Christmas Box Set

by Nella Tyler

  I closed my bedroom door and got in bed, not even wanting to answer the text messages I’d received from Jake and a few of the other guys. Nothing from Sophia, of course, though my number hadn’t changed since high school. Unlike hers. But that was yet another way she’d come up with to leave me behind in Wisconsin with the rest of her past life.

  As I lay in the dark, staring out of the window at the winter sky, I made up my mind about how I wanted to move forward in my life, starting with two of the most immediate challenges in front of me: surviving the rest of the holiday season and making it through Dad’s Christmas wedding.

  I had no choice but to interact with Sophia. Our parents were getting married. My plan for how to get by was to treat her the same way I would a total stranger: with politeness and nothing more. We weren’t friends. We weren’t anything at all. She’d made that much crystal clear to me several years ago. For some reason, it had taken hearing it directly from her mouth for it to really sink into my numb, stubborn skull.

  But I understood it now. I got it. And, I planned to give her exactly what she wanted. The days of me feeling bad over the loss of my relationship with a girl I used to dream of one day marrying were done. I’d be pleasant when she was around so I didn’t ruin my dad’s wedding, but after that, I refused to even think about Sophia Ray. I was finished feeling intense pain and regret over not having a relationship with her. She’d moved on. I needed to commit myself to doing the same. I could start first thing tomorrow morning.

  Those decisions made, I found the bulk of my anger had burned out on its own. Mom used to make me take cold showers whenever I got too upset. And though not many memories about her stirred up warm, fuzzy feelings inside of me, those showers did. It looked like they still worked. I felt exhausted and used up. The last week had been especially taxing. I just wanted to get through the crazy bustle of the holidays and get back to my boring little life in San Francisco. Except I planned to make it a lot less boring once I got home.

  I grabbed my cellphone from the night table next to my old twin bed and tapped out a message to Jason.

  As soon as I get home, I want you to set me up with someone. I’m ready to start having fun, ASAP.

  I reread it a few times, and then pressed send. Fuck it. I deserved some fun, didn’t I? It felt like ages since I’d had a good time with a woman.

  I set the phone back down again, not expecting an answer until the morning. It was late, even in California, which was two hours behind us, making it just about two am. But my phone beeped less than a minute later with his reply.

  Fuck yeah! I have the perfect honey in mind. She’ll rock your world.

  I messaged back: Sounds good! and put the phone away again.

  Feeling a lot better, I closed my eyes and fell right into dreams I didn’t remember when I woke up the next morning.

  Sophia

  The Next Evening, Four Days before the Wedding

  The closer we got to the wedding, the more flustered Mom became, like the pressure was increasing with every hour that passed, quickly causing her to unravel at the seams. She was still floating up in the ether even higher than cloud nine, but she was also turning into a real basket case as time went on. It was really weird to see, as she’d always been the rock solid foundation for us growing up. Nothing could knock her off balance or cause her to lose her shit, but I guess I hadn’t seen her planning the ceremony and reception for her marriage to Dad.

  Lacey and I joked that if this wedding didn’t happen soon, we were both leaving and never coming back. Mom laughed nervously, and then asked us to go over the plans with her again, checking things off of one of the endless lists she’d created for both the holiday itself — we were going to celebrate one last Christmas right before the wedding as a family of three, the way we always had since the year Dad died — and the wedding, which was separate from all the regular Christmas crazy. All this frantic planning for two huge events taking place on the same day was stretching Mom to her limit, meaning most of the day-to-day stuff had been left for Lacey and me to take care of. We were happy to have tasks we could accomplish away from the house, leaving Mom free to well and truly freak out if she wanted.

  Today, Lacey and I left the house with a number of places to hit up, starting with the bridal shop to make sure all our alterations would be finished by tomorrow afternoon, as promised. Then we went by the venue to drop off the final deposit on the space — I still couldn’t believe they were willing to host and cater a function on Christmas Day, but they acted like this was perfectly routine — and took a look around, since neither of us had even seen it yet.

  Our final stop was the grocery store. We were out of just about everything. Mom had been all but living with Mr. Mills — ugh, John — since right after they started dating, so her cupboards were just about bare. Lacey had gotten it into her head that we needed to bake our traditional cookies and even a few batches of chocolate and peppermint fudge, even though we were all running around like crazy trying to get everything done. The minute Mom heard Lacey utter words, she insisted we write down the ingredients we needed from her recipe cards and go out immediately to get everything from the store. She even suggested we invite Carter and his father over to bake with us, but I put the brakes on that before it got out of control, proposing that we make everything and surprise them with a big platter of the finished products. Mom thought that was great.

  Now we were stuck making the damned cookies and fudge, which I really wasn’t excited to do. But at least I could put off the five of us doing it as a family for another year. I had no idea how I was going to deal with the rest of my life with Carter as a permanent part of it.

