.”
“No!” She laughed some more.
“Yes, you did!”
The two of us fell into step as we headed toward the door.
“I mean…” she said. “Of course I did. Who makes that up out of nothing?”
“Authors!” I said. “That’s what authors do. We make shit up out of nothing.”
“I guess I’m complimenting you,” she said. “The scene read like you really knew what you were talking about.”
I stopped in my tracks.
She doubled back, concerned. “What?”
“I think you just blew my mind.” I started walking again.
“How so?”
“This is probably why so many women—and let’s be honest, some men—would stand for hours in line to meet me at signings,” I said. “Because they thought that scene was based on personal experience. They thought that, if they slept with me, they’d get to reenact it.” I was starting to see my fan base in a whole new way.
“So, you’d never do any of the stuff you wrote about in that scene?” Dani asked.
“Well.” I smiled at her, something stirring deep inside me. “Never say never.”
Chapter Eight
Dani
When Matt pulled his car into my parents’ driveway and put it in park, I felt like a kid in high school all of a sudden, like I was being dropped off by some hot guy from my social studies class, whom I wasn’t sure liked me yet.
“Thank you for the ride,” I said, unbuckling my seat belt.
He gazed up at my parents’ house. There was a light on in my mom and dad’s bedroom window, which faced us. They were all home—my parents, the kids, and Una—probably watching TV or playing games together. “Hey,” Matt said. “Can I ask you something?”
“Sure.” I let go of the door handle.
In the darkness, his eyes were a deep, serious indigo. “The other day in the kitchen…what were you going to ask me?”
“Oh.” I sank back in my seat. I’d been trying to forget about that ever since. It had been silly, rash, so unlike me to even think about asking him to hook up. But here we were in his car, in the darkness, after a lovely afternoon of joking and flirting and sitting back-to-back while breathing in sync. Maybe I hadn’t been off-base to think that could happen. Maybe saying it out loud would be worth the risk. “I was…” I giggled. “I was going to suggest that maybe we have sex. With each other,” I added, for clarity’s sake.
A slow grin developed on his face. “Really? That was it?”
My stomach soured. He wasn’t interested. I should’ve kept this to myself. “It was…” I said. “Yeah. It was a bad idea.”
“I don’t think it was a bad idea.” The moonlight caught his eyes, making them sparkle. “Why didn’t you bring it up again?”
“Honestly?” I tucked my wild hair behind my ears.
“Honestly. Please.”
“It’s embarrassing.”
Matt waited. He was not going to let me off the hook.
“Well,” I said. “The reason I never brought it up again was because I read that scene…”
Laughing, he balled his hands into fists. “That scene,” he said. “Grrr. I hate it.”
“No.” I reached for him and wrapped my hand around his strong upper arm. “I read it, and yeah, I did think maybe it was somewhat autobiographical.” I paused. “But I wasn’t, like, judging you for it or anything. I only worried that I wouldn’t be able to keep up with you.”
“Oh, Dani.” His face softened.
“I met my ex-husband in college, and I’ve never been with anybody else and—” A tear fell from my right eye, and I wiped it away angrily. “Damn it. I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay.” He reached over and wiped my cheek with his thumb.
I sighed. “I was worried I’d bore you.”
“You do the opposite of bore me, Dani.”
I felt my nose getting puffy and full, but I tried to ignore that. I bit my lip to fight away any more tears.
Matt squeezed my hand. “We have to talk about this, though. I’m only here for a few more weeks. And you work for me.” He raised his eyebrows.
I shook my head. “I kissed you before I knew you were my boss, so I think we’ve found a loophole there. I mean, I’m seeing it as one.”
“What about the first thing?”
I sat up straight, hoping to project an image of strength. “Well, I understand you’re only here for the holidays, and I’m okay with it. Like I said, I was with the same person for twenty-five years. I’m not looking to jump into another few decades with someone else.” This was true. My goal was to try new things and experience life, not to fall head-first into a relationship with the first guy I met.
