Mistletoe'd!

by Cach, Lisa

  Oh, lord.

  My long, dark hair was flat and stringy, desperately in need of washing; my pale face was mottled with pink creases where I had lain on the table and cards; mascara was smudged under my bloodshot brown eyes; and worst of all, my chapped lips were stained purple by the wine I’d been drinking. I smiled and saw that my teeth were tinted the same creepy shade.

  I brushed my teeth and took a quick shower. I thought better of filling the tub and soaking the robe, since he might want a shower in the morning. Instead, I sat on the lid of the toilet and ran water over the wine stain, grateful for the sound of the running water and the fan overhead, the white noise making me feel like I was in my own steamy little cocoon of privacy. A girl could be herself in the bathroom.

  I picked a Christmas card out of the trash—not one of the cards I’d been writing, but one of those that my old college friend Rachel had sent, and to which I’d been responding. The cover was a paper-framed photo of her and her husband cheek-to-cheek, arms around each other, grinning with delirious happiness. They wore leis and bathing suits, the blue skies of Hawaii overhead. The note said the photo was taken on their third anniversary, and my friend’s bare tummy showed the bulge of her first child growing inside.

  It had been this card that had encouraged me to open the bottle of wine. I was happy for my friend—happy for all my friends who had sent me cards filled with husbands and young children to go with their degrees and careers—but it did remind me that my last relationship had expired eight months ago, turning slowly unhealthy like an aging tub of cottage cheese. I still thought that my ex, Alan, had been the closest I’d ever gotten to Mr. Right, and there were many days when I wondered if I should have fought harder to keep the relationship going.

  The truth was, though, that I had a secret suspicion that I’d never really loved Alan. Sadder still, I’d never been with any man I deeply loved, loved past reason or self-preservation. I’d never been with anyone with whom I could joyfully, without doubt or a creeping sense of future unhappiness, contemplate spending the rest of my life. I was thirty years old and losing hope that I would find that mythical he who could erase all the questions and fears from my mind.

  Maybe I was too strange a person to find a match, or maybe there was something wrong with me that made me incapable of loving. Maybe it was my fate to end up the eccentric professor whom students laughed at behind her back and told anecdotes about. I’d tell my female students that you didn’t need a husband or a family to be happy; that books and travel and friends and creativity were more than enough. I’d probably be happy, too—except for that part of me that still wept for the broken dream, and still looked to find it in the face of every man I met.

  I felt tears well in my eyes as I looked again at the photo of Rachel in the encompassing embrace of the man she’d married.

  I wanted my own husband to love, who would fold me in his arms at night as we slept, the warmth of his body sheltering me against the cold and promising his companionship until the end of our days.

  *

  I don’t know how long I’d been asleep in my bed when Lauren’s hand once again shook me awake. She clicked on my bedside lamp and I groaned and turned away. “What?” I asked. “What?”

  “Tessa! Do me a huge favor? My sister just went into labor. I’m driving up to Bellingham to be with her. Can you drive Ian to the airport in the morning?”

  I rolled back over and squinted one eye open just enough to read the clock. Three thirty a.m. “What time does he have to be there?”

  “His flight’s at eight. It’s international, so he has to be there two hours early….” She paused to think, which was good, as I was beyond figuring timetables. “So you should leave here by five thirty.”

  I pulled the covers over my eyes. “Set my alarm for five, would you?” I didn’t want to face handsome Ian again, but at the moment I was less interested in protesting than I was in slipping back into sleep and a dream filled with dancing men in tights.

  “Thank you! I’ll wash all the dishes for a month.” The light was back off and the door half-shut when it creaked back open again. “Oh, and wake up Ian when you get up! He doesn’t have an alarm clock.”

  “Mmm,” I said, already asleep again, and happily frolicking with men in poofy shirts.

  Chapter Two

  I hit my snooze button yet another time, then woke enough to remember that I didn’t have to go to work today. I flipped the alarm all the way off.

  It was over an hour later that my eyes suddenly flew open, some dreg of memory working its way up through my cozy dozing to remind me that I was supposed to drive Ian to the airport. A panicked glance at the clock showed the time in glowing, accusatory red: six fifty-five a.m.

