by Jax Garren
Right now, she just needed to put as much distance between herself and tonight’s events as possible.
She turned back for one final look before the trees blocked her vision. Instead of the house, however, she sought Brett. His silhouette stood out darkly against the lights of the party, dominating the landscape around him. His eyes were closed and his narrow face tilted up to the stars as the wind tossed his hair back into its natural dishevel. With his slim hips and tall stature, she imagined delicate elf ears in place of the scars.
They fit him so well she could almost believe.
He ran his hands through his hair and cocked his head, like he listened to something mere mortals couldn’t hear. His eyes opened, reflecting brightly in the moonlight. He was sublime, a thing of nature. With that final, perfect view of him, she ducked into the trees before he caught her staring.
Chapter 8
Well after the five-to-seven minutes it should take to reach the gas station, Carrie was lost and freezing. The landscape had changed too much; her old signposts were gone or altered beyond recognition. The wind whipped the trees into a frenzy, swaddling her in prickly cedar and relentless cold. She sat on a boulder to catch her breath or maybe just to give up, call Lora, and try to explain the series of events that led her to be lost and freezing on a hillside.
Coming this way had been hasty and stupid. Lora would be pissed at her emotion-spiked dumbassery, but eventually her friend would get her off this godforsaken hill.
But it wasn’t Lora she wanted right now. Carrie inhaled and exhaled slowly, thinking of Brett’s warm arms and kind eyes. She’d blown that bridge to shreds. Performing as a mall elf for fun was one kind of crazy; nearly screwing your married ex-husband and then wandering down a deserted hill sometime around midnight was another crazy entirely.
The night sky provided the only light, and it danced dark shadows across the trees with barely a whisper reaching the ground. Her shoes were ruined, but luckily she hadn’t destroyed the dress. At least she didn’t think she had. She’d find out in the morning, if she ever got out of here. She had to stand up, figure out which direction was down, and go that way. Hell, if she just walked one direction, she’d eventually find something.
She puffed hot air into her hands and rubbed them on her shoulders, trying to fight the growing numbness. Maybe she’d call Brett in the morning and apologize. She could tell him she’d gone crazy—no lie there—not because of the house, but because she was terrified of losing him. So she left first.
But why would he take her back after she’d admitted she was too scared to go the distance? Lincoln had never changed. What made her think she could? It would be stupidly hopeful on his part to expect better of her after she’d let him down.
The cold fact remained that she couldn’t honestly tell Brett she’d never get scared again. It would be a lie, and he deserved the truth.
Her insecurity didn’t stop her from wanting him, though. She wanted to be a stronger person for him and for herself so she could let love happen. She wanted to love and be loved again. And Brett was special. They wouldn’t merely be fun, they’d be wondrous together. Epic, just like he’d said. Sure, they hadn’t known each other long enough to think those things, but her heart believed with a passion she was afraid to indulge… and equally afraid to deny.
Closing her eyes, she wished with all she had inside her for Brett and his kindness and his joy to find her now. She wished so hard that his name escaped her lips like a murmured prayer.
The trees rustled and the birds cawed, and she was alone on a hill. Stupid magical thinking. She needed to get to the gas station. Hoisting herself back up, she winced when her left ankle strap cut into her skin. Ignore it. Pick a direction. Get off the freezing hill.
“Carrie?” A voice blew on the wind so in tune with the movement that it seemed a part of the gale. She lifted her head. There was no way he’d heard her.
And yet... “Brett? Is that you?” Or was she hallucinating? Because she wouldn’t put that past herself right now.
“Carrie,” echoed from a different side this time, impossibly far from the first call but closer to where she was. But it was his voice with its quiet power. Either that or she was going completely insane.
Still, she called loudly this time, “Brett! Brett Vertanen! I’m here! Find me! Please!”
“Carrie Martin.” The voice was right in front of her.
And so was Brett, with no sound of footsteps or moving branches or crunching leaves to betray his path. The air felt charged, like lightning had struck. Energy tickled across her skin, then dissipated as quickly as it had come.
