Christmas at the End of Main (A Nestled Hollow Romance Book 2)

by Meg Easton

  Chapter Two

  As soon as the discussion in the faculty lunchroom at Nestled Hollow High turned to dating, Aaron made a show of noticing the time and excusing himself. His group of friends already gave him enough grief about it— he didn’t need any more.

  Actually, the bell was seconds from ringing, and if it weren’t for the topic change, he very well could have kept socializing and been late to class. He stopped by the copy room and picked up his stack, then hurried toward his classroom as quickly as he could while the hallways emptied. His left leg still hurt a bit, but at least he wasn’t having to limp. His cell phone buzzed in his pocket, and he pulled it out and glanced at the text on his screen.

  “Speak of the devils,” he said to no one in particular, and slid the message open. In a group text with his friends, Matt mentioned their weekly Wednesday night get-together. Then he texted, Can you find your own date, Aaron? Or should we find one for you?

  Aaron shifted the stack of papers he was holding so he could type in a return text.

  Afraid I’ll win every game again if I don’t have a date to distract me?

  The bell rang when he was still four classrooms away. As soon as he stepped into his room, the talking died down to complete silence, all eyes on him. Aaron eyed them. “Good afternoon.” He paused for a moment, trying to see if he could tell why they were acting weird. “What’s up, guys?”

  “Nothing,” Allen said.

  “Nothing at all,” Kyle added.

  Morgan rolled her eyes. “You guys are so smooth. We were just speculating about why you were late, Mr. Hall. That’s all. So how are you doing? How was your Monday evening?”

  “You guys first,” Aaron said. “I haven’t seen you since class on Friday. How was everyone’s weekend?” This AP History class was his favorite to teach. At just eleven students, it was by far his smallest class. The kids were all bright, and they gelled in a way that classes rarely did. It made for some interesting and enlightening discussions on history.

  Several of his students told about what they’d done over the weekend or on Monday, they all riffed back and forth on each other’s comments, and class settled into something more normal.

  Then one of the students, Alecia, asked to use his cell phone. He nearly pulled it out of his pocket— something he’d have never done with any of his other classes, but then he realized that everyone was back to acting weird.

  “You’re welcome to use the classroom phone if you need to call home.”

  “I need your phone, actually.” Alecia’s eyes cut to her classmates.

  Aaron shifted his weight to his other leg and gave them his best I am willing to stand here for as long as it takes to get someone to raise their hand and answer look. He had perfected this look— it was one of the reasons why he was able to get his classes to chat about history so much.

  “Oh, just tell him,” Morgan said.

  Alecia looked at Morgan for a moment, then ducked her head and pulled a post-it note out of her binder. “We, um, made you a dating profile on the Single Professionals Match app.”

  She held the orange paper his direction, but he didn’t reach for it. “You... What?” He couldn’t quite make sense of the words. “How did you even get my—” Then the previous class with these students came to mind. Four students were gone on the Young Ambassadors field trip and he didn’t want them to get too far behind, so when the last half hour of class turned to chatting, he’d let it turn into a bonding moment. “Now all the specific questions you were asking me on Friday make sense.”

  The kids were grinning. He couldn’t ruin this for them just because he wasn’t thrilled at all that they were trying to set him up too.

  “You really got me to answer all the questions needed? How did you do it without a confirmation email coming to me?” He reached out and finally took the paper from Alecia.

  “That was my genius idea,” Cory said. “We just created a new email address for you.”

  “MrHallIsSingle at sentmail dot com,” Kyle said.

  Alecia pointed at the paper. “It’s right there in your login information. The password to the email account is at the bottom.”

  “You might want to log in soon,” Morgan said, sharing a grin with the rest of the class. “Your profile is pretty impressive. You’ve got quite a few interested people reaching out.”

  “Good-looking ones, too, Coach,” Allen said.

  “We’ve got your back,” Alecia said. “We’ll get you a wife by the end of the school year.”

  “That’s our goal,” Cory said.

