Twice Upon a Christmas

by Shanna Swendson

I couldn’t help but glance toward Dan as Jason dragged me over to the Carltons. For a split second, Dan and I made eye contact, but he moved on, not even registering the moment. I couldn’t help but sigh wistfully. I had a feeling I wouldn’t have nearly as much fun talking business during the banquet as I’d had singing and spending my breaks dancing with Dan.

  In fact, I could barely focus on the business conversation. My attention kept straying to the stage. I knew these songs like they were a part of my soul, and it felt wrong not to chime in on my part. There were times I had to bite my lip to keep from singing along, especially when one of the other girls stepped forward to sing one of my solos.

  Not that anyone noticed my lack of attention. Michelle monopolized Jason, and he made little effort to draw me into their conversation. I wasn’t sure anyone would have noticed if I’d stood up and started singing. During the group’s break, I found myself staring at Dan and Tilly. He seemed to be enjoying the music, even without knowing anyone in the group. He danced once with Tilly, but otherwise stayed at the table. I wondered if Jason would suggest we go greet Tilly, or had that been Hadley’s idea after I was let go in that other life? If we did go talk to Tilly, then I could be introduced to Dan. I wondered if whatever connection we’d formed in the other life would happen now, or did it hinge entirely upon us working together?

  At the second break, when Jason showed no sign of wanting to talk to anyone but the Carltons, I excused myself from the table and approached Alicia, bracing myself for an unfriendly reaction. “You sound great, even without me,” I said. “I don’t think I realized how good we really are until I heard you as an audience member.”

  “Regrets?” she asked, her tone a little frosty in spite of my attempted olive branch.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I really didn’t want to leave the group. I just couldn’t have both. At least, not right now.”

  “Getting a lot of business done?”

  “Not really, to be honest. They wanted me here, but I’m not sure they even notice me.”

  “Want to join us for a number?”

  I glanced over my shoulder at the Carlton table. “I’m tempted, but I’d better not. I have no idea how well that would go over with these people.”

  “Why would you even want to deal with people who’d have an issue with that? You know, you could still quit and come back to us.”

  “No, I couldn’t.” There were nice things about that other life, but my bank balance wasn’t one of them. I wasn’t sure I could make myself choose that.

  “Well, you know where to find us. And now I have to get back on stage.”

  Jason finally seemed to remember me as we left at the end of the evening. He escorted me out on his arm, but I noticed that his attention was focused on Michelle. He talked about being afraid of the dragon lady, but I noticed that he wasn’t exactly avoiding her. “I guess we need to get a cab,” he said as we entered the lobby.

  “It’s really not that far for me,” I said.

  “So you’ll be okay on your own?” There was a time when that would have stung, but it came as a relief now.

  “Sure, I’ll be great,” I said, but he was already turning toward Michelle. So much for the attentiveness he’d shown during those late nights in the office. What he was really attracted to was getting ahead. I suppose that explained the fact that he didn’t notice me when we weren’t working together.

  I couldn’t wait to get home and wake up in another life.

  In another life, at another party, I wore a sexy “Mrs. Santa” costume as the women in our group sang Andrews Sisters-style arrangements of Christmas carols. We finished a song to a smattering of applause, and then it was time for our break. Alicia and I stood to the side of the room, drinking water while watching the crowd of twenty- and thirty-something professionals letting their hair down at the company holiday party.

  “You know, there are a lot of viable candidates here,” Alicia said.

  “Candidates for what?” I asked.

  “Eligible men.”

  “Oh, yeah. I guess.”

  She turned to me. “Okay, what’s with you? You seem distracted. Are you still stressed about losing your job?”

  “No, I’m starting to think that really may be for the best.”

  “Then what’s up?”

  “Dan kissed me the other night.”

  “Dan? The foster kids center guy? Eeyore? The one you were dancing with at the gala? And you didn’t tell me last night that he’d kissed you? Was that why you didn’t want him to see you in a bonnet?”

