Twice Upon a Christmas

by Shanna Swendson

  The dinner proved to be more of a “home for the holidays” event than I ever might have imagined. It was like being part of an enormous, boisterous family. Tilly handed out presents to delighted kids. There were games and music. Even Dan looked happy and at ease. He sat with his arm gently resting across my shoulders, and it felt right, like we belonged together. At one point in the evening, after we’d all had dessert, I looked up to see Tilly watching us, a smug smile on her lips.

  Later, when we were cleaning up, she approached me. “I was sorry to hear about your job. And after all the good work you’ve done on this project, too.”

  “It’s okay. It was about time I focused on my music, and my heart never really was in that job. This was the first project I’ve thrown myself into like this, probably because it was the first thing I actually cared about.”

  She smiled and glanced across the room, where Dan was playing a video game with some of the kids. “And I get the impression the project wasn’t the only thing you came to care about. You’ve been good for Dan. I haven’t seen him smiling this much, ever. I think he just needed someone he knew he could count on.”

  “I’m glad I could be that someone.”

  “I know you’ve got that music career, but if you want to keep your hand in this kind of work, my foundation could use someone to help us with events and publicity. You could work for me, and I’d let you keep your schedule flexible.”

  For a moment, I wondered it I might still be dreaming. This was everything I could have hoped for. I supposed that I’d been cheating myself by clinging to my former job when there really were more opportunities out there than I’d imagined. It had never been an either/or situation, choosing between financial security and music. I could have found ways to make it work. “Oh, that would be perfect,” I said. “Thank you so much.”

  Dwayne interrupted us, running over with his phone. “Natalie! I uploaded some video of you guys singing from last night, and it’s going viral.” The rest of the band members ran over to see. “See, it’s been shared thousands of times,” Dwayne said. It was a clip of us doing one of our Christmas arrangements, and apparently people were sending it to their friends as a holiday greeting.

  Alicia checked her phone. “Hey, I’ve got dozens of messages, and my follower count has gone through the roof. Maybe we’ll get some bookings out of this.” She gave Dwayne a friendly punch on the shoulder. “And you’ll have to join us. We’ll add a horn section.”

  That night, Dan and I sat alone in the common room, all the lights out except for the Christmas tree. “Have I thanked you for everything today?” he said, hugging me.

  “A lot of it was your idea.”

  “But it wouldn’t have happened without you. Thank you. You stood up to me when you needed to, listened to me, and then made it all happen. I don’t even want to think about what might have happened if you hadn’t come along.”

  “Trust me, you wouldn’t want to know.” I couldn’t help but shudder. In the other life, Hadley had pushed for Tilly’s initial idea, and although they got donations through the charity drive, the Christmas event had gone nowhere. Dan and the kids must have spent as miserable and lonely a Christmas Eve as I had.

  “Is something wrong?”

  “No, everything’s right. Really, really right.”

  “And yet you don’t sound happy about it. Don’t tell me I’m being a bad influence on you.”

  “Do you ever have the feeling that you could wake up in the morning and it will all be gone—everything you love and want?”

  “Welcome to my world. That’s how I wake up every morning. But I’m not going anywhere.”

  I looked up at him. “What if I do?”

  He tightened his embrace. “I won’t let you slip away.”

  We sat quietly for a long time. I was so tired, but I was afraid to fall asleep. My eyes kept fluttering closed, and I barely caught myself to blink back to consciousness. I didn’t want this to end. I couldn’t let it end. Finally, though, I drifted off. I wasn’t sure how much longer it was before he nudged me awake. “Natalie? If you’re sleepy, we can go up to bed. It’s after midnight, anyway.”

  I opened my eyes, taking in my surroundings. Had I fallen asleep enough to have changed lives, or was it over? I squeezed his hand, making sure it was real. “I’m still here. I fell asleep, and I woke up, and I’m still here,” I said dreamily before throwing my arms around him. “I’m still here, and this is the life I wanted.”

  “I’m glad to hear that.” He frowned. “You weren’t just visited by three ghosts who showed you your past, present, and future, were you? Because you sound kind of like Scrooge on Christmas morning.”

  I laughed. “No, nothing like that at all. Just a bad dream about the way things could have gone if things had gone a different way. I can’t tell you how glad I was to wake up here with you. There’s nowhere else I’d rather be.”

  An Excerpt from Enchanted, Inc.

  If you enjoyed this romantic comedy with a dash of magic, you may enjoy Shanna Swendson's Enchanted, Inc. Here's an excerpt.

