by Meg Easton
“Could be broken,” she said. “She’ll want to see a doctor.”
Bethany sobbed.
“Your brother is on his way, and he’s going to get you to the doctor and take good care of you.”
Bethany nodded, then, muffled through the wad of gauze covering her nose, said, “Mr. Hall, I’m feeling like my stress is even higher than eight-thirty-seven right now. Does that mean I’m going to fail this assignment and get a horrible grade in your class?”
He chuckled and shook his head. “You’re not going to fail it. I’ll tell you what. I’ll give you extra credit for being a trooper.”
“Thank you,” she croaked out, looking like her injury might be worth it if it meant extra credit. He wasn’t sure why extra credit mattered so much to someone who already had a 99.4% in his class, but it looked like it did.
As he was trying to make it back to his class before the bell rang, his phone vibrated, so he pulled it out of his pocket and saw a text from Matt.
Can you come over the second you get off work?
He quickly typed in a response.
Is everything okay?
Just come.
There was so much Aaron wanted to talk to Macie about. So much time he wanted to spend with her. So much more he wanted to find out. And he really really wanted to kiss her again.
He was hoping to get a chance to do at least some of that after all his students left. But when he got to the classroom, there was barely enough time to put the room back in order. Before they left, he had the students erase their old stress rating and replace it with the post hang-out-with-puppies-during-class score, which he was happy to see were all sixes and lower, with the exception of Bethany’s 837 that was still on the board.
Distracted by what could be going on with Matt, he helped Macie get the dogs and cat back to her car, she gave him a quick kiss on the cheek, and he said, “I’m sorry I have to run. I’ll call you after I leave Matt’s.”
And now thoughts of Macie and worry about Matt fought for dominance in his mind. He pulled up to the front of Matt’s house, the yard filled with Christmas lights and decorations with the lights still on, even though it was mid-afternoon.
He knocked on Matt’s door, and heard a shouted, “Come in,” so he did. The place was feeling strangely empty. Like some of the furniture was missing, or maybe the things on the walls, but he couldn’t quite put his finger on what. It just felt as though the essence of the home was gone. Matt was splayed on the couch, looking unshowered and bedraggled.
“Matt, buddy, what’s going on?”
Matt sat up and leaned forward with his elbows on his knees. Aaron sat in the chair across from him and waited.
“Ciara and I are separated. She just left with all her stuff right before I texted you.”
Of all the things that had run through his mind of what could be wrong, this didn’t even make the list at all. Matt and Ciara were the perfect couple. They were rock solid. “How did this happen? I thought you two were happy together. You always seemed...happy.”
“We were! But then I lost my job.”
“She left you because you lost your job?”
Matt shook his head. “She wasn’t upset about that. Well, she was upset that I didn’t tell her before our game night last week.”
“You didn’t tell her? Matt!”
“I know, I know. But I knew she’d ask why I got fired, and I didn’t want to tell her.”
Dread filled Aaron’s stomach like a lead weight. “Matt, why did you get fired?”
He ran his hands over his face, and then ran them through his hair, making it stand up in all directions. “I was caught in a compromising situation in the break room with a co-worker. Subordinate, actually—I’m her boss. Was her boss.”
Aaron fell back in his chair. All he could manage to say was one word. “Why?”
“I don’t even know! Because I’m the biggest idiot on the planet? It’s never happened before...It was just that once...And we didn’t actually...”
“Matt! Regardless of how far you got before you were caught, you cheated on your wife!”
“I know,” Matt said, and dropped his head into his hands. “What do I do?”
Aaron took a few slow breaths. “I want to be a good friend and give you good advice. I do. But I’m going to need a few minutes to process this before I can.” He stood up, let himself out of the house, and started walking around the block.
Chapter Fifteen
In preparation to eventually start Paws and Relax, Macie had worked at a pet groomer’s in college so she’d learn everything she needed to know. She had mostly used the skill to groom her own dogs, but now that she opened it to the public and had started advertising, business was coming in quickly. If this kept up, she might even be able to get a second employee.
As she trimmed the fur of a poodle named Pebbles, she looked around the back room. If she had a second employee, she could probably turn this part into a place to board animals when people went on vacation, just like she’d envisioned when she’d first leased the building.
And if she opened up boarding, along with everything else she was doing, it’d likely bring in more than enough to justify buying the building.
But all that was just dreaming. There was no way to tell if any of those things would be profitable over the long term, so they couldn’t be relied on when making her decision. She just needed more facts! More assurances that things would work out. More certainty that buying the building was the right choice. Because if she couldn’t be certain, she couldn’t tell her landlord that she wanted to put in an offer.
She glanced at her phone, like she had every couple of minutes for the past three hours. Logically, she knew that Aaron could be at Matt’s for a while. All night, even. But that didn’t stop her heart from a little too often hoping she’d get a call from him. Every couple of minutes, apparently. He had started a conversation in his classroom that she desperately wanted to finish. It seemed like maybe he had felt the same way that she did, but she wasn’t sure. She wanted to know for sure.