  I’d forgotten that not everyone lived every day twice. It really would have been last night for her. “Oh, sorry, it was last night, when he walked me home. I’m just getting my days all jumbled up. I don’t seem to know whether I’m coming or going at this time of year. And the dreams aren’t helping.”

  “Dreams?”

  I hesitated, but I needed to talk about this to someone, and I hadn’t mentioned it to her in this life. “Do you ever have déjà vu?”

  “Doesn’t everyone?”

  “What about reliving every day?”

  Now she really looked confused. “What?”

  I took a deep breath and dove in. “For the past couple of weeks, I feel like I’ve been living every day twice. I live a day, and then I wake up in the morning and instead of it being the next day, it’s the same day again, but like a totally different life. Sometimes, I feel like I’m either dreaming a day and then living it, or living a day and then dreaming about it.” When she didn’t immediately reply, I tried to remember if it had, in fact, been the other Alicia I’d discussed this with. “We haven’t had this conversation before, have we?”

  She raised an eyebrow. “I think I would have remembered it if we had.”

  “But I’ve had this conversation with you. Just in that other life. At first I thought this life was the nightmare—when this all started, I had a terrible day. I was late for work, spilled coffee on myself, didn’t get the Carlton’s Department Store account and got a pro bono assignment instead and then had a costume mix-up and was late for the gig.”

  “I remember that day.”

  “But then I woke up on that same day again. It was a relief to find that I got another chance. I fixed all the things that went wrong. But I’m starting to feel like it’s really the other way around. In that other life, I had to leave the group because I keep having to go to work events, and I never met Dan. I was at that gala again, only I was there as a guest, and I wasn’t singing. I missed it so much. And then Dan was there, but he didn’t know me.”

  “It sounds like you finally figured out what you want.”

  “I don’t know,” I hedged.

  “When are you happier? Do you wake up glad to get the do-over in that other life, or do you want to stay in this one? If you had to choose which one to wake up in for good, which would it be?”

  “This one,” I admitted. “I wasn’t sure at first. Losing my job sucked. On the other hand, everything else is better. But I don’t know how to make it stop.”

  “Have you tried staying up all night?”

  “No, but that’s an idea. If I don’t go to sleep, I can’t dream another life.”

  “Then it sounds like we’re pulling an all-nighter after this party.”

  After the party, we went back to my apartment for a slumber party—make that a non-slumber party. We got out of our costumes and into sweats. I made coffee while Alicia created an upbeat playlist on her phone and connected it to my stereo. I brought her a cup of coffee. “Okay, your mission is to keep me awake,” I said.

  She clinked her mug against mine. “On it, boss! Good thing I’m a night owl.”

  We drank more coffee in one night than I usually had in a week. We started with a short dance party, but soon realized that made us physically tired after an evening of singing. We switched to watching movies, and every time I started to nod off, Alicia nudged me awake. Although being a musician forced me to be a night person, I’d
never been one for pulling all-nighters, so this was new territory for me. I’d never wanted to sleep more in my life. My eyelids were leaden, and my whole body felt heavy. I kept reminding myself of why I was doing this, and that was enough motivation to keep me going for a few minutes more, but as the night wore on, it became more and more difficult to keep my eyes open.

  I splashed my face with cold water, opened a window and stuck my head outside, and soaked my hair so I wouldn’t want to put my head on a pillow. When it got really dire, Alicia turned up the music, grabbed my hands, and danced around with me. Finally, my stamina wore out and I fell onto the sofa to catch my breath. “Natalie, no!” Alicia called out, and her voice seemed to come from a great distance. “Think about Dan.”

  “I need to rest for a moment,” I mumbled. My eyes fluttered shut, just for an instant, and when I opened them, I was in my bed, wearing the sparkly bracelet. To be absolutely certain, I reached over to the nightstand to check my phone. It was Sunday morning. “No!” I wailed.

  My phone rang, and Jason’s name was on the screen. When I answered, he said, “Are we still on for brunch? I want to go over the final plans for the Christmas Eve event.”