  I’d always heard that New York City was weird, but I had no idea just how weird until I got here. Before I left Texas to move here, my family tried to talk me out of it, telling me all sorts of urban legends about the strange and horrible things that happened in the big bad city. Even my college friends who’d been living in New York for a while told me stories about the weird and wonderful things they’d seen that didn’t cause the natives to so much as blink. My friends joked that an alien from outer space could walk down Broadway without anyone looking twice. I used to think they were exaggerating.

  But now, after having survived a year in the city, I still saw things every day that shocked and amazed me but didn’t cause anyone else to so much as raise an eyebrow. Nearly naked street performers, people doing tap-dance routines on the sidewalk, and full-scale film productions—complete with celebrities—weren’t worth a second glance to the locals, while I couldn’t help but gawk. It made me feel like such a hick, no matter how hard I tried to act sophisticated.

  Take this morning, for instance. The girl ahead of me on the sidewalk was wearing wings—those strap-on fairy wings people wear as part of a Halloween costume. Halloween was more than a month away, and while I couldn’t afford designer fashions, I read enough fashion magazines to know that fairy wings were not a current fashion statement. She must be some neo-bohemian trendsetter from NYU, I thought, or maybe in the costume design program. She’d done a really good job on the wings because the straps were invisible, making it look like she had real wings. They even fluttered slightly, but that was probably just the wind currents from walking.

  I forced my attention away from Miss Airy Fairy to check my watch, then groaned. There was no way I’d make it to work on time if I walked, and my boss was usually lying in wait for me on Monday mornings, so I didn’t dare come in even a minute late. I’d have to take the subway to work, even though it would take a precious two dollars off my MetroCard. I’d make up for it by walking home, I promised myself.

  When I reached the Union Square station, I was surprised to see Miss Airy Fairy head down into the subway ahead of me instead of continuing toward the university. People who work downtown tend not to dress like that for work. As I followed her down the stairs, I noticed that she wore what must have been platform shoes with Lucite soles, which gave her the appearance of floating a couple of inches off the ground. She moved remarkably gracefully for someone wearing what had to be pretty clunky shoes.

  As usual, no one on the platform gave her a second glance. I’d been here a year, and I’d yet to exchange one of those knowing “only in New York” glances with anyone. How could everyone be so jaded? Surely there were people around who were newer to the city than I was, and then there were the tourists, who were supposed to stare at everything.

  But then I noticed a guy looking at Miss Airy Fairy. He didn’t seem shocked or surprised, though. Instead, he smiled at her like he kne
w her. That in and of itself was odd because he didn’t seem the type to spend his weekends wearing a cape and playing Middle Earth in Central Park. He looked like a typical Wall Street type, wearing a well-tailored dark suit and carrying a briefcase—the kind of Mr. Right that just about every career girl in New York hopes to snag. I’d guess he was a few years older than me, and he was quite good-looking, even if he was a little shorter than average.

  Mr. Right (if he wasn’t mine, he had to be somebody’s) glanced at his watch, then up the tunnel, like he was looking for the next train. He muttered something under his breath—probably something like “Where is that train?” or “I’m going to be late”—twitched his wrist, and next thing I knew, I heard the rumble that signaled an approaching train. If I didn’t know better, I would have thought he summoned it. I wasn’t complaining because I needed the train myself.

  The waiting passengers shoved their way onto the train, then the conductor’s voice came over the PA system, saying, “Attention passengers. Due to a one time situation, this Brooklyn-bound N train will stop next at City Hall. If you need stops prior to this, please exit the train here and board an R train or another N train. Thank you.”

  There was a chorus of mutters and groans as passengers poured out of the train. I took a now-empty seat and looked at my watch. At this rate I’d be early to work. This wasn’t a bad way to start the week.

  Mr. Right was still on board, as was Miss Airy Fairy. Mr. Right exchanged a grin with the guy sitting next to me. I turned to look at that guy and then wondered if there was a polite way I could move to another seat without it being obvious that I was avoiding him.

  He looked like the kind of guy who spends his lifetime defending against sexual harassment charges, the kind who thinks of himself as so irresistible that he can’t imagine his advances being unwanted. Unfortunately, that type is never as attractive as he’d like to think. This one wasn’t exactly hideous. With a little effort and the right personality he might not have been so bad. Unfortunately, he made no effort at all, so that his hair was poorly styled and greasy, while his skin would have made my mother, the Mary Kay representative, faint in horror. But he acted like he thought every woman on that train should be drooling over him, which made him even more unattractive to me.

  The funny thing was, all the women on the train were looking at him over the tops of their books and newspapers like they thought Pierce Brosnan had joined us on the subway car, and he grinned at them like he was totally used to that kind of attention. Maybe they could tell he was particularly well-endowed. Or maybe he was a famous rock star I didn’t recognize. I wasn’t hip enough to know what most rock stars looked like. He had the kind of smug slickness you’d expect from a famous rock star who didn’t have to do anything to make women fall at his feet.

