The Candy Cane Kiss: Briarwood High Series

by Dallen, Maggie

  “She’s really hurt,” Blake said to me, her tone accusatory. “How could you move on so quickly, and with someone like her?”

  My whole plan had hinged on the fact that Eleanor wouldn’t tell anyone. She wasn’t a big gossip like that, so she must have been distraught over that kiss if she’d talked to Blake.

  My feelings were mixed. On one hand, yes! Eleanor was upset. She wasn’t nearly as cool about me moving on as she would have me believe.

  On the other hand…crap. I’d been hoping to tell Eleanor I’d already moved on to someone else. I’d find some other girl to ask to the party, and leave Lola behind as a distant memory. Where I was going to find this new girl while cooped up in a hospital and in time for the Christmas Eve party was a problem I had not yet addressed.

  But now it didn’t matter; it seemed I was too far in.

  Eleanor was upset over Lola. The effect would be ruined if it was clear that Lola meant nothing to me. Aside from that, if Blake knew then everyone knew. Word was officially out. I couldn’t just throw my hands up and say “Just kidding! Lola was just a one-day fling, I’m moving on now.”

  No one would believe it. It wouldn’t take a genius to figure out that Lola had just been here as a volunteer. They’d guess that I’d gone and kissed her because she was literally right next to me. They’d see straight through my actions and I would be the most pathetic, pitiful guy in school.

  Hell, for all I knew Lola would open her big mouth and spill everything.

  Blake was still talking. Yelling at me, really. Something about how she always knew I was a player. How Eleanor was better off without me. How this fling with Lola wouldn’t last.

  Blah blah blah…I was screwed.

  When I couldn’t listen to Blake’s shrill lecture anymore, I interrupted with the most valid point I could think of. “Blake, Eleanor broke up with me.”

  Blake’s lecture stopped mid-word and her lips remained parted, like she wanted to argue but couldn’t.

  She knew I was right. After countless years of friendship and three solid years of being a couple, Eleanor had called it quits.

  Right after I’d lost my position as quarterback.

  And for another guy.

  Yet somehow I was the prick because I’d kissed another girl.

  Blake blinked a few times as Trevor and I watched her. Even Trevor seemed curious as to how she’d react to that one.

  Finally, Blake sighed. “Yeah, but that’s different.”

  I groaned and rolled my eyes as Trevor laughed. He shook his head behind her back like his witch of a girlfriend was so very amusing.

  How was that different? How? I wanted to say that, but I resisted the urge. The breakup was humiliating enough without begging Blake for her opinion on the matter.

  Besides, she was already talking about what she planned to wear to the Christmas Eve party. She was going as Trevor’s plus one, and while Trevor had come every year, along with his family, I sincerely wished that this year I could disinvite all my friends, and most especially my ex-girlfriend.

  That feeling intensified a million times over when Blake turned her cold, challenging gaze on me. “What about retro girl?”

  I blinked. I’d honestly forgotten about Lola as I sat here stewing in my misery. “What about her?”

  “What’s she going to wear?” Blake’s scowl was already turning into a smirk and she didn’t give me a chance to speak. “I can’t wait to see. Your mom is going to have a conniption.”

  She kept talking, and I just lay there and glared. They all expected Lola to be at the party…as my date.

  Awesome. More humiliation, that was exactly what my life needed right now.

  Maybe the shoulder wouldn’t heal right. Maybe they’d keep me in here even longer than planned. Maybe I’d caught some disease on the operating table…that happened, right?

  A guy could dream.

  Chapter Four

  Lola

  I sat and stared at the image on my laptop, as if that would make it any less of a farfetched dream. I looked at the address of the club where the swing dancing event was to take place. Downtown Atwater. So incredibly close, yet so out of reach.

  What were the odds that this rinky-dink town in nowheresville Pennsylvania would have a dance club that hosted swing dancing events? Every few weeks they hosted classes, workshops, and even the occasional competition.

