by Неизвестный
“Carmen? Who’s that again?”
He laughed. “I thought you’d pick the elephant, because of the whole fortune joke.”
“I like dolphins.”
“Fair enough.” He squeezed her hand, which was how she realized he was holding her hand again. Their hands were now finding each other on their own.
They passed by the food kiosks, then joined the line for the carousel.
“Carmen will be disappointed you didn’t get the elephant,” he said.
“I’m so lost. What are you talking about?”
The line moved ahead, and they stepped up onto the carousel and took a shared seat between two giant swans.
He put his arm around her, along the back of the seat. The carousel began to move. The world swirled around them, all twinkling lights and sugar.
It was the perfect moment for their first kiss, and both of them sensed it. They turned to each other, tilted their heads, and started to lean in.
Danielle closed her eyes.
“Now we’re between two swans,” Carter said.
She opened her eyes. “I guess so.” The moment for kissing had passed.
“When Carmen put you up to wearing the yellow dress, didn’t she tell you about the elephant?”
“Who’s Carmen?”
“My sister. The one who set us up tonight.”
The world swirled around them. The carousel wasn’t moving that quickly, but combined with Danielle’s sudden realization that the situation was not what she thought, the ride seemed to be spinning wildly out of control.
“Carter, I don’t know your sister,” she admitted. “We were playing a prank. I was hungry, and the rest of the staff at the lodge dared me to pretend to be your date who cancelled.” She stared into his eyes, looking for a sign that he was pranking her now. “You knew that, right? And you’re just messing with me, right?”
His eyes flashed with hurt, then anger. He looked away quickly.
“This is all a joke,” he said flatly.
“I’m having a really nice night,” she squeaked.
He withdrew his arm from behind her back like she was a bag of stinking garbage.
“Who the hell are you?” he demanded.
The lights swam around her, and Danielle fought the urge to cry. “I’m Danielle. People call me Dani.”
“Sure,” he said coldly as he looked around, avoiding eye contact.
She tried to explain, “Your real blind date, Elle, got sick, and—”
“This isn’t yours.” He grabbed the stuffed dolphin from her hands. “This is Elle’s dolphin.” His stern tone showed he wasn’t joking.
Danielle didn’t know whether to apologize or laugh in his face. He was acting like such a jerk. She scowled at the stuffed dolphin and resisted the urge to tell Carter where he could stick it.
The carousel ride went on and on.
Danielle kept her arms crossed and her body angled away from Carter, shutting him out. How could she have looked at his stupid face and had her heart soar? He was obviously a rich jerk who didn’t deserve her friendship, let alone her love.
The ride finally slowed, grinding toward a stop.
“Finally,” he said with his rich-jerk voice.
Danielle jumped to her feet and scrambled to escape the still-moving carousel. She wove around disembarking couples and hit the ground, jumped over the low security rope, and ran as fast as she could. The cold wind in her hair felt good, and her anger made her fly.
She disappeared, invisible in the crowd.
9.
At that exact same moment, in another part of the world, behind a green door that you could walk by every day of your life and never see, a group of magic wielders gathered in a witches’ pub named The Dragon’s Tail.
One of the witches paused in her knitting and yelled at the giant TV screen on the wall, “Don’t run away, Danielle! You don’t really want to be invisible forever, do you?”
A dozen witches gathered around the pub’s tables, muttering their opinions while the large screen displayed a live image of Danielle, running away from the carousel, and then a shot of Carter, sitting between two swans and frowning at a stuffed dolphin like a chump.
“You dummy!” the Dice Witch ranted at the screen. “Carter, get up and chase after her!”
The Knitting Witch shrugged and went back to her knitting. “Well, you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink.”
“I’m not giving up on these two,” the Dice Witch said.
Someone at another table yelled, “These two suck! They had their chance and they screwed it up. Change the channel!”
Another witch cackled and yelled, “Yeah, change the channel! These two are too dumb to help! Put on Real Housewives!”
The Dice Witch got to her feet and waved her arms, trying to get everyone’s attention. “We can’t give up on these two! Carter has a good heart, I just know it. I can’t intervene again, but one of you can. Please?”
She looked around the pub. The other witches looked down at their hands or checked their cell phones, avoiding eye contact. It had been a busy month, and everyone had been putting in overtime. They were all tired, and nobody wanted more paperwork.
The Dice Witch hated to beg, and she hated owing people favors, so she slowly took her seat again. The rowdy table with the Drama Witches had gotten the remote control and they were about to change the TV channel.
The Dice Witch ordered a drink to drown her sorrows, then looked up at the TV screen just in time to see the dim light of hope blink out of Carter’s eyes. He tossed the stuffed dolphin in a trash can, pushed his hands into his pockets, and started walking through the carnival crowd.
10.
Danielle ran all the way back to the lodge. Her cheeks were damp, but she pretended the moisture was from falling snow.
She changed into her comfortable jeans and sweatshirt, tossed the yellow dress back into the Lost and Found, then scrubbed the glamorous makeup off her face in the women’s washroom.