  I’d totally forgotten that we’d planned brunch. Then again, to me, it had been about half a week since we’d made those plans, and I’d had a whole day in which I had no reason to think about them, since they didn’t exist. “Um, yeah, I guess. I can meet you in about half an hour.” I ended the call and rubbed my face, trying to stir up some life, before I dragged myself out of bed. In this life, I’d supposedly had a full night’s sleep, but I still felt like I’d stayed up all night. The last thing I wanted to do was spend a Sunday afternoon talking about work.

  A nudge woke me suddenly. I opened my eyes to find myself sitting on my sofa, Alicia leaning over me. “Hey! Wake up! You’re not supposed to fall asleep, remember?”

  I blinked groggily, trying to figure out where and when I was. “How long was I out?”

  “You barely nodded off—maybe a few seconds at most. I woke you up as soon as your eyes closed.”

  “Well, in that few seconds, I lived a whole day.”

  She sat next to me. “A whole day?”

  “Yeah, I woke up the morning after the gala with my bracelet on—that’s how I tell the lives apart. In that life, I always put on a sparkly bracelet before going to sleep. In this one, I tie a ribbon around my wrist—well, I do when I’m planning to sleep. Then I got a call from Jason confirming our brunch plans. And we had brunch and planned the Christmas Eve event at the store. I came home pretty late in the afternoon, had dinner, watched TV, and went to bed. And then you woke me up here. So I guess I get to live this Monday now.”

  She yawned. “Starting very, very early on Monday. Now that you’ve had that day, I wonder what happens if you take a nap.”

  “I don’t know. They didn’t hand out an instruction book when this happened to me. I’m almost afraid to find out. I don’t know if I have to live the whole day before it switches or if I’d find myself on Monday Two if I took a nap now. But I’m not going to try to find out until after I have lunch with Dan. I don’t know that ‘I fell asleep and fast-forwarded into my other life’ counts as a valid excuse for standing someone up.”

  I was excited enough about seeing Dan again that I had a surge of energy I hoped would get us through our lunch and meeting. I had to admit, I was a little nervous about seeing him again after that kiss. What had it meant? It had felt to me like it meant something, but could it have been just his idea of a good-night kiss? Should I let it mean more? Normally, it was considered a bad idea to get personally involved with a client, but I was no longer being paid to work for him, so the work was more in the realm of a personal favor for a friend, so maybe it didn’t count.

  When I arrived at his office, he barely looked up from his desk. “Oh, hi, just a second, I need to finish this,” he said, and for a moment I worried that he was having second thoughts about kissing me and would try to pretend nothing had happened. Okay, I thought, I can play that game, too. But when he finished what he was working on and closed the folder, he looked up at me, and a smile slowly lit up his whole face. “Hi,” he said, his voice a little husky.

  “Hi,” I replied, afraid I sounded breathless.

  He immediately frowned. “Are you okay?”

  Apparently, all the concealer I’d applied hadn’t been enough to hide the dark circles. “Late night,” I said with a shrug. “It’s that time of year. We had a corporate party gig last night, and I drank enough coffee to keep going through it that I couldn’t sleep even when I got home. I’m wired and tired, all at the same time.”

  “We don’t have to do this today.”

  “Yes, we do. We’ve got a big event we need to get ready for, and my late nights aren’t going to get better until after the holidays. I’ll get a nap after lunch. I actually get an evening off tonight. Not too many people plan Monday parties.”

  Although event planning was supposedly our excuse for meeting, the lunch turned into something that felt suspiciously like a date. Work never seemed to come up. In fact, I’d had real dates in which we talked more about work than we did during this “business” lunch. “So, is this—I mean, singing—what you always wanted to do?” he asked.

  “Yeah. My parents have pictures of me as a preschooler, leaning against my toy piano and singing into the cylinder from my block set.”

  “I’d like to see those.” He studied me for a moment, a small crease forming between his eyebrows. “It’s funny, I’m not sure I’d have imagined you being a singer or performer. Maybe I’ve got the wrong stereotype in mind.”