  I sighed. What I wouldn’t give to go. But one didn’t just show up at a swing dancing event solo. One could potentially win a dance that way but it would be of the pity variety. More than likely though, I’d be the outcast in the corner. The proverbial wallflower.

  No, I’d tried doing it before and had promised myself I wouldn’t try again without a proper partner. It was less horrible for everyone that way. But finding a partner meant finding a ballroom dance studio—and Atwater had none. Oh, the irony. I’d moved to a town cool enough to host ballroom dance events, but not metropolitan enough to have a ballroom dance school.

  I scrolled down through the photos one more time as a sort of self-torture. Happy partners dancing. Happy partners posing with trophies. Happy partners—

  “Dolores May, what are you doing in there?” My mother’s voice sounded weary in the doorway.

  I slapped my laptop shut. “Nothing.”

  The disappointment on her face made my stomach churn. “It’s Friday night.”

  I blinked at her. If I spoke it would be sarcastic, because yeah…I wasn’t a moron. I knew what day it was.

  “Shouldn’t you be out with friends?”

  I blinked again. I so did not want to get into a fight tonight. My mom looked tired, and I was just as exhausted. I’d had a long day of playing with kiddos at the hospital again.

  And fending off a psycho quarterback.

  This time when I’d gone to his room he’d offered me money. Point blank. I’d slapped some stickers on his chest, just to annoy him, stuck some unwanted candy canes on his tray of uneaten food, and skedaddled out of there.

  It wasn’t like I was scared of the guy, but his look of determination as he’d tried to talk me into going to some stupid party with him had bordered on desperation. Also, I felt bad for him. I knew from listening to some of the nurses talk that he was supposed to have been discharged by now.

  I didn’t know what the holdup was, but I could empathize with being stuck alone in a place you didn’t want to be. Basically, that was every day of high school for me.

  So yeah, I felt sorry for the guy. But he also pissed me off. Anger and pity were a terrible combination for me. It made me want to be snarky, but the moment I was rude I felt a surge of guilt.

  Ugh. I could handle an annoying patient who mocked me for my clothing—and no, not even his quest to buy a fake date with me stopped him from mocking my new elf hat and the candy striper outfit. But when I caught the edge of panic in his voice, when that fierce determination threatened to turn into desperation…I just couldn’t handle the pity it had evoked.

  And now my mother’s expression was dangerously close to desperate.

  “This was why we moved here,” she said, her tone plaintive as she started in on the lecture I knew by heart. “So you and your little brothers would have a stable home, and a school where you could make friends and…”

  I tuned her out. I hated this lecture on so many levels. What I wanted to say but would never actually say was—don’t. Just don’t. Don’t put this on us. Whenever she talked about how she’d moved here so that we could stay in one place—and by that I presume she meant my little brothers, because I only had two years of high school left—what she was really saying was, she left him for us.

  They got divorced for us.

  I didn’t want the blame for that. Sure, I might’ve been crap at making new friends whenever we moved, but I didn’t care. I’d had Grandpa. I still had Grandpa.

  And Mikey and Vince? They were champs at starting over. They got the sociable, fit-in-anywhere gene that was missing from my DNA, so
they were fine. They were always fine.

  But I knew better than to get into this with my mother. Any mention of the divorce, even if it was to try to avert the blame game, and my mother would descend into tears.

  There was no fighting tears.

  So I just sat there and listened to the lecture, though this time she added a twist. “If you can’t make friends on your own, I’ll do it for you.”

  By the twist of her lips and the slight guilt in her eyes, I knew she’d already done it. “Mom,” I said slowly. “What did you do?”

  She shrugged, but she wouldn’t make eye contact.

  “Mom,” I said again, warning clear in my tone.

  She pursed her lips in defiance, crossing her arms over her chest. “One of the PTA mothers mentioned that the junior class dance committee needs volunteers.”

  I stared at her. She could not be serious.