  Lace and I went a little crazy in the store. Okay, we went a lot crazy, completely filling up the cart with anything that caught our eye. We also bought stuff for an over-the-top Christmas Eve feast, since we wouldn’t be able to have our regular family meal on the actual holiday, and Mom had mentioned her desire to keep with the traditional values of not seeing her groom the night before the wedding. We were running through the store throwing things in the basket — eggnog, ham, ingredients for cookies and corn casserole, cranberry sauce — and cackling like crazy women. It was the best time I’d had all week, hands down. By the time we got the groceries loaded into the car and were headed back to the house, my stomach ached from all the giggling we’d done.

  “Oh, man, that was awesome,” Lacey said, settling into the passenger’s seat. She put on her seatbelt and looked over at me, the grin still spread over her face. “I can’t believe you threw that cranberry sauce from so far away and actually made it into the cart!”

  I smiled, too. “Nothing but net.”

  She giggled as I got the car started. I hadn’t done this much driving in years. I didn’t have a car at Cornell, and there was no reason to have one in the city. I took the subway or a taxi anywhere I needed to go. If my destination was a reasonable distance away, I walked. I’d gotten plenty of exercise since leaving Wisconsin.

  “I can’t believe Mom is getting married on Christmas Day,” I blurted out. It was the first time I was saying it, and Lacey was about the only person I knew who would take it the right way. Anyone else would probably just yell at me for being a selfish, ungrateful daughter.

  She looked over at me again, but didn’t interrupt me as I continued.

  “I don’t come home very often. It would be great to spend some time over the holidays visiting with people, you know?”

  Lacey hiccupped one of her secretive little laughs. “Oh, like you did at the party last night when you disappeared and never came back until it was time to go?”

  She had me there, but she couldn’t have known what I’d seen upstairs or the argument I had with Carter out on the porch. He’d been so angry, and he had every right to be. I still felt shaken by the way he’d confronted me, but I couldn’t really take issue with anything that he’d said. It had just been so strange to see him that pissed off at me. We’d never fought once growi
ng up together.

  “Well, it would be nice to look around at a few of the sights. I miss the lake like crazy, but it’s just too damned cold to go out there this time of year. The lake has to be frozen over by now. I forgot how cold it is here. It’s much worse than the city.”

  “I doubt that,” Lace replied, watching the traffic through the windshield. The roads were pretty clear, but most everyone else was probably just sitting down to dinner right now. We were on our own for food tonight — which was why we’d picked up so many groceries, we just couldn’t decide what we wanted — because Mom was going out with her future husband tonight. Even thinking about her dating someone else was weirding me out, let alone her marrying someone who wasn’t my father.

  “And, anyway,” Lacey continued, “you could still go out to the lake. I know some guys from school who were planning to ice fish a bunch of times over the break. I’m sure they’d love to take you along.”

  I snorted a laugh. “I can’t stand regular fishing in warm weather. There’s no fucking way I’d sit out on the ice shivering my ass off in the hopes of catching some slimy old fish.” Lacey cackled, sounding five years old.

  If I stayed silent, my mind circled back to Carter and how shitty that situation had turned out thanks to me. It had been happening all day, which was part of the reason I was trying so desperately to stay busy. I sat up a little straighter in my chair as another diversion occurred to me.

  “What’s going on with your status?” I asked, not taking my eyes off the road for a second to look over at my little sis. The roads here could be treacherous during the winter, even with constant plowing and salting.

  “What do you mean?” she asked.

  “You know, are you single, taken, it’s complicated?”

  She giggled at that, but didn’t answer right away.

  “You mentioned a boyfriend offhand during a chat a few weeks ago,” I said. “But I haven’t heard anything about him lately. What’s up?”

  She sighed, but not unhappily. There was no way her relationship history was as royally fucked as mine was.

  “No, I’m not dating anyone at the moment. There was a guy at school who seemed interesting for a few weeks, but then I realized he wasn’t half as interesting as I thought at first. No biggie. And, anyway, I’m super slammed with school right now. I don’t need some guy messing with my headspace.”

  No one but Lacey talked like this. I missed her something terrible when I was in New York. I wished there was some way I could get her to move to the city. My apartment was small, but it could handle another person for a while. Willem knew thousands of people in Manhattan alone. He could probably set her up with a sweet job before she even stepped off of the plane at La Guardia.

  “Good plan,” I said, even though that’s exactly what Carter was doing to me. Messing with my headspace. I never would have believed that trying to push him out of my life would end up giving him a permanent space inside my head. Instead of thinking too much for the millionth time today about how badly I’d messed everything up, I plunged ahead.

  “Too bad this wedding is so damned small,” I remarked.

  “Why’s that?”

  “Well, receptions are usually great places to hook up, no questions asked. But most of the guests at this wedding are family, so that’s not really appropriate!”

  She let loose another cackle. “Like you’ve gone to a wedding before and had a one-night stand!”

  “I didn’t say I had, just that people do.”

  But now that I was thinking of it, my mind took over, easing right into thoughts of what it might be like to hook up with Carter. In all the years we’d known each other, I’d never so much as kissed him, but since running into him at the grocery store my first night back into town, I hadn’t been able to cast out thoughts of his solid, muscled body settling over mine, his hips dropping in between my legs.

