by Katy Regnery
“Where’s home?”
“The inn.”
Brandy backs away, her eyes conveying a clear message that if I upset Faye or try anything remotely ungentlemanly, I’ll be answering to her, and it won’t be pretty. For someone so young and only a little over five feet tall, Brandy is legit terrifying sometimes.
“I’ll get her back in one piece,” I whisper back.
She turns around. “Faye, don’t forget what I said: come back tomorrow at four. My folks’ll be here. Denny’s too. It’s a big family dinner. Anyone’s welcome. You’re welcome.”
“Yummmmy!” says Faye, waggling her fingers in farewell. “Thanks...Brandy.”
“You should come too,” Brandy tells me as she heads back to the bar.
“I’ll think about it,” I mutter before sitting down in her empty seat.
Faye’s still hugging the bowl, her chin resting on the rim, and her eyes closed. I only know she’s drinking because of the light slurping sound I can hear coming from her mouth. I would’ve guessed she had more of a tolerance. A scorpion bowl is thirty-two ounces of mixed alcohol, and by my calculations, she’s had half of that. She can’t handle sixteen ounces?
“How’s your drink?” I ask her.
One eye pops open, but she’s otherwise still. “The second’s as good as the first.”
The second? “You’re on your second...bowl?”
“Uh-huh,” she murmurs. “An’ Ima have a third one if I want.”
No, you’re not.
Okay, this is making more sense now. She’s had about—forty? Forty-eight?—ounces of mixed alcohol in about the same number of minutes. Fuck. I mean, I know they put juices and shit in the bowl along with the alcohol, but she’s still had a lot.
“Youuu...,” she says, pointing a finger at me, “are not...very nice.”
I nod. “You’re right.”
“We were...jus’ talk-een,” she says, raising her head again. I’m tempted to pull the straws out of her mouth because she looks so ridiculous, but I’m worried I’ll offend her, so they stay where they are, the brightly colored fluorescent tusks bobbing in my direction as she speaks. “D’you wanna have dinner? No ma’am! Jus’ sex.”
I clear my throat. “I know that—”
“You know...nothing,” she says. One straw falls out and bounces on the table before falling on the floor. She’s left with one and looks sadly lopsided now. “I’m very tired.”
“Are you?”
“Yes, I am. I left Newark at ten o’clock this morning and—” Suddenly, her eyebrows furrow, and she frowns. “And I...I don’ feel so...so well...uhhhhg...”
“How about we get some air?” I suggest.
It takes her a second to fully lift her head and focus her eyes on mine. “Air. Yeah. I need some air...”
Before I can stand up, she slides out of the booth in a hurry, leaving her coat behind. I grab it, following her weaving path past a row of booths and out the front door.
Chapter 5
Trevor
By the time I catch up with her, she’s standing in the parking lot, one hand braced on the nearest SUV, head bent over, and the contents of one-and-a-half scorpion bowls heaving forth onto the snow in shades of reddish-purple.
She retches over and over again, four or five times, gasping for breath between each bout. Her back rises and falls rapidly as she waits for a final expulsion, but it doesn’t come. Finally, she stands up, turns around, and leans back against the truck.
“God,” she half-murmurs, half-sobs. “Oh God. What a mess.”
I would’ve offered to hold her hair back, but her bun’s doing a better job than I ever could. Not a single hair is loose.
“Can I, um—get you anything? Water? A...tissue?”
She looks up at me, her eyes glistening with tears, and backhands her mouth with the sleeve of her wool sweater. “No. Thanks.”
“The good news is that you just got most of the poison out. You’ll feel a lot better in a little bit.”
“What’s...the bad news?” she asks, looking up at me with bleary eyes.
“I get to walk you back to your hotel.”
“I don’t n-need”—she places her hand over her mouth like she might vomit again, then lowers it slowly when she doesn’t—“an...escort.”
“I’ll keep my distance,” I promise her.