  My mother looked everywhere but at me. Suddenly my bedspread was of the utmost interest to her. “They’re planning a dance,” she said, her voice losing its defiant edge as her voice took on a plaintive note. “You like dances.”

  I blinked again. “I like to dance,” I said. “I don’t like dances. I’ve never even been to a dance—”

  “Exactly!” My mother perked up at this, her expression triumphant. “You’ve never even been to a dance. I couldn’t get you to go last year—”

  “Why would I go to homecoming?” I shot back. “We’d been living in Rosemont for all of three weeks, it was hardly my home.”

  Her brows drew together and I knew I’d only helped to make her earlier point. The one that involved her divorcing my dad so we’d have a “real home.”

  Maybe one day I’d have a real home—whatever that meant—but Briarwood High School definitely wasn’t it. “They’re a bunch of uptight, snobby drones,” I said before she could launch into another defense detailing why her moving us here had been the right call.

  “You don’t even know them.” She arched her brows at me. “Have you even taken the time to get to know any of the kids in your class?”

  I opened my mouth to say yes, but hesitated because lying didn’t come naturally to me. A fact which my mother knew well. She was about to gloat, but then I thought of the jerk laid up in a hospital bed and I recovered quickly. “As a matter of fact, I hung out with a guy from my high school yesterday and today.”

  This was…sort of true. If by “hung out” one meant brutally fluffed his pillows and glared at him over giant candy cane cutouts.

  My mother frowned as she clearly tried to remember what I’d been up to this week. “At the hospital?”

  I nodded. “Yup. At the hospital.”

  My mom’s eyes narrowed, but thankfully she didn’t ask any more questions or I might’ve spilled the fact that he wasn’t a fellow volunteer, and our interactions hadn’t been even remotely friendly.

  When he wasn’t shocking the heck out of me with an unexpected kiss, he was tormenting me. Making fun of my hair, my clothes, my cheery attitude.

  In reality, my attitude had been anything but cheery ever since that kiss, but I’d realized how much my good humor annoyed him, so today when I’d hit his room on my rounds, I’d been sure to wear a huge beaming smile even as he accosted me with offers of money and then mocked my hair.

  I tugged on one of the wavy locks now as I tried not to dwell on the fact that I was lying. Sort of. But then again, not really. It wasn’t my fault if my mother got the wrong impression. And technically I had seen Lucas yesterday and today, so…

  “I want to meet this boy.”

  I blinked up at my mom, mildly terrified by the gleam in her eyes. She was so freakin’…happy. God, was she really that worried about me and my lack of friends that she was this over-the-top relieved just because I’d talked to someone?

  “I knew volunteering would be good for you.” She was bustling around my room, straightening my books on the shelf and picking up a shirt I’d discarded on a chair. She was so giddy with excitement that I didn’t have the heart to remind her that volunteering at the hospital had been my idea.

  She’d tried to get me to do something that would involve me meeting people my own age, not children in the kids’ wing or my grandfather. She hadn’t been fooled at all by my sudden interest in candy striping. She’d known I’d just wanted to stay close to Grandpa, who was due to stay in the hospital right up until Christmas Eve.

  But now, it seemed, she’d had a change of heart. “This was exactly what you needed,” she said. “To get out of the house and do something where you interact with others, and…”

  I stifled a yawn. It was the same lecture over and over. Dancing swing dance with people twice, if not quadruple, my age did not qualify as “getting out of the house.”

  She didn’t mean going out and doing something fun, something that made my soul soar. No, she meant doing something normal kids did.

  My mother desperately wanted me to be normal. And popular. She’d never outright say it but her stories about how wonderful her high school experience had been were not exactly subtle. She loved to say how high school was the best time of her life, even though every time she said it I wanted to cry on her behalf.

  Dear Lord, if high school was as good as it got, just kill me know.

  But my mother didn’t seem to understand that college was what I was striving for. And then my twenties, when I’d be out on my own, surrounded by my tribe. People who understood me, and liked me, and who thought it was cool that I preferred to watch old movies to new ones.