  What would it feel like to have his lips on mine? To feel them sucking lightly on my neck, and then harder as his hands moved over my body, exploring every quivering inch? Did he know how to pleasure a woman using just his fingers? His tongue? I was dying to find out, but the best I was ever going to do was the steamy fantasizing I’d been doing for days.

  We were stopped at a light only a minute or so down the road from Mom’s house. I snuck a look at Lacey, worried she might have noticed how the heat had cranked up in the car at the thoughts of Carter naked and on top of me, his cock entering the aching, hungry sex between my legs. I hadn’t been able to cast that heat out of my body, that need that I feared only he could quench. All that fiery need kept threatening to boil over. My only option was to stay away from Carter as much as I could, get through this wedding and the several days afterwards, and return home to the city where I was at a safe distance from all of this.

  Now Lacey was looking at me, her smile bright in the dark. “Are you going to go, Soph? You have a green light.”

  I blinked and looked at the road again, taking my foot off the brake to get us going. No one was behind us, so there was no harm done.

  “Sorry,” I muttered. “My thoughts were running faster than I could catch them.” That had been one of the few sayings of Dad’s that I could remember. It was painful to think about how much I’d already forgotten about him and stood to forget in the future. I wondered how much Mom had forgotten.

  Did she remember what had made her fall in love with him? She told stories sometimes, more the further away we got from the devastating incident overseas that had ended his life, and there were so many pictures carefully arranged in dozens of albums. I was thankful for them because it was getting difficult to even remember the sound of his voice or how his big, muscly arms had felt gathering me close for a hug. When I saw him in my dreams, he didn’t speak to me. Sometimes I woke up and cried because I was so desperate to hear his voice again. I never brought these things up to anyone, not even Lacey.

  “You were off in the clouds,” she replied.

  “I was thinking about wedding hookups.” I forced a smile, which was my favorite defense mechanism, going way back to when we lost Dad. I didn’t cry in front of other people. I saved that for when I was alone at night, and then I just couldn’t stop. I felt another sharp stab of regret when I realized that Carter had been the only exception to that. I’d cried in front of him so many times after Dad was killed, and he’d held me, not saying a word while I got out all the helpless anger and sorrow.

  She tittered. “The only person you could safely hook up with is Carter, but you aren’t even really friends anymore. So, I’m thinking that’s not an option.”

  “Yeah,” I agreed, my cheeks burning at how close she’d come to what I’d actually been thinking. Now I was back in a steamy fantasy with his hands and lips all over me, our naked limbs tangled. I had to actively force my mind away from that, exciting as it might be…at least until later when I was alone in my room. I had no real option now but to stick with the choice I made years ago, as painful as that was once again proving to be. I just had to keep from meeting Carter’s hazel eyes or noticing the firm shape of his ass in the jeans he wore. Easy, right?

  God, the first thing I needed to do once I got back to New York was to create a profile on one of those dating websites so I could finally meet someone nice. This was ridiculous. I was a grown woman.

  “What about you?” Lacey asked in a thoughtful tone as we pulled off of the main road and into our old neighborhood.

  I made a questioning noise.

  “You haven’t mentioned a boyfriend in over a year. Aren’t there thousands of hot, available men in New York City?”

  I laughed, buying myself a little time while I figured out the best way to answer. “I’m not really looking right now. My job keeps me incredibly busy.”

  “Uh huh.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Just that maybe you should put yourself out there more. If Mom can do it, you can, too.”

  I forced a nervous laugh that felt
as fake as it sounded. If Lace noticed, she didn’t point it out. “Maybe I don’t need a guy messing with my headspace, either.”

  She brayed a loud laugh and dropped the subject. But my mind stayed pinned on the wedding and just how in the hell I was going to get past the next week or so with both my sanity and dignity intact.

  Carter

  Two Days Later, Two Days before the Wedding

  I’d actually had a pretty great night hanging out with some of the guys from high school. It was all Jake’s idea, setting up a casual get together at his place, which was the polar opposite of the loud, beer-soaked party Lisa had hosted the other night. We ordered pizzas and sat around shooting the shit while we leisurely drank a few beers, catching up on all the things that had happened in our lives since we’d last seen each other.

  After so much craziness and uncertainty over the last several days since landing in Wisconsin, I really needed a low key night like this one, reconnecting with guys I still counted among my closest friends. I thought about Sophia, of course — it was hard not to; she’d even come up once or twice during the evening, mostly because we’d always been connected at the hip — but something had changed after our unpleasant conversation on Lisa’s porch. I really felt like I’d finally turned a corner. It would take time to recover fully, I was sure, but at least I was on my way.

  I left Jake’s just after nine, wanting to get home a little earlier than I had the last few nights. Dad seemed bothered by the amount of time I was spending outside of the house. Over breakfast that morning, he’d lightly mentioned that I seemed a lot busier than he’d expected. I’d give some excuse about missing my friends, which was partly true.