  Aieeee!

  I sprang out of bed and out of my room, careening around the corner and into the living room. The futon had been unfolded into a bed, and Ian was sprawled across it, one arm flung above his head, feet dangling over the edge, the sheet and blanket in a wrinkled heap over his legs and groin but leaving his dark-haired chest uncovered. He was snoring softly in the dim gray light of morning, his thick black lashes shadowing the delicate skin under his eyes.

  “Ian!”

  The snoring continued.

  “Ian! Wake up! We’re late!” I shook the edge of the stiff mattress and made not a ripple. Damn futon. I reached out to touch him, but my hands hovered over his bare chest; they didn’t have the guts to settle on that exposed skin. They drifted down over his thigh, but that was all too close to his privates. I whimpered and flapped my hands helplessly, then moved to the end of the makeshift bed and, using thumb and forefinger, gingerly grasped the hand he’d flung above his head. I waggled it back and forth. “Ian!”

  His hand turned and gripped mine and began to pull. His eyes opened halfway and met mine, and my heart pounded in my chest. The pull on my arm continued, and I leaned forward, ready to topple down across him. Yes, yes, pull me into bed with you. I won’t fight; I won’t say no… Lie on top of me and press me against the mattress with your whole glorious, manly length…

  Recognition filtered into his eyes, and a frown drew down his brows. “Sorry!” he said, releasing my hand.

  Dammit.

  He sat up and rubbed his face, the covers pooling across his loins. There was a narrow trail of black, silky hair from his navel down into the shadows of the sheet. What I wouldn’t give to trail my fingers down it. “What time is it?” he asked.

  The question recalled me suddenly to myself. “Seven!” I shouted. “Seven! We’ve got to go now!” I dashed back to my room and threw on the clothes closest to hand, then made an unavoidable pit stop in the bathroom. A glance in the mirror while I did a quick brush of my teeth revealed horrors of rat’s-nest hair and, despite my shower, smudges of mascara still lodged like smashed spiders under my eyes. I grabbed a washcloth, but before I could so much as wet it, Ian was rapping on the bathroom door.

  “Are you ready?”

  I squeaked and gave up, tossing the washcloth into the sink. Interesting him in me was hopeless to begin with, and the man was leaving town. All he wanted me to do for him was get him to the airport on time.

  I opened the door and rushed past him and through the house to the foyer, stepped sockless into a pair of beat-to-death running shoes, grabbed my purse and keys, and reached for the front door. He beat me to it, his hand grasping the knob a moment before my own. I felt the warmth and movement of him in the air, catching a faint scent of something spicy and deliciously masculine. When I caught my breath I took a moment to look at him.

  The dark scruffiness of his one-day beard and his bed-head hair looked intentional, as if he were modeling for a sultry black-and-white cologne ad, perhaps with a diamond-encrusted blonde pawing his naked chest. How old was he? Thirty? Forty? He had a few creases on his brow, beside his eyes, and at the sides of his nose, but they could as easily be from weather or laughter as age. He had a black leather garment bag in his left hand, and nodded to
me to go first through the door. There was a faint hint of a smile on his lips, and I scowled as I wondered if he was laughing at me.

  “Go ahead; I have to lock up,” I said. “It’s the blue Wagoneer at the curb.”

  I locked the door and followed him down the steep cement stairs to the sidewalk. My 1975 Jeep Wagoneer had the soft blue-gray patina that only age can bring, and which I personally feel it would be a shame to destroy with something so crass as regular cleanings and polish. I opened a back door for him to toss in his garment bag.

  “Why is there white felt all over?” he asked as he put his bag on the lumpy back of a folded-down bench seat. The entire back of the Wagoneer was coated in felt, the felt in turn covered with tiny snippets of abandoned thread, stray pins, a stack of tissue paper, a few paper garment boxes, and drifts of filmy plastic dry cleaning bags.