With a somber face, he wrapped his tux jacket around her shivering shoulders, and the woods seemed lighter with him near. She collapsed against him, and he held her securely while she cried sobbing tears that ripped from deep inside her.
She wasn’t sure how long she stayed there emptying her pain, somehow warm in his arms despite the winter howling around her.
As her tears slowed and calm replaced the ache, his lips pressed gently against her forehead. “Come home with me,” he said. “Please. Don’t make me leave you alone tonight. We don’t have to do anything. Just be with me.”
She hesitated, wavering on the edge between hope and despair. But she knew which way she’d fall—she’d picked despair long ago and change was hard. She looked away from his expectant face, down to the ground where he couldn’t catch her eyes. But what she saw there jolted her mood, resetting the delicate balance. “Why are you barefoot? It’s freezing.”
He dug his toes into the ground like a sun worshipper on the beach. “It feels good to me.”
A few tiny flakes of white stuck to his hair and shoulders. She reached out incredulously to touch them, and each fleck melted with the heat of her fingers. “Is it snowing? In Austin?”
Brett smiled up at the sky. “Sometimes I miss it.”
Carrie let him go so she could limp around in a circle and see the drops fluttering in the wind. “Did you...” What a ridiculous question. Did he make it snow? Of course not. And he was crazy for going shoeless in a snowstorm. But there he was, with his ethereal face still tilted up, eyes closed, enjoying the snowflakes as they tumbled across his skin.
He opened his eyes slowly and looked back at her, his face unreadable. “I have another gift to give you, if you’ll accept it.” He reached into his slacks and pulled out a ring box, then waved a hand at her, like he was warding off a protest as his eyes went wide and worried. “I’m not proposing—don’t panic, please.”
Carrie laughed nervously as the little gray cube clicked open. Inside was a platinum ring with a snow-white opal, glowing with hints of blue, brown, and green. “Then what are you doing?”
He walked slowly toward her. “We call it a hope ring.”
“Who’s we?” A lump formed in her throat as she waited for an answer she didn’t think she could believe.
He hesitated, then took two more steps toward her until they were close enough to touch. In a tone that walked the line between honest and teasing, he said, “Elves.”
“Elves,” she repeated, feeling crazy and yet nearly certain that was true at the exact same time.
“In my, uh, my culture,” he hurried on as if nervous, “the ring comes first, when the feeling first hits and your world turns upside-down.” His hopeful smile came back as he looked her over with the same naked want he’d shown since they’d met. “It’s not a promise. We exchange and wear them as a sign of shared hope for what could be. Then after a year and a day, we agree to either marry or go our separate ways, after we’ve had the time to make it work or realize it can’t. It’s backward from what you’re used to, I know. But I swear you’d find this all very normal if you weren’t… Actually, you’d probably be mad I waited so long. But I was afraid of scaring you off.” He stopped babbling and examined her again for a reaction. His own expression showed nothing but a certainty that he wanted to give her this gift and a nervousness that she’d
turn him down.
She didn’t know what to say, her mind reeling. She’d think he was slow to give her a ring if she weren’t human? Was that what he’d meant?
After a moment of her confused silence, he spoke again. “I wasn’t going to ask like this. But I want you to understand how serious I am. I got home the night we met and put it in my pocket—I’ve carried it everywhere since then. You probably don’t believe I can know what I’ll want five, ten, twenty years from now. But you’re wrong. I knew when I met you.” He looked chagrinned. “Even drunk, I knew.”
She stared at the ring, scared and yet covetous. Yeah, their way was different, but it still made sense. Taking the ring wasn’t a lifelong commitment, just a commitment to give them an honest try. Still, it was a freaking ring. Fear held her back from saying the feelings that were starting to grow in her heart.
A voice inside, the one her mother of the cha-cha-ing cat paper referred to as her “soul’s voice,” insisted she couldn’t let him pass by, that the only right answer here was yes. Eyes misting, Carrie tried to sort through the conflict for an answer.