  Aaron rubbed his forehead with a thumb and two fingers, pretending like they were giving him a headache. Which was completely and totally true, but he didn’t want them to know that, so he made it obvious he was faking it. He didn’t mind dating. Actually, he liked dating. Casual dating. It was the marriage part he wasn’t okay with. He definitely didn’t need any more people trying to push him into it. “What am I going to do with you guys?”

  “You could give us all A’s for our troubles,” Kyle said.

  Like every kid in this class didn’t already do everything they had to in order to earn A’s.

  “And bring us donuts on Thursday,” Alecia said.

  The last thing Aaron wanted was to be on a dating app. Their actions heaped frustration on top of frustration that seemed to come from every direction, but their hearts were in the right place. He might have to surprise them with donuts on Thursday just for being thoughtful.

  Except that would probably only encourage them. He’d better not.

  “Instead, how about I provide you with a feast of historical knowledge?” As he was writing 1450 to 1650: The Age of Discovery, Reconnaissance, Expansion on the white board, the classroom on the other side of the wall erupted in cheers. “See? Even Mr. Klein’s class agrees.” The class gave half-hearted groans, but they dutifully pulled out their notebooks and held their pens or pencils at the ready, because if nothing else, this group of kids loved knowledge.

  At the end of class, Aaron called out, “Morgan and Allen, I’ll see you down at the pool in fifteen minutes for swim team practice. The rest of you, have a great Tuesday, and I’ll see you in class on Thursday!”

  As he stood at the door, giving each student a fist bump, hand shake, or high-five as they exited, Alecia said, “Mr. Hall, do you promise to install the app on your phone and see the people who are interested in you?”

  Aaron took a deep breath. “I promise to think about it.”

  Alecia paused a moment, like she was deciding if that was good enough, and then nodded and left.

  When the last student was gone, he walked over to his desk, stared down at the sticky note with the login information for his new email address and for Single Professionals Match. After a few moments, he opened his desk drawer, shoved the note in the back, shut the drawer, and walked out of his classroom.

  By the time he left swim team practice, Aaron was mentally exhausted. Morgan and Allen had told the rest of his team— with great excitement— about setting their coach up on the dating app, and every single one of them was pressuring him to install it. He kept refocusing them on drills, and eventually on getting their form exactly right for the butterfly stroke, since that one wore them out the quickest, but they had been relentless in their coaxing.

  He walked back to his classroom, put on his coat, got his bike out of his office, and wheeled it outside. He hadn’t swam today, but he could still smell the chlorine on his slacks and button-down, which always happened simply by being in the same room as an indoor pool. The scent had been a near constant companion since he’d first discovered swimming at age three, and for him, was tied with nearly every emotion a human could experience. It was a scent that made him feel more himself than anything else.

  Normally, he would’ve gone for a swim after his team left to help wash away his frustration. But today’s frustrations called for something different. He had never been one to drink— not after his first and only time a
decade ago. Actually, he wasn’t one to put less than wholesome things into his body for any reason, with one exception. And a day like today called for exactly that kind of self-medicating exception: ice cream. His students had told him about a great shop right in Nestled Hollow, so he figured he’d stop by before heading home to Mountain Springs.

  As he rode his bike through the streets of town, he tilted his face upward, letting the cold mountain scent wash over him as the wind got stronger the faster he pedaled. The wind rushing past him while biking always brought back the same sense of powerful speed that swimming brought him. That feeling of truly connecting all the senses in your body, your mind, and your muscles, with what was around you, and becoming all the more powerful because of it. It was intoxicating and exhilarating and made him feel invincible.

  He slowed as he reached Main Street and turned on to the road. As he was heading to the other end of the street, a car pulled up next to him, matching his speed. He glanced over to see a student of his, Tim, and he waved.

  Tim rolled down his window and said, “Hey, Mr. Hall. We’ve got a new hashtag trending. It’s hashtag NHH Finds a Wife For Mr Hall. You should check it out!” Then the car pulled ahead and Tim rolled his window back up.