After Pebbles’ owner, a war veteran named Jim, stopped by to pick her up, Macie got a phone call. It wasn’t Aaron, but it was Joselyn, and that was just what she needed right now.
“Hey, sis! Are you still at work?”
“Yes, why—do you want to go do something?”
Joselyn laughed. “Yes, actually. I am just leaving the shop right now and was hoping to get the last little bit of Christmas shopping done. It sounds like you would love to go with me.”
“I very much would. I’m grabbing my stuff right now.”
“That’s good, because I’m already at your door.”
Macie poked her head out of her office, and saw Joselyn as she reached the front door, baby Aria in her arms. She waved, then hung up the phone and put on her coat. She let Emily know that she was going to be gone for a couple of hours, and if she wasn’t back by closing time, Emily should just close up, and she’d be by shortly after to get Reese and Lola.
A light snow was falling as they walked. Just enough to add a little magic to Main Street, the Christmas lights above shining in the darkness. They took Aria to go touch the poinsettia garlands wrapped around all the hand rails on the pedestrian bridges, to see the giant wreath on the clock tower, and watched the creek as the lights from above danced in the water that was starting to form ice crystals where the snow met the slow-moving water. Eventually, they even made it to Wishstones and started shopping.
“Okay, tell me what’s up,” Joselyn said as they paused next to the boxes of wrapping paper. “You’ve checked your phone dozens of times since we’ve been out.”
She had? And here she thought she had been doing a good job of distracting herself. “I was just hoping for a call from Aaron.”
“Here,” Joselyn said, putting Aria in her arms. “You need something to keep your hands busy, and I need to find the perfect paper. You’ll hear it when he calls.”
Macie made faces
at her little niece and was rewarded with some big smiles and a few laughs.
“You really like him, don’t you?”
Macie sighed. “I really do. I’m just unsure about how much he likes me.”
“Are you kidding? It’s obvious how in love with you he is!”
Not really. It was painfully un-obvious.
Joselyn stopped searching through the rolls of wrapping paper and narrowed her eyes, scrutinizing Macie’s face. “Why are you so unsure? Did he say or do something? Because from what I saw on Saturday, you two were both looking pretty smitten.”
Macie reached down into Joselyn’s bag, grabbed out a toy, and handed it to Aria. She looked at Aria for a moment as the baby squealed in delight and then started shaking the toy, and then she took a deep breath and looked at her sister. The two of them used to argue a lot back when they were in middle school, but by the time Macie was a sophomore in high school and Joselyn was a senior, they had become best friends. She was used to telling Joselyn everything. And right now she needed to be real with her sister and to get some help figuring things out way more than she needed to have her believe that she and Aaron were dating.
“I’m unsure because...” She hadn’t realized how difficult it would be to tell her sister that she had been lying to her. But if it was so hard, why had it not been so hard to pull off faking the relationship in front of her? Macie wondered if that possibly meant that she hadn’t been faking. Maybe she had liked him since that first day. “Okay, remember that day when we first met and were eating ice cream together in your shop?”
Her sister nodded, her hands still frozen on the rolls of wrapping paper.
“I was complaining about dating and said I wanted to take a break for six months. He said he didn’t want to ever get married, but his students were set on finding him a wife by the end of the school year. So we decided to fake date each other so that everyone would back off.”
“You’ve been faking?!”
“Shhh!” Macie said. “I don’t exactly want it to be public knowledge!”
In a much quieter voice, Joselyn added, “And you didn’t tell me?”
“I am so sorry. It was just somehow easier to pull off if I was acting the same way around everyone. I’m not exactly proficient in lying or faking things, so if only the two of us knew, then it was us teaming up together to do something. And he is really great to team up with.”
“But then you actually fell for him.”
“Pretty fully. I haven’t felt this way since...” Macie racked her brain, trying to figure out when, “probably Jack.”
Joselyn smiled, remembering. “Wow. When was that? The summer after your senior year? I remember, he was the guy you thought you’d ride off into the sunset with. This is huge.”
“Well, huge for me. I have no idea where he stands. But that kiss Saturday night felt pretty real.”
“From what Janet, Sophie, Trevor, and Mindy said, it was pretty smoochie smoochie.”
Macie blushed, still embarrassed that her nieces and nephew had witnessed it. “And then earlier today, he started to ask me about it, and it seemed that maybe he had felt something too, but then his students needed him and then his friend needed him, and I just don’t know.” She adjusted the way Aria was sitting on her hip and pulled out her phone, just to make sure she hadn’t missed the ring tone or the buzz.
Joselyn pulled out two different wrapping paper rolls, and held them next to each other, her head cocking to the side. “Well, from where I stood, things looked pretty authentic on his part. Do you think you want to continue dating him—for real?” Joselyn must’ve decided on the paper, because she moved down the aisle to bows.