  “I don’t know how much Lauren told you,” I said as I unlocked the front passenger door for him, all the while feeling the ticking of the clock and mentally planning the best route to take to the airport. “I’m an assistant professor in the theater department at the University of Washington. I teach costume history and I design the costumes for the school’s theater productions, which means I sometimes transport a lot of expensive fabrics and costumes. I’m a little obsessive about keeping them clean.”

  “So you really did know not to wring your robe,” he said, shutting the back door and opening the front one.

  “Yes.” I jogged around to the driver’s side, getting in and slamming the old heavy door with a clang that probably woke the neighbors. The Jeep started with a roar and we were off. “If traffic is clear we might make it,” I said with forced cheerfulness. “Might,” I repeated more quietly, and turned on the radio just in time to hear that Interstate 5 was a mess. “Damn.”

  “Is that going to affect us?”

  I muttered a few curses against the traffic gods, then tossed Ian a bright smile and took the Jeep into a sharp turn, the centrifugal force knocking him against his door. “Oh, no, don’t worry. I have my ways.”

  “Do you then,” he said, his voice rising half an octave as I barreled down the street, his face going still and his eyes intent on the road in front of us in that way frightened passengers have. I took another corner and he reached for the assist strap above the door. Unfortunately for him, all that was left of it was a three-inch stub of plastic. Our family dog had chewed it off when I was a kid.

  I got onto Highway 99 south and began to pick up speed. The wing windows started to whistle, then to howl. Ian said something, but it was lost under the roar of wind and motor.

  “What was that you said?” I shouted. Fat splats of rain hit the windshield, and I turned on the wipers, adding their screech and thwack to the tumult. The highway took us onto a high, long bridge, the gray waters of Lake Union far below. Up ahead I could see the bright red flares of brakelights on unmoving cars. I muttered another dark imprecation as we slowed to a crawl, and then to a stop. We were about twenty feet from reaching the end of the bridge.

  “I asked you what drew you to costuming.”

  I tapped my fingers on the steering wheel, eyeing the cars ahead and looking for possible escape routes from the traffic jam. “I love beautiful clothes.”

  “Do you.”

  I glanced at him and caught his gaze flickering over my outfit. I was wearing a baggy gray sweater with frayed ribbing at the cuffs and a cotton broomstick skirt of the ten dollar variety. “Yes, I do. Not that my wardrobe is any indication,” I admitted.

  “You love beautiful clothes, your work revolves around beautiful, creative clothes, you know the history of beautiful clothes, and yet you don’t wear them.”

  I heard the implied question, crouching in his words like a hungry psychologist. “Because I don’t have the time. Besides,” I added before he could comment further, “it’s historical clothing I really love, not contemporary. Contemporary clothing is too utilitarian.”

  “All historical clothes were contemporary at one point. All were utilitarian to some degree; all served some purpose.”

  “But I wasn’t living then, so they still have magic for me.” I sought further words to describe the feeling that an embroidered apron from the eighteenth century or a pair of hand sewn leather boots from the fourteenth gave to me: the sense of touching another period of time, of touching the lives of people who had been gone for centuries. That magical sense held true even if the garment itself was nothing more than a theatrical reproduction. Time put a gloss of romance on the past—a romance that I had always felt sorely lacking in my own existence.

  “Is it the magic of the inaccessible?” he asked, breaking into my reverie.

  I was surprised by his perception. “Yes, the magic of a time and a life that I will never have.” I frowned at him. Who was this Ian? Why would he be sensitive to such things? “What is it that you do, Ian? For a living, I mean.”

  “My business cards call me a purveyor of luxury goods,” he said with a wry smile.

  “Sounds shady, ‘purveyor.’ Do the goods fall off a truck?”

  “We’d have a higher profit margin if they did.” He shrugged. “It’s so inelegant to say I’m just a shopkeeper. Accurate, but inelegant.”

  “And you’re an elegant guy?”

  “I pretend to be.”

  “Can elegance truly ever be faked?”

  “I count on it.”

  But before I could follow up on that intriguing line of thought, the car in front of me inched forward and I spotted my escape route. I eyed the narrow distance between the lane of cars and the high curb. “Hold on,” I said.