  Aaron stopped pedaling and put his feet out as his bike stopped. Tim was one of his students, but he hadn’t even had his class today. How had news spread so quickly? And how in the world was he going to stop something that had apparently taken on a life of its own?

  Needing the ice cream now even more than before, he spied With a Cherry on Top a couple of buildings down. He pedaled there, parked his bike in the rack out front, and went in to the shop, the smell of sweet cream and sugary cones hitting him the second he walked in. If he was ever going to let himself have a vice, this would be it. Something about the smell of ice cream took him back to every good memory in his childhood. It didn’t exactly make problems go away, but it helped.

  “Do you already know what you’d like,” a broad-shouldered man with a big voice said from behind the counter, “or can I interest you in a few sample spoons?”

  Aaron leaned forward, but realized that angle made his ankle injury from this morning hurt, so he shifted and looked at his choices. “Let’s try Maple, Please Bring Home the Bacon.”

  The man scooped out a bite on a little plastic spoon and handed it to Aaron. He put it in his mouth, and maple exploded across his tongue, the candied bacon and walnut adding the perfect amount of crunch. “Wow. Let’s do a big scoop of that.”

  “You don’t want to try any other flavors first?”

  Aaron shook his head. “I don’t care about anything else at the moment. This is all I’ll be able to think of until I get a scoop. No wonder so many of my students recommended this place.”

  As the man scooped up his ice cream, Aaron’s attention wandered around the shop. A dad and his two elementary school-aged kids sat at one table, and a woman holding a baby sat across from a woman with blonde curls that fell halfway down her back. The woman was chatting using her hands, a bunch of papers spread out in front of her, a cup of ice cream next to them. He turned back as the man handed him his ice cream, which had a cherry perched on top, just like on their logo. As he was paying, his eyes went back to the woman. There was something familiar about her.

  “Enjoy,” the man said.

  Aaron turned to leave, but the woman caught his eye again.

  Then an image of her awkwardly trying to brush dirt off his coat hit him, and he smiled. They had met this morning. He walked over to her table. Just before he got there, a group of kids that all looked about ten years old, wearing matching basketball uniforms, walked in with their coach, and the woman with the baby stood up. As soon as she realized that Aaron was coming to her table, she said, “Oh, hi.” Then she looked to the other woman, probably realizing that Aaron had come over because of her and said, “Do you two know each other?”

  The other woman’s attention had been on her papers, spoon in hand. She looked at him like she was looking at a stranger, but only for a fraction of a second, then it turned to recognition and she nearly choked on her ice cream.

  “Hi,” he said. “Nice seeing you again. Especially under less painful circumstances.” But as he was saying it, she had stood up so quickly that her chair fell over backwards, hitting her in the shin, and she winced. So he added, “Or possibly equally painful circumstances.”

  “Oh hi. I, um, sorry about this morning. I’m so embarrassed. Lola isn’t usually that crazy. Are you okay? Did that, the wreck, do any damage? You know, to you or your bike?”

  “We’re both doing great, thank you for asking.”

  “I’m sorry. My brain is so deep in business planning I can’t even think straight. But I am very sorry about this morning. Would you like to sit?”

  He was about to open his mouth to say no, but between the number of tables and chairs in the shop and the number of kids on the basketball team, they’d probably all be taken, and riding a bike while holding an ice cream cone wasn’t optimal. “Sure.” He slung his coat over the back of the chair and sat down, then motioned to her ice cream cup. “What flavor did you go with?”

  “My standby— Is the Doctor Pepper In? I see you went with Maple, Please Bring Home the Bacon. Quality choice, there.”

  “Well, I’m a quality guy, so it seemed appropriate.”

  She cocked her head to the side and narrowed her eyes as he took a bite. “What?” he asked around a mouthful.

  “Just trying to figure this out.”

  He looked to the left and the right, suddenly self-conscious under her gaze.

  “This isn’t a celebratory ice cream for you.”