“Why should I believe you?” she mutters. “You made your...intentions clear earlier.”
“I was a total ass,” I tell her.
“No argument here,” she says, taking a deep breath of cold air. She stares at me for a second, looking tired and miserable, and I realize I’m still holding her coat. I offer it to her.
“I’m very sorry,” I say, “for the way I treated you before.”
“You should be,” she mumbles, shrugging into her coat.
“And I’d feel better about everything if I knew you got home safe.”
“You feeling better about everything isn’t my first priority,” she says, side-eyeing me.
“C’mon. I’ll be on my best behavior from now on. I promise.”
She takes another deep breath, looks at the motel, which is a quarter mile across a very dark and empty parking lot, then back at me. “Fine. Let’s go.”
After she zips up her coat, she crosses her arms over her chest and starts walking without looking at me. Gone is the sophisticated, well-spoken woman from the bar. Now? She’s just a young woman in a strange town who had way too much to drink way too fast.
“So, uh...” I say as our boots crunch over the snow and ice, “did you say you flew in from New York today?”
“I had a meeting in Manhattan this morning, but I actually left from Newark.”
It takes me a second to get my head around this, not only because New York is so far away but also because I can’t imagine why she would fly from New York to Fairbanks on Christmas Eve.
“Have family in the area?”
“We already covered that,” she says.
Shit. Right. We did. And it was a sore spot the first time. Great job, Trev.
“So...you’re just checking out Alaska for Christmas, huh?”
“Sort of,” she says. She takes a deep breath, then adds, “There’s a business my company is interested in acquiring, and it’s located in Fairbanks, so I thought I’d spend Christmas in the North Pole and then try to meet with the owner the day after.”
“I know just about every business owner in Fairbanks,” I tell her. “It’s a small town.”
“I believe that.”
“So if you wanted to...”
“What?”
“Tell me about it—um, your deal. Maybe I could give you some pointers on the personalities in play.”
She glances up at me. “Why would you do that?”
I shrug. “Because I’m not as much of an asshole as I acted like back there.”
“No offense, but I’m not really in the mood to talk business...”
“Yeah,” I say. “I get it.”
We walk in silence for several minutes before she speaks again.
“Brandy told me about your, um...” She clears her throat. “Your brother.”
This surprises me because Brandy isn’t much of a gossip, so she really must have taken issue with my behavior if she made excuses for me. “What exactly did she say?”
“Just that you were engaged and...it didn’t work out.”
“That’s the G-rated version,” I mutter.
“I’m really sorry,” she says. “I can’t imagine how much that must have hurt.”
I reach behind my neck with a bare hand and rub the skin there. I’m uncomfortable discussing this on one hand, but on the other, the polite sympathy in her voice feels...nice. I haven’t talked about this with anyone in a while. I’ve sort of been dealing with it on my own.
“Yeah. It sucked.”
“To be clear,” she says, “I don’t think it gives you the right to be a jerk to strange women, but ‘to understand all is
to forgive all.’”
Forgive. It’s such an old-fashioned word, and yet it holds so much power.
“Do you forgive me?” I ask her.
She nods as we stop on the sidewalk by the front door of the hotel. When she raises her head, her dark eyes seize mine, searching them for a moment before saying, “Yes. I do.”
Most of the time when people offer forgiveness or acceptance, it’s not wholehearted. It’s a way of smoothing over an uncomfortable situation, while remnants of hurt are still actively alive in the equation. That’s why Faye’s face—the softness around her intelligent eyes and openness of her expression—is so extraordinary in this moment. Because I sense that understanding, compassion, and forgiveness mean something real to this person. She has cleaned the proverbial slate between us, and there is no lingering ill will.
Furthermore, I sense that the open road that lay before us while we sat at the bar an hour ago is now, miraculously, restored. And for me, to me, it feels like a gift. That is the only way I can explain it.
“Thank you,” I whisper.
“You’re welcome,” she answers.