The dinner rush was over, so she found most of the staff in the kitchen, eager to hear about the second half of the prank-date. Danielle relayed what had happened. In her version, the whole thing was a big joke and she didn’t feel anything at all for Carter, who was never once referred to by name, but only as The Rich Jerk.
The group agreed that the first half of the prank had gone really well, but the second half almost made them wonder if they should be more serious about their jobs and not mess around with people so much.
The bartender apologized for coming up with the whole idea, then made two take-out cups of hot chocolate with Peppermint Schnapps.
“One for you,” the bartender said gently. “And one to take outside for Eddie.”
Danielle gasped. “I totally forgot about Eddie! Maybe the Rich Jerk was right, and I am a terrible person.”
“We’re all terrible,” the bartender said with a grin. “We should probably stop messing around with people.”
“I need to bring snacks with me everywhere I go. Low blood sugar makes me susceptible to terrible ideas.”
“Truth.” The bartender nodded. “See you at home later.”
Danielle took the cups of hot cocoa and headed outside. She’d already tucked her long, amber-hued hair up into a twist inside her knitted cap.
To any casual onlooker, she was just a valet—someone you’d toss your keys at without a second look.
She went out through the side door and found Eddie at the main entrance. Eddie took his fortified hot cocoa drink, sipped it while she filled him on the details of her terrible prank-date, then gave her a big hug.
“I’m sorry your date was a bust,” he said. “Let’s go dancing tonight. I’ve got an app that tells me which club all the athletes training for the next Winter Olympics are at.”
“Sounds fun,” she said, which was a lie. What she really wanted to do was read a book or sleep for two days straight, until the ache in her chest had lifted.
How could she be b
roken-hearted over a man she’d only spent a few hours with? She went over and over the details of the evening, trying to figure out where the communication had gone wrong. It would be easier to isolate the few moments where it had actually gone right. What a disaster.
“Hey,” said Eddie.
Danielle looked up, wondering how much of the conversation she’d missed. Eddie had been talking about Olympic athletes and their sexual stamina, and then some other stuff.
“So, would you mind?” Eddie asked sweetly. “There are only a few cars left, so you can handle it on your own, right? I want to get to the club before all the good athletes are taken.” He patted her on the shoulder. “You look like you need to go home, so I won’t drag you out. But do you mind finishing up the shift?”
“Of course not. It’s my shift, remember?”
Eddie gave her a gap-toothed grin. “Right.”
He handed her the keys for the remaining cars, hugged her again, and then left.
People filtered out of the restaurant for the next hour, and she kept busy running to fetch their cars.
Eventually, there was just one set of keys remaining. Danielle looked at the car keys and sighed. These had to be the Rich Jerk’s. He should have gotten his car by now, but of course he hadn’t, because her disaster of a night was just going to get worse and worse.
The back of her neck tickled, like someone was sneaking up behind her. She whipped around, but nobody was there. She shivered and pulled the Hat of Invisibility down tighter on her head. She couldn’t shake the feeling she was being watched, and that her pathetic life was someone else’s Reality TV.
“Don’t be crazy,” she muttered to herself. “Who would watch this show? Maybe masochists, or insomniacs who need to get bored to sleep.”
An audience of unseen people laughed and applauded, like she’d just delivered a punchline. Danielle whirled around again. “Who’s there?”
The sound, which had been exactly like a sitcom laugh track, faded away, just as a chilly winter wind picked up and whistled through the nearby trees.
She grabbed the car keys and set them on top of the valet stand. Her shift was over, and he could get his own car, if he ever showed up.
She turned to start the walk to her house, but a blast of wind stopped her in her snowy tracks. The wind had come directly from the North Pole, with no stops along the way to soften the chill. The insides of her nostrils froze, and she clenched her eyes shut to protect them. The forceful wind lifted the knitted cap from her head as easily as if it were two cold hands, and suddenly her hair was flying loose.
The wind kept gusting, and she squinted open her eyes in time to see her beloved lumpy, gray cap swirl up and disappear into the inky sky. She waited for the hat to fall back down, but it didn’t.
The cold wind blew through her clothes, forcing her further back into the alcove of the front door, where she was protected from the chill.
The wind gusted for ten minutes, and then abruptly stopped, as inexplicably as it had begun. She looked up at the night sky, which told her nothing, except that she was very small, and the universe was so large.
“Now what?” she asked the sky.
The stars twinkled, like they wanted to give her a hint, but didn’t speak the same language.
She kept staring up at the sky, waiting for something. Finally, she concluded that the sky had no answers, so she’d have to find them herself, perhaps on the walk home.
She’d walked only two steps when she heard the crunching of snow, out of rhythm with her boots. She turned to find the Rich Jerk approaching her. He looked as handsome as she remembered, but different. Something had changed in his eyes.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
“I should have run after you, Danielle. You did tell me the truth, and I shouldn’t have held the misunderstanding against you.”
“I shouldn’t have messed around with you in the first place. It was a silly prank. I’m very sorry.”
“I’m sorry I acted like a jerk.”
