Jingle All the Way

by Fern Michaels

  Olivia shuts off the water and gives me a look.

  “I have no idea who that could be,” I say.

  I walk across my townhome to my door and open it so that my body is shielded by the door and just my head is peeking out.

  Ryan is sitting on the path just outside my door. A rush of emotions surge through me: excitement, nervousness, desire, and then, when I remember my partially made-up face, embarrassment.

  Immediately, my hand goes to shield my one made-up eye.

  “Happy New Year’s,” he says.

  I notice that Vince and Gerry are in a dark blue van in the parking lot. They wave, and I wave back, and then immediately return my hand to covering up my one made-up eye.

  “Hi, what are you doing here? How did you find my house?”

  “I have caller ID, so I got your number when you called me. You’re in the book, so I was able to look on-line and match your number to your house.”

  “Oh, so . . . why are you here?”

  “I’m here to apologize. I’ve been thinking a lot about what you said when you called—left the message, I mean—and . . . I feel really bad about how things went between us.”

  It’s freezing out, and the cold air has made me hyperaware of my nipples standing at attention. I feel like my nipples have taken over the entire house.

  “I’m sorry, but I’m freezing. Can you—” I was going to ask him to come in, but he won’t be able to make it over the cement step you have to cross to get inside with his wheelchair. “Hang on a second. Let me put a jacket on. I’ll come out.”

  I run over to the sink, wash off the makeup from my eye, then grab my coat from the back of the kitchen chair and put it on as I go outside.

  “Hey,” I say.

  “Hey. So, I mean, I just wanted to say that—that I’m sorry. Of course I think you’re attractive. And I had a lot of fun talking to you, too. I’m just not sure I’m ready to start dating.”

  “Well, that’s fair. I understand that.”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay.”

  We stare at each other for a long moment. I shift my weight from my right foot to my left, feeling confused and awkward.

  “So, you’re going out?” he asks.

  “Yeah. My coworker, Olivia, and I are going to this party at my friend’s house. How about you?”

  “Gerry, Vince, and me are going to see a band downtown.”

  “Cool.”

  We stare at each other in silence for several more seconds.

  “God, this is really awkward, isn’t it?” he says.

  “Yeah. It sort of is.”

  “Well, I guess I’ll get going. I . . . uh, would you be interested in seeing the exhibit at the art museum with me sometime?”

  “As friends, you mean?”

  “To start.”

  “Yeah. Sure. I think I’d like that.”

  “Well, I have your number. I’ll call you. Have fun tonight. Happy New Year.”

  “You, too. Happy New Year.”

  I wave him off, watching him for a moment before I return to the warmth of my townhome.

  “Who was that?” Olivia asks.

  I tell her the whole story, and she reacts as I knew she would, which is why I haven’t told her before: she goes bonkers, shrieking about how he was the transcendent love my horoscope told me about.

  “I don’t know about love. There’s definitely attraction.” I tell her about his accident and how he’s not ready to date. I ask her if she thinks it’ll be a problem for me to date a guy who can’t walk.

  “You guys could have fallen in love and then he could have gotten in the accident. What would you do then, leave him?”

  “No, of course not.”

  “Every relationship has its challenges. Real attraction, real connection—that doesn’t come along very often. I think you should see where this goes.”

  “Well, the real obstacle is whether he actually calls. I’m not counting on it.”

  I blow-dry and curl her hair; then I help her with her makeup and finish doing my own. I end up wearing a fitted black sweater that is sexy without being too revealing. Olivia and I would never be mistaken for movie stars, but I think for two ordinary underwriters, we clean up pretty well.

  The party is at my friend Cindy’s house. Cindy and I were roommates our freshman year in college. We were, and still are, very different people, but somehow we became friends, despite getting off to a terrible start. When she learned I was French Canadian, she told me she’d taken French in high school and proceeded to ramble off some horribly mangled sentences in a pitiful attempt at French. I couldn’t help myself—it was so awful—I burst out laughing. Needless to say, this didn’t endear me to her.