“I don’t know. I like him a lot. For so many reasons. But I’ve found myself hoping again, and that’s a dangerous thing. It’s like my heart has PTSD when it comes to hope. It knows that when it starts to hope, it has to prepare for being shattered.”
“Unless this is the one time that it doesn’t get shattered. Maybe this will be what restores your heart’s faith in hope.” She picked up a box of bows, and then looked toward the front of the store. “We really should’ve grabbed a cart if we want to get any shopping done.”
They headed to the front of the store, then Macie buckled Aria into the seat in the cart and handed back the toy she had tossed onto the ground. “I think shattering is the more likely outcome. Plus, I think God’s been giving me signs all along that we shouldn’t be together.”
Joselyn crossed her arms and raised an eyebrow in only the way an older sister could.
“No, really. Every time we’ve been together, something bad has happened. That first day, we went to the tree lighting, remember? And for the first time in probably all of Nestled Hollow history, the tree lighting caused a power outage for the entire city.”
“That’s because it was the first time in Nestled Hollow history that we had that many lights on the tree.”
“At Winter Formal, we got the kids dancing, and one danced into the refreshment table, and punch and cookies went everywhere. At the hayride, that little kid got separated from his mom, so I got us disqualified.” She tried to think through the order of the dates they’d gone on. “And then at his friend’s house, not only did we have to leave early because I was getting so sick, but I totally and completely offended and embarrassed his friend. At the family Christmas party, we all got snowed in.”
“Which ended up working in your favor, if you remember. Plus, the kids had a blast with the bonus sleepover.”
“Today,” she plowed ahead, sure that if she presented enough evidence, Joselyn would understand, “I took the dogs to his AP History class, and one of the girls got a broken nose. A broken nose, from playing with my dogs! What are the chances of that even happening?”
Joselyn still had her arms crossed and they still hadn’t moved from the front of the store. Macie grabbed hold of the handle to the shopping cart and steered it back toward the toy section of the store, so Joselyn followed. “Oh! And let’s not forget the first moment we met—it was because Lola ran ahead and her leash caused him to crash his bike. We met because he crashed.”
“Maybe that was God intervening, because neither of you would’ve given each other a chance if he hadn’t.”
Macie just shook her head. “There have just been too many evidences that it’s a bad idea. I mean seriously, Joselyn, even the idea was bad, because when I went to Best Dressed, I wasn’t even with Aaron. I was simply getting a dress for when I would be with him, and chaos erupted at Paws and Relax just during those few minutes I was gone.”
Joselyn reached out and stopped the cart, stopping Macie. “Have you actually asked God? Or are you just making assumptions?”
Macie sighed. “I haven’t. But the fact remains that my goal is to get married. His goal is to not get married. So none of this matters anyway. My brain should’ve known all along not to let hope in, because there’s really no hope to be had when it comes to things working out between us. Subconsciously, my brain hasn’t been doing its job of protecting my heart from harm. I need to start doing it consciously.”
Joselyn shook her head like she saw that Macie was just going down a path she’d seen her go down before. But this one really was different. “Just...Before you decide to do that, wait for his call. Ask him your questions, and see what he has to say, okay? Just wait for that?”
Macie hesitated, so Joselyn said, “Your ‘boyfriend’ and you have been fake dating, and you didn’t tell me. I think the least you could do to make up for that is to promise me you’ll wait until he calls to decide anything.”
Macie nodded. She could do that. “Okay, I will.”
Except Aaron didn’t call at all that night.
Or at all on Wednesday or Thursday.
By the time Friday morning rolled around and her texts were still going unanswered, she wasn’t even sure they were going to be going to the Main Street Business Alliance Christmas party together.
Chapter Sixteen
But this was Macie.
So Friday during lunch, when he only had one class period left before the semester was over and school let out for two weeks for the Christmas break, he finally felt strong enough to reply. Before today, he’d planned to let her know that he couldn’t make it to her work Christmas party, but now that the day was here, he decided that maybe he could handle it. Plus, he just really wanted to see her. He typed out a text and pressed send.
I apologize for not calling. It’s been a rough few days. Are we still on for tonight?
The text showed as being read, but it was still a few agonizing minutes before the bubble showing that she was replying appeared.
I’m sorry about your last few days! If you need to skip tonight, that’s okay. Like I said, dates aren’t required, and I don’t mind going alone.
I want to go. What time and where should I meet you?
8:00, at the library on Main Street. Go around to the back, and you’ll see doors that lead to the basement.
He knew he should’ve offered to pick her up so that they could arrive together, but he just didn’t have it in him.
Aaron arrived at the doors to the basement of the library just a few minutes after eight, took a deep breath, and went inside. Macie’s face lit up when she saw him, but then fell pretty soon after. This was a party. He really needed to figure out how to smile while he was here. He worked on it while she made her way to him.