by Lindsey Kelk
‘So, I know it’s the holidays and we’re all going to be stuffing ourselves stupid pretty soon, but they have these awesome little ice–cream balls here that I can’t resist.’ He draped his arm along the back of the booth, letting his fingers brush against my bare back. ‘You up for dessert?’
‘Oh, Joe,’ I said, the light of triumph in my eyes. Reaching out, I brushed his hair back into place. ‘I’m up for anything.’
*
When my alarm rang the next morning I had no idea where I was, but after a couple of seconds blinking up at a familiar light fixture, I realized I was in my room, just at a different end of the bed from where I usually found myself at seven a.m. on a Tuesday. Rolling over to silence the alarm, I squinted through a curtain of curls at the man fast asleep beside me. We had given the song ‘O Holy Night’ a whole new meaning. Stretching out my legs, I rested my toes on my headboard and flexed my calves. No need for Soulcycle this morning; I’d gotten my cardio already.
Joe stirred, reaching an arm across the bed and narrowly avoiding swatting me in the face. Never the kind of girl to miss an opportunity, I rolled over, shuffling into the sweet spot between his chest and his chin, my shoulder nestled into his armpit, my hand resting on his smooth, toned abs. I wanted to wake up like this every morning for the rest of my life. Without words, Joe turned over onto his side, wrapped his arms around my body and pressed against me. Perhaps he wasn’t entirely awake, but one part of him definitely was. Happily it was one of my favourite parts.
‘Good morning,’ I whispered as his hands began to explore their new-found territory.
‘Shh,’ he replied, his face pushed into my hair, his hips pushing into me. ‘Don’t talk.’
Even someone with as much to say for themselves as me couldn’t really argue with that.
Chapter Five
‘I can’t believe you brought him home with you.’ Sadie tossed her Louis Vuitton weekend bag into the trunk of the hire car and slammed the door. Hard. ‘You’re such a whore.’
‘I can’t believe I’m letting you crash my Christmas,’ I replied, gunning the engine and turning down the carols on the radio. ‘You’re such a bitch.’
First thing Wednesday morning, Sadie and I loaded ourselves into a hire car in the West Village. My plan was to leave early, get settled into the house and then take care of work. The pitch to MUMH was all but done. After I’d seen off Mr Davies, aka the future Mr Jenny Lopez, I’d pulled off the most impressive pitch of my career. Even Erin was impressed, and between being an uber-WASP and an exhausted mother of two, Erin was never impressed. We were still waiting for a couple of financial notes, and then it was ready to send. Since we’d closed the office as an early Christmas treat to the staff, I didn’t see any reason why I couldn’t send it from my happy holiday getaway.
‘You know you love me,’ she said, long legs folding up in the passenger seat. ‘How long is this drive?’
‘Maybe five hours?’ I grimaced at the GPS and made a silent prayer for it not to snow until we arrived at the house. The forecast did not look good. ‘I hope you’re feeling chatty.’
‘I’m tired,’ she whined. ‘Can we stop for coffee?’
‘Sadie, we aren’t even on the road yet.’ I turned to give her the full force of my stare. ‘This is going to be a really long trip if you’re going to start like this.’
She pouted, sticking out the big full bottom lip that, if I had my way, was about to make us both a lot of money. It was hard to be mad at her now that she represented not just a pain-in-the-ass roommate but dollar signs. ‘Why isn’t Angela driving up with us?’
‘Angie has to close the mag,’ I explained. ‘So she’s coming later with James and Jeremy.’
‘Oh, I love James!’ she said, concentrating her attention on her toes.
‘Yeah, no one like Jeremy.’ I gave voice to what went unspoken, as was so often the way. ‘But it’s the holidays and Angie wanted to invite James, so we’re stuck with him. Apparently he’s an amazing chef, so he can help with lunch.’
‘Are they bringing the food?’ she asked, dubiously staring into the back seat and finding nothing but Christmas decorations, boxes of beautiful (and secretly professionally wrapped) gifts and a tasteful yet festive selection of outfits. ‘Because I don’t see any food?’
‘It’s being delivered this afternoon,’ I said. ‘Along with the tree. Trust me, it’s all taken care of. I have Christmas completely covered.’