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” I’d said. “That was very French of me. We’re snobs about our language. But that was a good try, really. No, really.”

  We managed to become friends despite me nearly keeling over with laughter at her butchered French the first time we met.

  Though she never spoke French in front of me again.

  Nowadays we hardly ever see each other. I swear if e-mail hadn’t been invented, most of my friendships would have disintegrated like a sandcastle in a windstorm. Much like a Christmas newsletter, once a month or so I e-mail my friends, telling them about what’s going on in my life whether they care or not and doing my best to pry out a few details about their lives as well. In this way, we’re able to stay in touch, even if it is a tenuous link.

  As soon as I get to the party, I start scoping the scene for guys who look to be about Olivia’s age and aren’t wearing wedding rings. I see one who looks promising. I’m pretty sure I’ve met him at one of Cindy’s parties before. He either goes to her church or works with her, something like that.

  “What about him?” I whisper to Olivia.

  “What about him?”

  “For you, silly. What do you think about him for you? Come on, let’s go chat him up.”

  “Oh, I don’t—”

  But before she can protest, I’ve got her by the arm and am essentially dragging her across the room.

  “Hi,” I say to the guy. “I’m Aimee. We met at one of Cindy’s parties . . .”

  “Her barbeque last spring.”

  “Oh, right, right. What was your name again?”

  “Bob.”

  “Bob, this is my coworker, Olivia. I was just going to get a drink. Bob, do you need a refill?”

  “Sure, that’d be great.”

  “Olivia, what’s your poison?”

  “Oh, I . . . I’ll have whatever you’re having.”

  “I’ll be right back.”

  I cross the room to the kitchen, where I take as long as I possibly can to retrieve a beer out of the fridge for Bob and pour two glasses of red wine. I sneak covert glances at Bob and Olivia, and things seem to be going well. There are smiles exchanged, gazes are met, the usual flirtation regimen. Just as I’m about to stop dawdling and return, I see Bob make a hasty retreat and a look of disappointment flash across Olivia’s face.

  “What happened?” I ask.

  “As soon as he found out I had kids he couldn’t get away from me fast enough.”

  “Oh. I’m sorry.”

  She just offers a resigned shrug.

  Not for the first time, it occurs to me that this whole dating thing really sucks. There is so much possibility for rejection, so many things that could go wrong. For two people to have things in common, and want the same things in life, and be attracted to each other . . . well, really, sometimes I think it’s amazing that a couple ever hooks up and stays together at all.

  It’s hard, because I want everyone to be partnered off with someone they love and who loves them back. You see two single people and want them to hit it off and live happily ever after. You think that if you can just finagle a way to get them together, they’ll be drawn to each other like cat hair to black pants—they’ll become inseparable. Sometimes I have to remind myself of t
he lesson of Sean and me and Bridgette and Tristan: Just because somebody is in a couple does not mean he or she is happy. Sometimes it’s better to be single and free than to be shackled in an unhappy relationship.

  I really want Olivia to have a good time tonight—she gets so few nights out on the town—so to get her mind off Bob, I quickly gather a group of eight of us together to play Cranium. She does her best to avoid doing any singing or art or impersonations, but at last her teammates force her to do the next round, and when she’s called upon to do a Copycat of Marilyn Monroe, she starts laughing and doesn’t stop for the rest of the night.

  When midnight approaches, Olivia whispers to me that she’s worried about not having anyone to kiss when the clock strikes twelve. I tell her we’ll kiss each other like the French do—once on each cheek. That’s exactly what we do. Then we hold our champagne glasses high and toast. Amid the yelling and shrieking and cheering, I have a moment where I think about the year that has gone by and the year that is to come. That’s the thing about the holidays—they force you to reflect on your life whether you like it or not.

  I realize this: This past year, I made some hard, but good decisions. I had some fun. I went on a trip to the Bahamas I’ll never forget (a little present to myself after breaking up with Sean). I don’t know what this new year will bring for sure, but I can make a guess that some of it will be good, some will be bad, most will be forgettable, but maybe, just maybe, this year has some exciting possibilities in store for me.

