by Holly Rayner
I turned back to my drink, finished it and got up to leave. The party was over for me. I’d made my appearance and I’d done my duty. I was going to go home now where there were no red and green decorations and no Christmas music playing. I started to get up and felt a tap on my shoulder. I turned around and was looking into Robyn’s beautiful blue eyes.
“Why so serious?” she said, doing her best “Joker” impression. She’d probably be surprised to know I was a big “Dark Knight” fan. It was a movie I watched at home, alone. I’m not sure if powerful men were supposed to like comic book movies, so I kept it to myself.
I did have to smile though. Just looking at her made me want to do that. “This is just not really my kind of party,” I said.
“A party’s a party. Look around you. Everyone is having a great time and best of all, it’s because of you. You did this for them, for all of us. You should be happy that everyone is enjoying themselves so much.”
“I am happy people are having fun.”
“Then you should try and have some yourself. Ignore the Christmas atmosphere if you must and relax a little. Being so serious all the time isn’t good for your health, and besides, it will give you frown lines and you’ll have to spend money on Botox injections. Then, you’ll have no expression at all.”
I laughed, she was too much sometimes.
“Dance with me,” she suddenly blurted out.
I looked out on the dance floor where people who’d had too much free champagne were moving around with jerky and in some cases mildly obscene movements. It was all set to a “Rocking around the Christmas tree” soundtrack. They could get away with that, they were only employees of the company. If I did it, they would talk about it for years to come.
“I don’t think so, but thanks,” I told her.
“Aw, come on, party-pooper. I don’t have a date and everyone else does. You wouldn’t want to be responsible for me sitting in a corner all alone without anyone to dance with, would you?”
“Guilt, that’s dirty pool.”
“Yes, I admit that it is,” she said with a grin. “All that matters is whether or not it worked.”
A slow Christmas song started then. This was exactly why I hadn’t seen her in three weeks. When she looked at me with those eyes I couldn’t say no.
“Okay, one dance… a slow one.”
She giggled and clapped her hands together like a little girl. Before I knew it, she was towing me out to the dance floor. I took her into my arms and we started swaying to the slow music. I could feel everyone looking at us. I wondered what they were saying about me, the boss who hates Christmas… dancing with an employee.
“Relax,” she said.
“What?”
“You’re so tense. Don’t worry about what anyone else is thinking. Pretend that it’s just you and me, dancing alone in a deserted room.” I wished it were. I tried to relax my muscles, but the more I thought about them, the tenser they got.
Robyn started singing. She knew every word to the song and her voice was lovely. I could feel her warm breath on my neck and smell the fresh, clean fragrance of her hair. For a few seconds I closed my eyes and tried to breathe in her energy. It worked for a while. While the song went on I didn’t see or feel or hear anything but the sound of her beautiful voice and the feel of her warm body against mine. I wanted to kiss her so badly that at one point I had to bite my own lip to stop myself. The song ended… I’m not sure how long ago it had ended when suddenly I realized that I was still standing there, holding her in my arms, looking into her eyes and dying to kiss her.
When I glanced around the room I realized that absolutely everyone was looking at us. I could feel the hot color flooding my cheeks…
“Ouch! Oh my!” Suddenly I felt her go slack in my arms and she fell to the floor.
“Robyn! Are you okay? What’s wrong?” I bent and picked her up as people rushed over.
“I hurt my ankle,” she said. “I’m okay. Do you mind taking me over by the door? I think I just need some fresh air.”
“Of course,” I told her. I put my arm around her waist and the people cleared a path for us. She limped against me until we were outside. I sat her down on one of the ledges where the plants and flowers were planted in front of the convention hall. I knelt next to her and said, “Let me look at your ankle.”
She winked at me and said, “I’m really fine. I could see how uncomfortable you were getting in there. I pretended to be hurt so they didn’t question why we were standing in each other’s arms with no music playing.”
I had to smile at her again. She looked so proud of herself.
“Well, that was quite the save,” I said, getting up and sitting next to her. “Thank you.”
She grinned, “You’re welcome,” she said. “Any time.”
“I should be going,” I told her.
“Why? It’s early yet. You seemed to just be starting to have fun.”
“I was, with you. I have to admit that dancing with you was the best part of the evening. I’m just not comfortable with that much attention. I have a lot to do before my trip, so I really should go.”
She suddenly looked up and said, “Okay, but there’s one Christmas tradition that I haven’t had a chance to get you to take part in this year and I’d really appreciate it if you would join me in this one last thing…”
I raised an eyebrow. She wasn’t ever going to get it, Christmas and I just didn’t mix. I had to ask though, “What tradition is that?”