  As for me, I’d rather look at Mr. Right, who was getting his fair share of admiring glances but who looked shy about it, not like he expected the attention. That made him infinitely cuter in my book.

  “On your way to work?” Slick asked. It wasn’t among the top five pickup lines I’d ever heard. Not that I heard a lot of them.

  “Actually, I just like being crammed like sardines in an underground tin can to head to lower Manhattan in the morning,” I said.

  He stretched his arm out along the back of the seat, like he was angling to put his arm around me. I’m from a part of the world that still has drive-in movies, so I recognized the move and edged away as subtly as I could. “You’re obviously not a native New Yorker,” he said, oozing charm like my dad’s old tractor oozes oil. “I love your accent.”

  Little did he know, but he wasn’t paying me a compliment. As effective as the steel magnolia routine could be when I was asking for something or trying to get my way, it was a liability at work, where everyone seemed to think my Texas drawl meant I was dumber and less educated than they were. I’d been trying to lose my accent, but it kept slipping out when I was being particularly sarcastic. I guess I inwardly thought the drawl took the sting out of whatever ugly thing I’d just said. In this case, it seemed to have worked, just when I didn’t want it to.

  I wished I’d brought a book to bury my face in, but I’d planned to walk to and from work when I left the apartment, so I hadn’t brought anything to read. In fact, the only things in my oh-so-professional-looking briefcase were my sack lunch and my dressier shoes for the office. Instead, I just gave Slick a glare and turned my attention to Mr. Right. Maybe he’d have a Galahad complex and feel compelled to rescue me from the subway stalker.

  Then I noticed that Slick was looking at Mr. Right as well, and suddenly his face was totally serious. Mr. Right, also serious, nodded his head slightly. Miss Airy Fairy was also staring at me. Now I couldn’t help but wonder if this was a conspiracy. Were they going to rob me or try to scam me? Goodness knows, I might as well have been wearing a big yellow button saying “Hick from Out of Town! Please take advantage of me!”

  Just then the door between cars opened and a giant chicken entered our car. To be more precise, it was a bored-looking man in a chicken suit—and how sad was it that he was more bored than embarrassed to be wearing that costume in public? I added to my mental list of jobs that were worse than mine. He shook a little plastic box in his left hand, and clucking sounds came out of it. I felt a pang of homesickness, for I used to have one like it on my desk back in Texas. I wouldn’t dare put it on my desk here. It would only reinforce the hick stereotype. At the clucking sound, everyone looked up, reacted with mild amusement, then immediately went back to reading or avoiding eye contact. The chicken man then tried to hand flyers to everyone in the car. I hadn’t yet learned the technique for avoiding flyers that most New Yorkers seem to have honed, so I took one from him. A new fried-chicken restaurant was opening, which gave me another moment of homesickness as I remembered family Sunday dinners. I tucked the flyer into my briefcase.

  This incident didn’t do much toward helping me understand New Yorkers. Fairy wings on the subway weren’t worth noticing, but a guy in a chicken suit got a slight reaction. Both outfits involved wings. Why was one humdrum while the other was at least a little bit amusing? I noticed that Mr. Right had also taken a flyer. He was smiling and staring at the chicken man, which made me like him even more. Or, it would have if he didn’t seem to be in cahoots with the other two, who were still looking at me funny. I forgot about the giant chicken as I remembered why I felt ill at ease.

  Did you like what you read? Enchanted, Inc. is available at all major eRetailers.

  About the Author

  SHANNA SWENDSON earned a journalism degree from the University of Texas and used to work in public relations but decided it was more fun to make up the people she wrote about, so now she’s a full-time novelist. She also writes the steampunk fantasy Rebels series and the contemporary fantasy Fairy Tale series. She lives in Irving, Texas, with several hardy houseplants and too many books to fit on the shelves.

  www.shannaswendson.com

  Also by Shanna Swendson

  The Enchanted, Inc. Series

  Enchanted, Inc.

  Once Upon Stilettos

  Damsel Under Stress

  Don’t Hex with Texas

  Much Ado About Magic

  No Quest for the Wicked

  Kiss and Spell

  Frogs and Kisses

  Paint the Town Red (short story)

  Criminal Enchantment (short story)

  * * *

  The Rebels Series

  Rebel Mechanics

  Rebel Magisters

  Rebels Rising

  * * *

  The Fairy Tale Series

  A Fairy Tale

  To Catch a Queen

  A Kind of Magic

  * * *

  Standalone Titles

  Twice Upon a Christmas

  Copyright © 2017 by Shanna Swendson

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, inclu
ding information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  ISBN: 978-1-62051-268-5