She smiled. “I’m also sorry you were a jerk. It would have been nice if you’d kissed me, there on the carousel, in the middle of the winter carnival.”
He winced. “But the moment is gone?”
“That moment is long gone. It took a train out of here about an hour ago.”
He looked sheepish. “I heard this obnoxious voice in my head, telling me I was a dummy, and telling me to chase after you, but I ignored the voice.”
She tilted her head to the side. “Do you hear these voices often?”
He looked down as he shuffled his feet and chuckled. “It’s not like that.”
“That’s too bad. We could be crazy together. A few minutes ago, I could have sworn I heard a sitcom laugh track.”
“Were you doing something funny at the time?”
“Funny?” She thought about it. “Sure. They say comedy is tragedy plus time. The worst day of my life is now everyone’s favorite anecdote. My friends are always saying, ‘Dani, tell us again about that time you doused yourself in ketchup and declared yourself perfectly marinated!’ And the more I tell the story, the funnier it gets.”
He laughed and kicked the snow around his feet into a neat pile.
She expected he would ask for more details about the ketchup story, but he just glanced up and stared at her with an awestruck expression.
“Why are you staring?” She ran her tongue over her teeth quickly. “Do I have something stuck in my teeth?”
“Your teeth are perfect,” he said. “I was just thinking. Remember how I bought out the wall of stuffed animals, and you thought I was so sweet? I only did that to impress you, but as I walked through the carnival tonight, and I saw everyone with their prizes, laughing and smiling and feeling like winners, I realized something.”
He stopped and raised his eyebrows, like he was inviting her to guess.
Danielle liked guessing games almost as much as pranks, so she guessed, “You realized money buys happiness, and it can actually be pretty cheap?”
He smiled. “It made me happy. I did a silly thing, buying a bunch of stuffed animals, and it made me happy, because it made other people happy.”
“Okay… ”
“I’m afraid of things that I think are silly, like Halloween costumes, and flip flops, and falling in love.”
“Those are all very silly.”
“But silly things make people happy.”
She shook her head. “I could have told you that. Since I left my career and came to work here, my whole life revolves around silly things.”
He smiled. “Did it work? Did you find what you were looking for?”
She laughed. “My days aren’t perfect now, but they’re perfectly great. That’s a phrase we use around here a lot, whenever someone starts taking themselves too seriously.”
“Perfectly great,” he said, then he looked her over with an admiring expression. “Why didn’t I notice the beautiful valet girl who parked my car? Never mind me being silly, I must be an idiot.”
“No, don’t say that. I was wearing my Hat of Invisibility.”
“Hat of Invisi… May I kiss you?”
The back of Danielle’s neck tickled. She could swear she heard the soundtrack again, with unseen people cheering, and then chanting, KISS HIM! KISS HIM ALREADY!
“Yes,” she said.
The dark sky flashed with sheet lightening. How could that be? A moment earlier, she’d been staring at the stars, with not a cloud in sight.
Around her, the noisy cheering, from the studio audience that couldn’t possibly be real, rose to a crescendo, and then…
Carter gently slipped his arms around her back and pulled her to him. She fit within his embrace like the final piece of a jigsaw puzzle. He tilted his head down slowly.
Danielle closed her eyes and opened her heart.
Kissing is silly, she thought, right as his lips met hers. Silly, and wonderful.
He was thinking the exact same thing.
&
nbsp; Danielle could still hear the faint cheering noises, augmented by the sounds of bells ringing. It sounded like someone was having quite the party. They kept kissing, and the soundtrack that both of them heard, yet would deny hearing, gradually faded away.
They kissed in the wintry silence.
Ten feet above their heads, an elephant sculpture jutted out above the restaurant’s entrance.
It was the parking valet’s job to go up onto the roof and sweep the snow off periodically, so it didn’t fall on guests, but the valet had been distracted that night, having her heart soar, then break, then soar again.
As Carter and Danielle kissed, energy swirled around them. The spell of the Dice Witch was culminating, building off itself and swirling in celebration.
Spells are a bit like people—they like to shout “I told you so,” when they get things right.
The spell rose up in delight, wafting on the heat of their kissing, and sent a vibration of happiness through the elephant. The day’s snow shook loose all at once and fell down upon Carter and Danielle in a single surprising WOOMPH.
They kept kissing.
11.
Danielle and Carter kissed under the snowy elephant, and went on to live happily ever after.
Their shared life was not without hurdles. The first major issue was that they lived in different cities, and Carter loved his career, while Danielle had quit the high-stress corporate lifestyle for good reason. They enjoyed a long-distance relationship for the first few months while they got to know each other, and then gradually met in the middle.
Danielle finished the winter season at the resort, then moved to the city to live with Carter on a trial basis. He had a big house with a guest cottage, and Danielle’s friends from the resort took the couple up on their invitations to visit any time.
With the help of Danielle’s friends, Carter learned how to relax and unwind on evenings and weekends. He didn’t get fully relaxed every single weekend, but he managed to participate in a prank or two.
Within a year, they were getting married, and the dressmaker had to let out the waistline of Danielle’s beautiful wedding gown to accommodate the new family members.