  CHAPTER SIX

  On New Year’s Day, I spend the morning sleeping in and then work out to a step aerobics videotape in my living room. I’m just contemplating what I want for lunch when the phone rings.

  “Aimee?”

  “This is she.”

  “Hey. This is Ryan.”

  Excuse me, does anyone have a defibrillator handy, because I do believe my heart has stopped.

  “Hi! I’m glad you called. How are you?”

  “Good. I’m good. Are you hurting from last night?” he asks.

  “Actually, I drank pretty sensibly last night. How about you?”

  “Me, too.”

  “I guess that means we’re growing up, huh?”

  “I never would have thought I’d see the day. What is the world coming to?”

  “It’s a scary, scary day indeed when you can drink in moderation on New Year’s. Rogaine and incontinence diapers are all that much closer.”

  He chuckles. “Look, would you still be interested in going to the art museum with me on Saturday?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Would you be able to pick me up?”

  “Sure.”

  He gives me directions to his place, and we decide I’ll pick him up around one.

  I spend the next two days out of my head with excitement, even though I tell myself that we’re going to the museum as friends and I shouldn’t expect anything.

  When Saturday finally comes, I pull into his driveway a few minutes before one. He lives in a ranch-style house with a ramp fashioned from his front door to a cement path that connects with his paved driveway. I wonder if, before the accident, he lived in a two- or three-story house with lots of stairs. Or maybe he lived here all along and the only change was the addition of the ramp.

  I ring the doorbell, and he’s at the door in about a split second—he must have been watching for me from the window. As soon as I see him again, a charge of excitement rushes through my body.

  “Hi,” he says with a kind smile.

  “Hi,” I say. And with just those two words and a couple of smiles exchanged between us, I feel like whatever weird blip happened with us is a thing of the past and everything is okay again.

  We spend a couple hours tooling around the museum. Then we walk (or roll, depending) several blocks to the 16th Street Mall, which is a pedestrian mall in the heart of downtown Denver. There, we go to a café and order lattes.

  We talk a little more, and then I ask him if we can move our conversation to some place where they serve real food.

  We go to the Wazee Supper Club and order pizza and beers and continue getting to know each other.

  “What was your worst class in college?” he asks me.

  “Hmm, I don’t know.” I think back for a second. “This one class—art history—I liked the subject matter, but the professor was this really uptight lady. She wore those shirts where the collar comes way up and it’s so tight it looks like she shouldn’t be able to breathe. She was just this very severe lady, the bun pulled back all tight, the whole deal. I had this class first thing in the morning, and she’d shut the lights off—a total recipe for disaster for a eight A.M. class, clearly—and then she’d talk in this monotone voice. The light from the projector kind of lit up her face in the dark in this really eerie way. Anyway, it was such a struggle staying awake in that class, I tell ya. I never signed up for an early morning class again, particularly not a class that required us to look at slides in the dark.”

  “I can top that. My freshman year I had geology at eight A.M. Every day the professor would turn out the lights so we could look at slides . . . of rocks. The professor would throw out pop quizzes at the end of class to make sure you’d been paying attention. He just asked questions from stuff he covered in lecture that day, so theoretically if you were in class, you’d be fine. Except I slept through every single minute of every single class. I’d just come to class, sit down next to my friend Bruce, and about four seconds after the lights went out, I was fast asleep. Then at the end of the class, Bruce would elbow me in the ribs. He’d be like, ‘Dude! Wake up! We have a quiz!’ I’d wake up all startled, ‘Who? What? Where am I? What’s going on?’ Needless to say, my grade in that class wasn’t among the finest of my college career.”

  I laugh. “Rocks at eight A.M. That is pretty brutal. You’re right, you win; that’s worse than my tale of collegiate woe. At least I got to look at pretty pictures.”