Her eyes must have betrayed her panic because he continued to fill the silence with nervous words. “It was my great-great-grandmother’s. Her husband made it for her, back in the old country. He was a smith. They said he was the best of his generation. You can look at it if you want without putting it on. See what you think. See if it calls to you.” He stood still, his eyes pleading as the snow swirled around his handsome frame, and she waited for the jerk of reality that inevitably cut through the fairy tale.
When it didn’t come, she asked, “Did Ryssa wear this?”
His jaw worked for a moment before he nodded. “For a month. It’s what panicked her brother into action. Does that bother you?”
“No. No, not at all. I was married. I’m not upset that you were serious about somebody else in the past. Just curious. Anyone else in between?”
“No.”
“Then why me? Why now?”
“You’re the one—more than Ryssa ever was. She and I were really young.”
Tears mixed with the snow that melted against her fevered skin. “You’re asking a bitter, thirty-two-year-old divorcée to believe in love at first sight, Brett.” He nodded but didn’t say anything. She huffed out a frustrated breath. “That’s like believing in magic or in”—she waved a hand at him—“elves.”
“All things that are rare. But real.”
Her laugh sounded more like a groan. There was the thing, the big crazy, the deal-breaker. “You’re telling me you’re an elf. A real, magic-flinging, Lord of the Rings elf.”
He narrowed his eyes. “I didn’t say that.”
Anger, fearful and irrational, ignited at his lack of answer. “Why won’t you say one way or another? Are you an elf, Brett?” She was crazy for asking it as a serious question, but somewhere in her addled brain it had become possible.
His fists clenched in frustration and his voice came out angry, the only time he’d directed that fire at her. “Why does it matter?”
“Why does it matter if you’re a human or a mythological being?”
He ran a frustrated hand through his hair. “You know me. You know I’m a lawyer who wants to quit for a crazy dream job. You know I left home after a fight in which I nearly killed a man, and I have no contact with my family. You know I spend the holidays skipping work to entertain children at the mall. I also go to hospitals dressed like that and hand out presents. You know I believe in us because the moment I met you, I had faith we’d work out if I could just convince you to give me a chance.” He shook the ring box. “A real chance, not some half-in where we’re coasting until you disappear. These things are who I am, and if you want to turn me down for any of that, I can’t argue with you. I won’t like it, but I can’t argue with it.
“But what I am? If I answer that question, one of two things will happen. Either I say yes, and you’ll decide I’m crazy and leave. Or I say no, and you’ll be disappointed and leave. Either way I lose. Ask me a question that matters. Will I outlive you or stay young while you grow old? No. Do I have weird rituals or some dark-occult practice? Unless you consider honoring the seasons with food and the occasional prayer, no. I have scars on my ears, and the cold doesn’t bother me. Take what you will from those facts, but ‘What am I?’ is the one question I will not answer. Not right now, anyway.” He breathed deeply in and out, his breath puffing whitely in the cold air. “Any other questions, any that matter, and I’ll do my best to satisfy you.”
He seemed so earnest as he caught and held eye contact. She wanted to run her hands through his hair and direct that passion in his voice and stance onto her in a more carnal way, to blanket herself with him and the force of his faith. His hands were hot as they held hers, a lifeline from the chill.
She was caught in another fairy tale, swept off her feet just like she’d been at twenty-two. And she was way too old for this. “I’m sorry, but I’m not sure I believe in love at all anymore.”
His hands shook, tightening on hers as if he couldn’t let her go. “I can keep you warm. And I would never leave.”
Hadn’t Lincoln promised her the same thing? “I’m sorry,” she whispered. She really was. She backed up a step, unable to turn away. Her heel caught in a tree root and she felt the plastic snap. “Dammit.” She tried to unwedge her shoe and toppled to the side.
He caught her shoulders, holding her upright as she struggled to unstick herself from the plant. Her motion got frantic as each second of his touch made her long to stay.