“Home safe and sound,” I say, gesturing to the facade of the hotel. “As promised.”
Her lips tilt up a touch. “Home may be taking things too far.”
“How will you spend tomorrow?” I ask her.
“I don’t know yet,” she says. “Brandy invited me for dinner at the Golden Buddha, so I’ll probably end up there.”
“I’ve been to Christmas dinner there before,” I tell her. “It’s lots of fun.”
“Will you be there tomorrow?” she asks.
Will I be there tomorrow?
Ping invites me every year, but I hadn’t planned to be this year.
I’d planned to be at my parents’ house for the entire day, sharing brunch and opening gifts, watching movies or a game, and sharing dinner together. But now I’m not sure.
As much as I’m not interested in getting involved with anyone, I’m undeniably intrigued by this woman who left New York this morning, knows a lot about vodka, and decided to spend Christmas in a strange town all by herself. I wish I could know her—or maybe just know more about her. All I really know is that I would be unaccountably sorry to leave her here with no plan to ever see her again.
“Maybe,” I whisper, feeling off-kilter but not minding the feeling as much as I probably should.
“Then maybe I’ll see you there,” she says, holding out her hand to me.
I reach forward with mine, and slowly, gently, we embrace one another’s hands, skin to skin, flesh to flesh, strangely intimate and yet culturally appropriate. Her hand, as I noted before, is small, warm, and freckled, and I savor the contact even more the second time around.
“It was nice to meet you,” I tell her. I want to apologize again, but I know it’s unnecessary. She’s already forgiven me for my very bad behavior.
“It was”—she pauses for a second before pulling her hand away, an attractive blush pinkening her cheeks—“certainly interesting. Good night.”
She turns and walks into the hotel, disappearing down the back hallway toward the elevator. And I stand there, out in the cold, watching her go until I can’t see her anymore.
***
It’s a twenty-five minute drive from the Golden Buddha to my house, and my phone rings while I’m driving home.
“Hello?”
“Hey,” says Baz.
“What’s up?”
“You didn’t come.”
“I told you I wouldn’t.”
“It hurt Mom’s feelings.”
Hearing this pinches my heart because I love my mother. But it also pinches my heart because she knows how I feel about Cez and Marlena, and she invited them for Christmas Eve anyway. Even though I know it wasn’t her intention, it almost feels like she chose them over me.
“That’s too bad, but she had to know I wouldn’t be there.”
“I think she hoped that you’d show up anyway, it being Christmas Eve and all.”
“Baz—”
“Trev, you’re going to have to deal with this eventually. Cez is your brother. Marlena’s pregnant with your niece. Sooner or later—”
“Niece?”
“Huh?”
“They’re having a girl?”
Baz pauses for a second. “Yeah. They announced it tonight. They’re expecting a daughter.”
If hurting my mother’s feelings pinched my heart, this is like a kick with cleats to the gut. My brother and ex-fiancée are having a little girl this spring, and it hurts like fuck, because Marlena and I used to talk about having kids. She always said that if we had a daughter, that little girl would have me wrapped around her pinkie, and I’d nod and tell her that was one hundred percent true. I try to ignore the sudden burst of longing that steals my breath away.
“Trev? You there?”
“Uh...yeah. What are they naming her?”
“Aurora.”
I nod, the clenching in my chest easing just a little. At least he didn’t say “Camilla,” which was the name Marlena and I had picked out for our future daughter.
“If they have a second child, they can call it Borealis,” I say.
“Dad made that joke too.”
Figures. My dad and I have the same sense of humor.
“Come tomorrow,” says Baz.
“I am,” I tell him. “I’ll be over in the morning and stay through dinner.”
“Umm...” Baz clears his throat. “Yeah. Okay. Cool, cool, cool.”
Fuck. He’s not telling me something.
“What?” I ask.
“No, that’s great. You’re coming tomorrow. Awesome.”
“Baz...spit it out. Now.”