  My fantasies about adult life were cut short by my mother’s next statement.

  “That’s why I know you’re going to love being on the dance committee.”

  I sat up straight. “What? No. I don’t need to—”

  But she wasn’t listening. She outright waved me off. “This will be perfect. You’ll meet some nice girls and get to know—”

  “But Mom,” I interrupted. “I already volunteer and—”

  “And look how well that’s working out,” she said with a smile that brooked no argument. Because really, my mother smiled at me like that so rarely, I just didn’t have it in me to ruin the moment.

  “But—” It came out as a sort of croak. Half-hearted and with no follow-through.

  She waved again. “You’ll love it. Trust me.”

  I did not trust her. Not in this. The woman might love me but she barely knew me, and she definitely didn’t understand me. I tried to throw Lucas up again as if the mention of my new friend might make this better. “But I told you, I’ve been hanging out with—”

  “Yes,” My mother spun around and pointed a finger at me, slightly terrifying with her enthusiasm. “And I can’t wait to meet him.”

  “Meet him?” I repeated, my own voice losing steam as she gained traction. She was buzzing around my room with a new energy.

  I’d finally pleased her. She thought I had a friend. She thought Lucas actually liked me, and that I’d suddenly become popular because she’d signed me up for some stupid committee.

  She had no idea how wrong she was.

  My mother let out a loud sigh that was filled with joy. “Oh, Lola, I’m just so glad you’re finally getting out there.” She came over and smoothed down my hair. “That’s all I ever wanted for you.” She shook her head and I could tell she was working herself up into an emotional moment. “I just want you to be happy, and I don’t want you to miss out on life.”

  I smiled through my guilt. “I know, Mom.”

  I hated the fact that she was getting all proud and mushy over a lie. Because, in reality, I wasn’t going out there and doing what would make me happy. To do that I’d need to find a partner for the dance event.

  My mom was heading for the door, but she turned back to smile. “I really can’t wait to meet this new friend of yours, sweetie.”

  I managed a tight smile as she closed the door behind her.

  Well, crap.

  Now I needed a friend to make my moth
er happy, and I wanted a dance partner to make me happy, and a thought was forming on how I could accomplish both but I really didn’t want to go there.

  I refused to even contemplate it because yes, maybe I would get something out of it, and sure it might keep my mom happy for a while. But it would also make him happy, and the petty part of me that wanted to see him rot in hell was not at all pleased at the idea of giving Lucas Carlson anything he wanted.

  I sat there decidedly not contemplating this course of action for the next twenty minutes. When the playlist I’d been listening to came to a stop, I fell backwards onto my bed and stared up at the ceiling.

  I’m going to do it, aren’t I?

  The ceiling didn’t answer, but it didn’t need to. The answer was obvious.

  There was only one way we could all get what we wanted…and it meant saying yes to my least favorite brat.

  Chapter Five

  Lucas

  This time I was ready for her. I would be on my best behavior. I wouldn’t mock her hair, or her hat, or her outfit.

  I would not piss her off before I had a chance to make my case.

  I would be polite, and charming, and kind, and—

  Seriously, what the hell was taking her so long? Yesterday she’d been here in the morning. I sat upright and craned forward for a glimpse through the doorway just in case she was hiding out in the hallway.

  She was not.

  Crap. I’d messed everything up yesterday. I’d been so sure she’d say yes to the money—after all, the girl clearly shopped at secondhand stores, she had to be in need of money, right? Or maybe she shopped garage sales, I didn’t know. All I knew was that I shouldn’t have asked if she shopped at the dumpster yesterday.

  That had not gone over well.

  In fact, after she’d stormed out of here, all but pelting me with candy canes on her way out the door, it occurred to me that perhaps I shouldn’t have mentioned her weird way of dressing at all.

  This was my last chance, and I meant to make it a success. I’d be released later today—finally. Which was great, except that meant that today was my last opportunity to talk to Lola, unless I wanted to track down her home address and stalk the girl.