“Leave it,” he told her.
Leave her shoe? “It’s freezing. And there’re rocks and cactus—this is Texas.” She couldn’t leave her shoe. She’d hurt herself.
She looked at his feet again. He’d ditched his shoes. Both of them. Intentionally. It didn’t seem to bother him in the least to stand on the snowy ground with naked feet. That, more than anything else, made her think maybe he was the real deal, a magical creature with power over reality. Either he was crazy, or magic was real.
Brett held her steady. “It needs faith to work. Doubt, and the ground will be hard and cold. But I promise you we can walk barefoot through the darkness together.”
How much faith could she give him? What kind of leap was she willing to take to have the life she wanted?
Trembling more from nervousness than cold, she knelt down and unbuckled her ankle strap. She took his offered hand to help her rise and slipped her foot out of the shoe.
Foot in the air, her nerves failed her again, and she shot a questioning look at Brett. He could go barefoot unharmed, but that didn’t mean she could. He was the elf, not her.
His eyes wide and breath held, he nodded encouragement.
She looked at him—really looked at him, his lithe figure and blue eyes, his sense of humor and creative mind—and let herself want him. Let herself imagine that this time, the fairy tale would be real. It would still be work. It would still be compromise and there would be good days and bad. But with Brett, she could make it stick. Letting go of her fear, she touched the ground with her bare toes.
Sun warm, despite the weather.
Putting her whole foot down, her toes sank into soft, dry earth. Brett and his shoeless ways weren’t as crazy as she’d thought.
Was she smiling? Yes, she was. Smiling barefoot in the snow with an elf who’d fallen in love with her.
But now she was unevenly balanced. She started to kneel for the other shoe, but Brett stopped her with a muttered, “I got it.”
He dropped to one knee and propped her foot up on his leg. She reached down for his shoulder for balance, laughing at herself and the wild wonder of the world.
He looked up at her, an ecstatic smile on his face. His hands gently touched her foot as he removed the strap and then slid the gold shoe off.
She put her foot down and let the magic of the earth soothe her frozen-numb skin.
He stood up with a teasing smile. “I told you the
moral of the story was you had to get her shoes off.”
She put the flats of her palms against his chest, feeling the muscles beneath his fancy tux. “I thought we’d decided her shoes were a metaphor for something else.” Burrowing her fingers into his shirt, she tugged.
Brett wrapped her in his arms and kissed her. Fear and hope mixed with the perfect rightness of Brett’s skin against hers, his tongue searching her, learning her.
She let him in as best she could, trying to hold on to that version of herself that believed in the future. It was hard. Oh, so hard even with all she’d seen. But in the strength of Brett’s arms, with the scent of his winter skin and press of his body, she thought she could do it.
He released her just enough to nuzzle his smooth cheek against hers.
Reaching up, she felt the scar on top of his left ear. He stilled, as if surprised at the touch, but didn’t stop her. “How did you keep faith in happily-ever-after after what happened to you?”
He let her trace the ragged edges with the pads of her fingers. It must have been so painful to have them docked. “For a long time, I didn’t. But I realized giving up on joy was giving up on myself.” He held up the ring once again. A little hesitant, maybe, but with the same eager desire in his eyes. “I also realized that there’s always something new to hope for.”
She knew what she wanted. Her nod was weak, but despite her fear, she managed it.
A smile started on his face, like the first rays of sunshine after winter’s longest night.
Her nod turned vigorous. “Yes, yes. Oh, yes. I want it.”
Brett slid the ring on her finger. The opal gleamed with the beauty of moonlight and snow. “Io Saturnalia, Carrie,” he said with a teasing grin. “May this be the first of a lifetime of holidays for us.”
As a light burned brighter inside her, Carrie thought maybe the holidays wouldn’t always be so horrible after all. She couldn’t have faith in them, not quite yet, and what she felt was too new to call love, although staring into Brett’s eyes, she had a feeling that could swiftly change.