She pointed above our heads. There was a sprig of mistletoe hanging on a line between the two trees, tied up with a red bow. This was the one thing out of all the traditions that I really was interested in, at least tonight with Robyn. I wanted to kiss her so badly that my chest almost physically ached. I couldn’t do that though. If I kissed her now, feeling the way that I did, I’m not sure I’d be able to walk away without telling her how I felt. It wasn’t the right time though. I was getting on a plane in two days. When I got back….
She leaned in towards me and I could feel her warmth. I had to physically pull myself away to keep from meeting her lips. I wanted to kiss her worse than I’d wanted anything for a really long time. Instead I stood up and said, “I have to go.”
I walked away from her and when I got almost to the parking lot, I turned back and looked. Robyn looked like I’d just broken her heart. I almost went back, it was killing me. I didn’t though. If I went back and kissed her, things would just get more complicated. I turned back around and continued on to my car. All I could hope was that she didn’t hate me too much to talk to me when I got back.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
~
ROBYN
I sat on the little concrete ledge outside the room where the Christmas party was going on and watched Aaron walk away. As the snow drifted softly down onto my bare head and shoulders I didn’t even notice the cold. My heart felt like it had gotten trapped in a vice and someone was tightening it every few seconds. I wasn’t capable of feeling anything beyond that. I watched him get in his car and drive away and I knew that any other woman faced with the same situation that I was in, would be disheartened enough to give up. I pushed myself up off the little ledge and went back inside wondering why I wasn’t. Was there something wrong with me, or was this how you felt when you finally happened up on the other half of your whole? When I got inside the door, Max was the first person I saw.
“You’re all wet. You’re going to catch your death in cold.”
I smiled at him, weakly. “I’ll be fine. I have an awesome immune system.”
Max raised an eyebrow at me, but he let it go. “How’s the ankle?” he asked, instead.
“What?”
“Your ankle, didn’t you hurt it?”
“Oh… oh yeah, it’s fine, thanks. I mean, it’s better. I just needed to stay off of it for a bit.”
“Is Aaron still out there? I don’t think he’ll be in the office before he leaves for his trip and I had a question
for him.”
“No… I guess you’ll have to call him. He’s gone,” I told him. “I think he had all the Christmas party he can stand.”
Max laughed, “Yep, just the fact that he keeps coming to these things every year surprises me.”
“Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why does it surprise you that he keeps coming? What is his problem with Christmas, Max?”
“I don’t know. I just know that when he hired me, it was right after Halloween; Janice took me aside after I got the job and told me not to mention the holidays any time after Thanksgiving in Aaron’s presence. She told me that he would take really good care of us and we’d get some really good benefits and bonuses around the holidays, but I wasn’t going to get far with him on a personal note at all unless I was willing to act like Christmas didn’t exist in his presence. Janice doesn’t even know the source of it all, and she knows more about him than any of us do.”
“Wow, I didn’t get the memo about not mentioning Christmas,” I told him. I started wondering if I had taken it too far. Had I not only jeopardized any possibility of a relationship with Aaron, but had I possibly jeopardized my job as well?
“Things are too politically correct these days,” he said. “The company has grown a lot since I was hired. Winters Inc. has absorbed over twenty companies in the past five years. I have no idea how many people work for Aaron now, but in our office alone we have over three hundred full-time employees. It’s not something we can really talk freely about around the office without putting Aaron at risk of some type of backlash, or lawsuit. You know, someone saying that he disrespected their customs or something silly like that. It’s all the rage these days. Instead, it’s just something that somehow we all come to know without talking about it. In truth, this is the fifth executive position I’ve had in my career with a major corporation, and I’ve never been taken care of so well around the holidays. I just don’t mention them around Aaron and I never send him a Christmas card.”
“Something terrible must have happened to him around Christmas time for him to feel so strongly about it. I wish I knew what it was. It’s so sad for someone to be all alone at Christmas, even if it is by his own choosing.” I said that more to myself than I did Max. I didn’t really notice I’d said it out loud.
“You have feelings for him…”
Panic constricted my chest. I could hear the rumors now. Trying to waylay it I said, “He’s a nice, interesting man, that’s all. I feel strongly about Christmas and I just have a hard time understanding others who don’t. I really, firmly believe that holding Christmas in your heart renews your spirit for the upcoming year.” He was looking at me strangely so I asked him, “Is that naïve, or silly, you think?”
“No Robyn, it’s not silly. It’s how you feel, but just because you feel so strongly about it, doesn’t mean that you can convince other people to feel that way too.”
I was nodding. He was making a valid point, but although I knew it wasn’t possible to make everyone believe, it had to be possible to convert a few. People convert religions all the time, maybe Christmas could be the same. Maybe Aaron was one of the ones I’d get lucky with if I tried.