  “Nope.” He took another bite.

  “And you didn’t just decide that ice cream was a viable choice for dinner tonight.”

  “Correct again.”

  She crossed her arms, studying him as he bit off another bite, this one giving him brain freeze. “You’re drowning your sorrows.”

  Aaron raised an eyebrow. “So, are you a professional Ice Cream Motivation Analyst?”

  “Nah. The Professional Ice Cream Motivation Analyst Guild has exorbitant membership fees, so I decided to stay a hobbyist.”

  “Understandable. That’s exactly the reason why I never joined the Professional Ice Cream Eater’s Guild. So what about you? What’s your ice cream reason today?”

  She looked down at hers, picked up a spoonful and put it in her mouth, a look of pure enjoyment on her face. “Celebration.”

  He held his ice cream cone out for a cheers, and she picked up her bowl and bumped it into his cone.

  “So what are you celebrating?”

  She sat up straighter in her chair and said, “I’m ignoring what everyone else wants me to do, and going six full months without dating.”

  Aaron thrust out his hand. “Hi, my name is Aaron Hall. Nice to meet you.”

  The woman laughed, then reached out and shook his hand. “Macie Zimmerman. I’m guessing we might have something in common.”

  Chapter Three

  “So tell me,” the man across from her said, as the chaos of kids on the basketball team all asked for sample spoons, “why are you choosing to go six months without dating?”

  This was all still so new to her. She hadn’t even thought about it much before she told Joselyn this morning, and now that she was telling this guy she just met, it felt like it was a commitment she was setting in stone. “Family is hugely important in my family. Well, it’s hugely important to me, too. I would love to get married and have lots of kids, but I haven’t found the right man to tie the knot with. And believe me, I’ve searched. Searching is exhausting mentally and emotionally, and I just need a break.”

  She lifted one shoulder in a shrug, and then straightened the stack of papers in front of her. “There’s a time for everything, and I feel like right now, it’s time to focus on seeing if I can turn my business into something more. How about you?” She studied him, trying read his
body language and reading between the lines of what little he’d said. “I’m guessing you’ve got some reasons for not dating too.”

  He turned his cone around, studying his ice cream like it held all the answers. “My reasons have to do with where dating leads, and that is always to either a break up or a marriage. And break ups get old after a while.”

  “And you don’t see marriage in your future?”

  “In my future? Not even a little bit.”

  “I’m sensing a story there, too.”

  He took a bite of his ice cream and chewed it slowly. “Trauma as a young adult, and a repeat as a slightly less-young adult. Not really an interesting story.”

  “And you’re jaded. Don’t forget that part.”

  He smiled, and his dimples were even visible through his scruff. They were cute. Actually, his brown scruff and matching short brown hair was cute, too. “You’re a perceptive one, Macie Zimmerman.”

  “Only if you’re eating ice cream. It kind of comes with the whole amateur Ice Cream Motivation Analyst gig.” She ate a spoonful of hers. There was just nothing that paired better with ice cream than Dr. Pepper. First bite or the last, each one was exactly right. “So, do you have a ‘no dating’ pact too?”

  “Before tonight I’ve pretty much had an ‘always dating’ pact, but after a day like I’ve had, going without sounds like an excellent idea. Why? Are you looking for an accountability partner? Is this going to be a hard commitment to keep if you don’t have someone to report in to?” He crunched into his cone.

  She thought of everything not dating would entail, and suddenly she was worried it actually would be a hard commitment to keep. “I just wish I could get everyone off my back. Telling my parents definitely isn’t going to be fun. Not that they’re controlling or anything, but they do know I want to get married and so they’re going to think I’m making a terrible choice. And then there’s the matter of my siblings and everyone in town always trying to set me up. Maybe I should have Whitney write an article in the Nestled Hollow Gazette with a big headline saying Macie Zimmerman isn’t dating for six months, so for the love of her sanity, don’t set her up on any blind dates. If I could get her to put it on the front page in big text, maybe people would listen.”