My night and morning of passion with Joseph C. Davies had really kicked my ass into gear. I’d stopped moping and started to get my act together. As well as writing the world’s most kick-ass pitch for Bertie Bennett, I’d planned the most perfect Christmas for me and the gang. For the first time since I’d walked past the Rockefeller Center tree and not even looked up, I was excited about the holidays.
‘Have you heard from him?’ Sadie asked as I turned on my blinker and eased out into Manhattan traffic. Luckily the streets were always quiet over the holidays so I was less worried about being ploughed into the Hudson by a manic taxi driver. ‘Mister First Date Sleepover?’
‘His name is Joseph C. Davies,’ I said, over-enunciating every syllable. ‘And you should take a couple of seconds to remember that, because you’re gonna be hearing it a lot.’
‘Yeah?’ She laughed, tightening the topknot on the top of her head. ‘Is that right?’
‘Yeah,’ I replied, scratching my eyebrow as we headed towards the Holland Tunnel and laughing right along with her. ‘I swear to God, Sadie, this man is my soul mate.’
‘And you worked that out on the first date?’
‘I worked that out when he dropped five hundred dollars on a wallet for his assistant in Barneys,’ I said, flipping off an extremely brave delivery man on a bicycle who thought it was a good idea to cut across four lanes of traffic to make sure someone got their morning bagel. ‘The date just confirmed everything.’
‘What happened to never sleep with a man on the first date?’ Sadie, hardly a stranger to first-date hook-ups herself, clicked her tongue. ‘He’s not going to buy the cow if he can get the milk for free.’
‘Dollface, he could buy the farm,’ I said, glancing over my shoulder. ‘But it’s not even about that. We just connected, you know? I mean, yeah, he’s super wealthy and he’s got a great job and our kids could probably get into any school they liked, but it’s deeper than that. I looked into his eyes and I just knew.’
‘Knew what, other than that he had a seven-figure-salary and no plans on a Monday night?’
‘That it would work.’ I ignored her bitter tone. She was still pretty fresh from her break-up. Well, not that fresh, but when you were a semi-supermodel you took rejection harder than most. ‘He was so great and smart and interesting. He was fun to be with, it wasn’t like he was just trying to get into my pants.’
‘But he did.’ She shrugged, pulling her black woollen hoodie over her head and looking out of the window. ‘He got into your pants, he took those pants off, and then I think he did a bunch of stuff you can never tell your mom about, right?’
‘Sadie, honey,’ I said, gritting my teeth and blinking into the strip lighting of the Holland Tunnel. ‘If he asked, I would burn my pants. All of them. I would spend the rest of my life pantless.’
Sadie gave a short sharp laugh while I concentrated on not driving her into a wall or a passing truck and tried not to wonder, for the hundredth time since Joe had left my apartment the morning before, when he was going to call.
*
‘I am never getting back into that car with you!’ Sadie jumped out of the car and slammed it shut before I had even turned off the radio. ‘Ever!’
‘Good,’ I shouted back, opening the car door and stretching my legs, feet crunching into a good foot of fresh snow. I didn’t even register how cold it was − anything was better than spending another second in the car with her. ‘Because I’m not driving you anywhere, ever again. You can find your own way home.’
She
flung the back passenger door open, grabbed her bag and made an angry grunting sound as she hurled it up onto her shoulder. I should have known better than to agree to a road trip with a model who was so temperamental she made Naomi Campbell look a bit boring. Sadie had a foul temper when she was pissed. The first time I met her she’d torn up a hotel room because her boyfriend had dumped her, so what on earth had possessed me to try to talk through her relationship issues and suggest that her parents’ divorce might have affected her ability to form lasting bonds with men when I was trapped in a compact car with her for six long, icy hours?
Truly I was a slave to the process.
‘Where are the keys? It’s freaking freezing out here,’ she spat, sprinting up the steps to the house and kicking at Erin’s beautiful front door.