  After dinner, we walk a couple of blocks to a bar and get a couple more beers, and before we know it it’s after midnight and we’re about a million miles away from the car.

  “What are we going to do?” I ask. “It’s too cold to walk all that . . .” I realize what I’ve just said, and I want to bludgeon myself with something heavy and painful. “. . . way.”

  “Why don’t you call a taxi and we’ll wait for it inside over another beer.”

  “That is a very good idea. You have some good critical thinking skills in that head of yours. It’s just one of the many things I really like about you.”

  We exchange smiles and flirty glances, and I realize that even though we’ve only gone on one date (albeit a twelve-hour one), I’m falling hard for this guy.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  After that first marathon date, Ryan and I see each other every chance we get, and when we don’t get together in person, we talk on the phone.

  Hanging out with someone in a wheelchair requires a lot of patience. Suddenly I have to wait for what feels like centuries for rickety old elevators to take us up a single flight of steps I would normally sprint up in seconds. Instead of being able to go through whatever door is closest to us, we often have to go around to some obscure back entrance that is wheelchair accessible. I never noticed any of this before because I never had to. But it could very easily have been me in that car accident. It could have been anyone. And now I notice this stuff.

  Every time he smiles at me, I get this dizzy feeling in my chest—not in my head, but in my chest, an actual physical reaction of lightness and excitement and sheer happiness. I think about him constantly. I think about things he said or the way he made me laugh. I fantasize about kissing him, running my hands across his chest, waking up in bed in his arms, getting him out of his clothes and licking and kissing every part of his warm flesh. I am, in short, out of my head with desire for him.

  I want to kiss him desperately, but it’s awkward. I’ll drive him home after we go on a date, and I’ll walk him to the door,
and because there is the height issue, I can’t just lean in close and hope he takes the hint and kisses me. So we don’t kiss, to my eternal sorrow.

  One day we go to the Natural Science Museum, and as we’re walking along, I put my hand over his. He envelopes my hand in his, and, as simple a gesture as it is, it thrills me. It’s like when you go camping and have been denied luxuries like a comfortable place to sleep and something more gourmet to eat than trail mix, and suddenly the simplest things become intensely pleasurable. We hold hands for maybe fifteen minutes, and the entire time I’m hyperaware of the warmth of his large, soft hands. I’m aware of the little glitter-sized pools of sweat that form in the heat between our palms. Then he lets go of my hand to hit some button on his mechanized chair. For the rest of the time we’re at the museum, all I can think about is holding his hand again, but maneuvering around the exhibits is tricky with his chair, and an opportunity to take his hand in mine never comes up again.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  One night I invite Ryan over for a gourmet meal of French food and good but inexpensive French wine. The menu is carefully planned to ensure every dish offers intensely flavorful, sensual delights. We start with a rich lobster bisque. For dinner we have roast duck, topped with candied orange in a Grand Marnier sauce, accompanied by wild rice. For dessert, I make la tarte d’eté, which is an almond shortbread filled with custard and raspberries, topped with milk chocolate mousse.

  It’s a meal in which every bite demands to be savored slowly. Every time Ryan tastes a new item, he emits a low, sexual groan of pleasure.

  We don’t talk much over the course of the meal, except to discuss food.

  “This food is absolutely spectacular,” Ryan says for approximately the twentieth time this evening.

  “Thank you. I love to cook, so I’d be happy to cook for you anytime.”

  “Where did you learn to cook like this?”

  “Both my mother and grandmother are good cooks. My mother and sister are girly girls, into all the stereotypical stuff you associate women with, like cooking, being into clothes and shoes, doing their hair and makeup. I was always a jock and never really got into clothes and makeup, at least not like my mom did, but cooking was one area that Mom and I could really bond over. My sister, Bridgette, is a decent cook, but I don’t think she was passionate about it like I was. So it was often Mom and me cooking dinners together. We just kind of worked quietly beside each other. I found cooking to be a good way to unwind after a long day, and, you know, you have to eat, so you might as well eat well if you can.”