  “What? I don’t look bohemian enough? Too normal for you?” For a moment, he looked alarmed, so I hurried to reassure him. “Not all of us are weird rebels. Though I did have a blue streak in my hair in college. I’ve been playing the corporate game, so I have to look normal, and it’s hard to pull off the medieval madrigals or Victorian caroler look with purple hair. Who knows, though? Now that I’m out of the rat race, maybe I’ll get wild and crazy.”

  “Blue would look good on you.”

  “And you, did you ever go through a rebel phase?”

  “I didn't have parents to rebel against, and I was grateful enough to my foster parents that I didn’t want to rock the boat.”

  Oops. That had been a bad question for him. He didn’t seem hurt by my blunder, but I hurried to nudge the topic away from his background. “I have to confess that I only did the blue streak to fit in with the other music majors, so I didn’t get kicked out of the music building for trespassing when I went late at night to practice.”

  “Oh, good. So you won’t think I’m boring.”

  “Not at all.”

  “Good. Because I’m really not the green hair type.”

  “No, you’re more of a blue. Or dark purple.”

  “I’m sure that would make a real statement the next time I have to go to court.”

  As we walked back to the office after lunch, his hand brushed mine, then when I didn’t shy away, he took it. I bit my lip to keep from grinning. It was such a boyish move, it was hard to believe he was close to thirty. Not that I minded. I gave his hand a squeeze to show that I was happy holding hands.

  Since I didn’t have to be back at my office, and his schedule was flexible, we took our time, pausing to look at store windows. “I’ve always had mixed feelings about the holidays,” he said. “I liked the idea of them, but they made me sad.” He glanced at me and gave me a rueful smile. “There I go, sounding like Eeyore again.”

  “No, I get it. I could see how it would be rough for a kid in your situation. There’s an entire industry devoted to showing us the perfect Christmas and making us want to buy stuff to create it for ourselves, and the further you are from that ideal, the worse you feel. It’s like you don’t measure up. And I feel like I should apologize for having been a part of that industry.”

  “No apology necessary,” he said, stoppin
g and pulling me close to him. “You saw the light.” He kissed my forehead. “And you’re helping create what I’m sure will be great memories.” He kissed my lips, softly and gently. “At least, for me.”

  It turned out that an afternoon nap didn’t launch me into the other life. When I collapsed on the sofa after I got home, I woke still on that sofa. I held out hope that maybe I’d broken the spell that had sent me off into two separate lives. After all, didn’t a kiss usually break curses in the stories? But, alas, when I went to bed, I woke the next morning wearing a sparkly bracelet and facing another Monday. A Monday devoted to creating those perfect images of Christmas and trying to make people buy stuff. I buried my face in my pillow and whimpered.

  I was tempted to call in sick and maybe get myself fired, to try to create my other life in this one, but I was afraid I’d gone too far down the wrong path. Even if I lost my job, I’d already lost the group, and I wasn’t sure they’d take me back. I had no excuse to contact Dan, and he wouldn’t know me if I did. If I lost my job in this life, I’d just be friendless and jobless, with nothing to fall back on.

  And so, I dragged myself out of bed and to work. I smiled and spoke to Janet, the receptionist, on my way in, and while she acknowledged me with a coolly professional smile, she looked at me like I was a stranger. My phone was already ringing as I approached my desk, with Jason wanting a status report. I barely resisted the urge to ask him the status of his Saturday-night meeting with Michelle. I did say, “Not much has changed since yesterday, when we talked about this at brunch.”

  “Hey, sorry,” he said. “No need to get defensive. I just have Michelle asking me questions left and right.”

  “That must have been what you talked about Saturday night, after the gala.” I’d managed to hold it in during brunch, but now it all seemed to be coming out.

  “Are you mad about that? You know us going to the gala wasn’t a real date, right? She’s the client, and I have to make her happy.”

  “Even if she is a dragon lady?”

  “Yeah, I’m afraid so. If you want to move ahead in this business, Natalie, you have to learn how to keep your clients happy.”