It seemed that her adorable bobble hat and cute little ski jacket weren’t nearly as warm as they looked. I, on the other hand, grew up upstate and knew winter was no laughing matter. Yeah, my coat looked like a sleeping bag, and sure, these hiking boots were the least stylish thing to grace my feet since I was forced to wear a pair of Old Navy flip-flops when I forgot my Havaianas at the beach last summer, but at least I was warm. Erin’s house was way up in the Finger Lakes and there was no way the mercury was pushing up past zero. The house itself was beautiful, a gorgeous gabled roof with huge windows that I couldn’t wait to stare out of while holding a spiked hot chocolate, but if I was honest, I was enjoying staring at the ass-faced looking girl with the chattering teeth even more.
Let her cool off, I thought as I took in the rest of the scenery. A porch wrapped all the way round the front of the house looking out onto the frozen lake, and the bedrooms at the front had their own little deck, complete with hot tub, just as Erin had promised. It looked like a storybook house, the kind a little kid might draw. All it needed was a tree, some tunes and several more people. With just the two of us, all it reminded me of was the house in The Shining.
‘Isn’t it beautiful?’ I asked, dragging my suitcase up the steps and rifling through my purse for the keys. There was no point in dragging out an argument when we were the only people for miles around. Even if I was totally in the right. ‘Hell of a lot nicer than your average manger, anyway. And not a donkey in sight.’
‘It’s a house,’ Sadie replied. ‘The lake is grey and frozen and cold. Remember two summers ago when I was at Lake Como? We met George Clooney and we had cocktails and—’
‘Here are the keys,’ I said brightly. I couldn’t take the George Clooney story again, I really couldn’t. And I loved the George Clooney story. ‘Let’s get out of the snow.’
All I wanted to do was get inside, check my emails and fire off the presentation to Stephen, then I could throw myself into Christmas mode full throttle. I’d brought up boxes and boxes of lights and every damn bauble I could find in the house, and by the time Angie arrived I wanted it to look like Santa had blown his load over every available surface. Assuming Santa’s load was made of glitter. Huh. Gross.
After wrestling with several false starts, I finally found the key that fitted the lock. ‘And we’re in!’ I declared, pushing the door wide open and letting Sadie push past me as though the devil himself were chasing her. ‘Wow, nice place.’
‘Yeah, it’s okay,’ Sadie agreed. It didn’t sound like much but it was a pretty big compliment coming from her. ‘Which one is my room?’
‘Whichever one you want,’ I relented, knowing she would pick the biggest and the best. ‘Don’t forget there are five other people coming!’ I shouted as she tore off up the stairs at an impressive pace for someone wearing studded stiletto-heeled Versace boots. ‘And two children!’
Like I said, I love children, but sometimes I forget that they count as people.
The living room was every bit as gorgeous as the outside of the house promised it would be. Huge, sprawling and super comfortable. Erin, or one of Erin’s interior designers, had done some fine work.
Work. Oh yeah.
I pulled my phone from my pocket, sadly remembering that I had a job and not a super-rich investment banker husband. I scanned through my emails but nothing much was going on − almost everyone was already on break for the holidays. Nothing more than a couple of corporate e-cards, sale reminders from Net-a-Porter and Bergdorf Goodman and the Kardashian family Christmas card forwarded by my friend Vanessa. She got me. No sign of the last couple of presentation points from our host.
Dumping myself on the couch, I unzipped my coat and swiped over to my messages, scrolling up and down, refreshing, reading and generally starting to worry about why I hadn’t heard from Joe. What if something had happened to him? He was supposed to fly down to Florida on Tuesday evening and now it was Wednesday afternoon. He could have been mugged, he could have been carjacked. His plane could have crashed, for all I knew − we’d been listening to Christmas music all the way up here. Oh my God, what if his plane had crashed? And his poor family were all sitting around waiting for him and I was the last person to see him and all his gifts for his nieces and nephews were just scattered somewhere over Georgia.
‘I could text him,’ I told the sofa. ‘I mean, he’s probably not dead, he’s probably just tied up with his family. I bet he’d love me to text him.’
I stared into the open fireplace and blinked. Who wouldn’t love me to text them?