  I put the Jeep in gear and veered half off the road, carefully riding the right-hand tires up onto the tall sidewalk that lined the bridge. Ian grasped the handle on his door, trying and mostly failing to keep from sliding across the bench seat into my lap. His leg hit mine, and I struggled to keep my foot on the gas as I myself fell against the driver’s side door. The Jeep was canted at what felt like a forty-five-degree angle.

  “How far am I from the bridge rail?” I asked.

  He struggled to peer out his side window. “A few inches!” he screeched. “What in God’s name are you doing?”

  “Trying to get you to the airport!” I eased the Jeep along the tall sidewalk, checking out my own window to be sure I didn’t take off anyone’s side mirror. Passengers in the cars I passed gaped at me: a woman jerked and spilled her Starbucks in her lap; a teenage boy’s sullen expression turned to sly joy; a small child in the midst of a red-faced, screaming temper tantrum went suddenly silent, her round, tear-filled eyes staring as we slid by.

  “It’s not worth getting in a wreck!”

  “Oh, pish. I’m not going to get in a wreck. I have an off-road vehicle, so I can take it off the road.”

  “Maybe you should be taken off the road.”

  “What was that you said?” I asked as we came to the end of the bridge and the sidewalk disappeared. The Jeep thumped down onto the gravel and mud beside the road, and I stepped on the gas, shooting us twenty feet to the turnoff to go up Queen Anne Hill.

  “God in heaven…”

  I realized I was enjoying myself. He’d seen my granny panties; he’d seen me drunk and covered with wine. This was my revenge. He might not ever find me attractive, but at least he’d find me memorable. “I learned to drive on dirt logging roads. Don’t worry, we’ll be fine.”

  ” ‘Don’t worry’ she says again…”

  I grinned and glanced at him and saw that his hand was still affixed in a death grip to the door handle. There was a grimace of fear tugging on the corner of his mouth. He caught me looking and widened his eyes, gesturing with his chin back toward the road. He must think I should watch where I was going.

  A stop sign popped up out of nowhere—was that there before?—and I slammed on the brakes, squealing a nice smear of rubber onto the road. “No problem,” I said.

  He grunted and tightened the seat belt over his hips.
>
  Back on pavement we made good time going up the hill and over, passing by some of the grander houses in Seattle and catching a few ghostly views of the city and Elliott Bay, covered in a thin fog.

  “Rain and fog together. It’s like Scotland,” he said.

  “Maybe the fog will delay your flight. Where’s your cell phone? You could call and check.”

  He perked up. “Good idea.” He took his phone out of the inside breast pocket of his leather coat and started punching buttons. He put it to his ear, listened, punched buttons, then did it all again. Listen, punch, listen, punch, the jabs at the buttons becoming fiercer each time. He must be stuck in his airline’s phone system.

  He suddenly said a very bad word, his button-punching finger bouncing up as if it had been singed. “Three, not two! Three! I wanted option three!” A few more bad words followed and then he settled down with the phone to his ear, a grim, bleakly accepting look on his face, like a prisoner awaiting execution. I could hear the spillover of McLean’s “American Pie” coming from the receiver.

  I felt a surge of regret for having suggested the phone to him. I’d gotten my fun with the wild ride; putting him in an airline’s phone system was kicking a man while he was down. “So what brought you to the States?” I asked by way of making amends as I pulled back onto Highway 99 a couple miles south of the traffic jam, the traffic flowing smoothly here. “Was it just to visit family?”

  “Business, mostly. We want to expand into the U.S. market. I had a meeting here in Seattle and took the chance to see Lauren.”

  “So why is she American while you’re Scottish? What’s the relationship?”

  “Her father fell in love with an American girl and moved out here to be with her and raise a family. I’d never met any of them until Lauren and her family spent a summer in Scotland with us when she and I were teenagers. We’ve kept in touch ever since.”

  A tinge of my Christmas card sadness came back. What a romantic life Lauren’s mother must have had, her Scotsman leaving his world behind to be with her. I didn’t want to hear any more about it. “So how big is this luxury goods emporium you work for?”