“Fuck,” he mutters. “Fine. They’re coming tomorrow too.”
“Cez and Marlena? Are you kidding me?”
He sighs softly. “Mom got all blubbery about the baby and asked them what they were doing tomorrow, and they didn’t have any plans, so she insisted that they come for the day.”
Well, that’s that. “Then I guess I won’t be there, after all.”
“Trevor, please.”
“I have to g-go,” I say, the words sticking in my throat.
“No! Come! Just come tomorrow. You don’t have to talk to them. You can just—”
“I’m going to the Golden Buddha for dinner, Baz. If you want to see me, you can find me there, but I swear to God, if you show up with Cez—”
“I wouldn’t do that,” he insists.
“Gotta go,” I say, because my eyes are burning and I seriously don’t feel like dealing with this shit anymore.
“Trev—”
I lean forward and hang up the call, watching as the display changes from “Baz Calling” to “Call Ended.”
A moment later, my phone rings again, but I don’t pick up. I don’t want to talk to my brother again tonight. I don’t want to hear about how sorry Cez is or how I need to forgive him or about how Marlena is carrying my parents’ first grandchild and that it’s been half a year since she broke our engagement and I need to make room in my heart for that baby. I don’t want to be guilt-tripped or criticized. I don’t want to fight. I just don’t want to spend Christmas with my cheating brother and his pregnant fiancée. And if that means I won’t see my parents at Christmas this year? So be it.
Forgiveness is a sticky thing, I think, heading north on Route 2 toward home.
Faye offered it so easily tonight, even though I treated her like trash at the bar. But I am totally unable to extend a shred of it to my brother.
I wish I could, I think to myself. I wish I could forgive him, because the peace that comes with offering forgiveness is almost as joyful as the relief that comes with being forgiven.
I think of Faye’s face as she said “I do.” It was free of hurt, free of anger. Perhaps I can’t forgive Cez and Marlena yet because I am still hurt and still angry, and frankly, I don’t know when that pain will subside, allowing room
for true forgiveness.
But as I get closer and closer to the house that should have been brimming with joy on my first married Christmas, I find that—for the first time since June—my sadness outweighs my anger. For the first time since that terrible night in Portland, I long for the peace and relief that only forgiveness can bring.
***
Faye
I wake up with the sun on Christmas morning...
...at 11:17 a.m. local time.
I do a double-take when I look at the clock radio beside my bed, blinking at the four red digital numbers filling the small screen. I can’t remember the last time I woke up this late, especially since my body clock is still probably set to Boston time, which means I’m actually waking up at 3:17 p.m.!
I chuckle softly as I stretch my arms over my head.
I guess I needed it.
“This is what happens when you don’t take a vacation for ten years,” I mumble to myself.
Blinking my eyes against the light coming in through my windows, I nestle under the sheets and blanket. For all that the North Pole Inn isn’t fancy digs, they make a damn comfortable bed. So comfortable, in fact, I had almost missed the throbbing of my head until now.
“Owww,” I whine, closing my eyes and frowning.
How many drinks did I have last night?
I piece together my memories and add them up: a gin martini, several sips of North Star vodka, a tequila shot, and...oh Lord. A scorpion bowl and a half. No wonder I feel like poop. I haven’t been hungover in...ages.
Swinging my legs over the bed, I stagger into the bathroom, where I open up my toiletry bag and find some Advil. After swallowing down three tablets chased with a plastic cup of water, I step back to bed, burrowing under the covers and mentally reconstruct the rest of last night.
Thoughts of Brandy-the-bartender make me smile, especially as I recall her perfect martini and confident advice about men. And if memory serves, she invited me to share Christmas dinner with her and everyone else at the Golden Buddha this evening. Though it wouldn’t have occurred to me even in my wildest dreams that I’d spend Christmas Day at a strip mall Chinese restaurant surrounded by strangers, I’m even more surprised by how much I’m looking forward to it.