Opening a new message, I considered my options for a moment. Nothing too heavy − something seasonal and light. The holidays were a perfect excuse to send the first message, something I would normally never do, but hey, I’d already broken all my rules with this guy. Grabbing Erin’s keys from the coffee table, I ran back out to the car and brought in one of the boxes of decorations. The one in which I had stashed my sexy Mrs Santa outfit. A master of the quick change, I was out of my jeans and into the little red dress inside thirty seconds. Now it was just a matter of lipstick and lighting. Perching myself on a windowsill, I turned my camera to face me, stretching my arm out as far as it would go and holding it high above my head. There, the perfect selfie, every time.
After cropping, filtering and making sure everything was perfect, I tapped in the message ‘happy holidays!’, decided not to add any x’s or o’s and pressed Send before I could overthink it. What was the worst that could happen? Maybe he’d send me a dick pic. Oh Jesus, what if he sent me a dick pic? How would I ever explain that to our grandbabies? As the message went through, I felt that familiar surge of excitement and slight regret that always comes with texting a guy first. Especially texting him a picture of yourself dressed as a sexy Santa.
‘Jenny!’
Apparently Sadie’s voice only had one setting today and that was ‘shriek’.
‘Jenny?’
‘Sadie,’ I called, flipping back to my emails. ‘We’re the only two people in the house, you don’t have to yell.’
‘Are the lights working down there?’ she asked, jogging down the stairs, a look of complete horror on her face. ‘Because they’re not working up here.’
‘Of course the lights are working,’ I replied, reaching over to a table lamp and yanking the little silver chain that hung beneath the shade. Nothing. ‘Okay, this one isn’t, but I’m sure the lights are working.’
‘Oh my God,’ she whispered. ‘There’s no electricity. We’re going to die.’
My legs felt like lead after the drive, and dragging myself off the sofa felt like a chore. I needed a coffee or seven. I elaborately strolled over to the panel of switches on the wall by the front door.
‘Stop overreacting,’ I said, wondering how Sadie made it through each day without something flying into her eyes and blinding her, they were so wide. ‘See?’
I flicked all four light switches.
And absolutely nothing happened.
Chapter Six
‘Oh my God, we’re going to die,’ Sadie wailed, throwing herself against the staircase. She was wasted as a model; she totally could have been one of those dumb blonde girls that got murdered at the beginni
ng of a horror movie. Preferably one of the really nasty ones. Maybe something in the Saw franchise.
‘Sadie, we’re not going to die,’ I said as matter-of-factly as possible. ‘We’re in the Finger Lakes − it’s hardly the end of civilization.’
‘But we have no electricity?’ she replied, pulling her thin jacket around her. ‘And I’m already cold? Are we going to freeze to death?’
‘Yeah, we’re gonna freeze to death,’ I sighed, shaking my head for extra emphasis. ‘You are the most dramatic human on earth.’
And from me, that was saying something.
‘Can you make it work?’ Sadie asked, snivelling and pushing herself into a broken-down-doll of a sitting position, draped against the stairs. ‘Can you fix it?’
‘Of course I can make it work,’ I said, looking out of the windows to see the sun setting across the lake. It would have been beautiful if our only source of light and heat wasn’t disappearing in the distance as I watched. ‘I’m sure it’s just a blown fuse or something. We just need to find the fuse box. I’ve got this.’
And as I was saying it, I kind of believed it. I’d lived on my own and with a variety of helpless roommates, and I’d dealt with more than one tripped circuit breaker in my time. Almost every apartment I’d lived in had the kind of wacky wiring where you couldn’t use the toaster, oven and the AC at the same time. Sadie didn’t know she was born,
‘Okay,’ she sniffed. ‘Jenny?’
‘Yeah?’
‘Why are you wearing a slutty Santa costume?’
I looked down at my minidress and shrugged. ‘Happy holidays?’ I offered.
Pinching her mouth into a tight circle, Sadie attempted to dial down the look of horror that had taken hold of her face as best she could and trotted into the kitchen after me. Ignoring her and dialling Erin’s number, I opened a variety of likely-looking cupboards and doors looking for the offending circuit breaker, finding nothing but a variety of very expensive seasonings and flatware. Sadie sat on the butcher’s-block island in the middle of the room, tapping the stainless-steel cookware that hung from the ceiling like a distracted cat. I hung up, relieved to know she was so invested in helping. One moment she was wailing about our impending doom, the next she was tapping out the tune to ‘Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer’ on a sauté pan.