“Are you okay, Robyn?”
“I’m great,” I told him. “It’s three days until Christmas. I’m never not okay at this time of year.” I smiled at him and went back to the party to continue my role as the life of it. I wasn’t really pretending either; my feelings for Aaron didn’t rule my life. I still loved Christmas and I still felt the magic of it all around me. My feelings about Aaron were always there though, at least in the back of my mind.
I woke up the next morning feeling restless, but unsure what to do with myself. I knew that Aaron planned on leaving on Christmas Eve for his trip, and I considered calling him, just to wish him a good trip. I didn’t, instead I got out my laptop and I typed his name into the search engine. I got over ten million hits. I was flabbergasted. I couldn’t imagine ever being known that well. I started thinking about what that must be like, for your life to be at someone’s fingertips.
I searched through the hits I got for a history. I found the history of him founding the company and I was able to follow him through to today, but before that it was like he didn’t exist. Where did he come from, and what happened to him to make him guard his loneliness like a shield? I closed the laptop in frustration. I was probably never going to find out what it was about Christmas that bothered him so badly, unless someday he chose to tell me himself.
I gave up looking for it and thinking about it for the moment and went out to the mall. I was hoping a lot of Christmas music and shopping and merriment would make me feel better. Just in case I also had a large cup of hot chocolate and a couple of chocolate chip cookies. If the Christmas merriment failed, the sugar was a sure fire cure.
AARON
December 22nd will go down in my own personal history as one of the worst nights of my life. I didn’t really have bad days, or nights. Besides work, I went out of my way to keep my stress level to a minimum, until I met Robyn and seemed to screw up over and over again. The night of the party wasn’t going so badly until I left Robyn sitting underneath the mistletoe in the snow. The look on her face made my heart feel like it was literally breaking. That in itself was a feat, since I’d built a solid wall of ice around it years before.
I had so much fun dancing with her. Not only did she feel wonderful in my arms, she was singing in my ear and it was beautiful and she smelled good enough to eat. I got a little carried away with it until I realized I was having too much fun and we were the center of the entire room’s attention. I told myself that walking away before it went any further was the right thing to do. I was the CEO of the company, after all. I did have a reputation to uphold. Plus, there were the concerns I had about Robyn. I worried about getting too close to her at a time of year when I only craved solitude. I hadn’t wanted to complicate things, but the look on her face made me want to go back and take her into my arms, kiss her passionately, and apologize profusely for being the biggest ass on the face of the earth. Obviously, since it was already the 24th of December and I still hadn’t talked to her… I didn’t turn around and go back. I’d taken the coward’s way out.
I hadn’t slept in two days. The first night I went over and over it in my head. By the end of the night that pitiful look on her face and the sight of her sitting there in the snow with her cheeks flushed and her hair turning white was burned into my brain and my heart. The next day I didn’t even get out of bed. I was the CEO of one of the top ten most successful companies in the world. I hadn’t spent an entire day in bed since… ever. But on December 23rd, I lay in my bed from sunup until sundown, feeling like a zit on the underbelly of humanity. Jeffrey brought me lunch and asked about Robyn.
“How should I know how she’s doing?” I snapped at him. “She’s just an employee. I have no idea how she is.”
“Excuse me sir,” he said in a sarcastic tone. “I was under the impression you cared for the young lady.”
“Well I don’t, Jeffrey. Like I said, she’s an employee.” It sounded false to my own ears. It must have sounded false to his as well. He gave me a disapproving look, but no more disapproving than the one I was giving myself inwardly. I’d told myself over and over not to encourage her, but I’d done it anyways and then I walked away.
He finally left and I was glad. It was hard enough to have my own accusing eyes on me, but to also have his as well was too much. After he left, I’d gone back into hibernation mode.
I finally fell asleep sometime around three a.m. on Christmas Eve. I woke up about five hours later. I lay there for a minute, considering what I was going to do with my day. My plane wasn’t leaving until the late afternoon, but spending a second day in bed wasn’t an option. I got up and showered and finished packing. I ate a light breakfast and had my coffee, but then I was at a loss for what to do for the rest of the day until it was time to leave. It was another first for me. Usua
lly, if I had a free hour or two I’d work. There was always work that I could do. I could always answer an email or ten, review a report or fifty and research new parts of the world that I wanted to break into. Today I was too preoccupied. I was afraid if I even tried, I would make a decision that I might later regret just because of the mood I was in. I still couldn’t get my mind off of Robyn, wondering if she would speak to me when I got back from my trip, wondering if we could possibly start over. I suddenly realized that I felt like I was choking on all of this indecision. I hated it. I needed some air. I had to get out of the apartment.