How the Grinch Stole My Heart
a novel by
Annabelle Costa
How the Grinch Stole My Heart
© 2018 by Annabelle Costa. All rights reserved.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means whatsoever without express written permission from the author.
This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, incidents and places are the products of the authors’ imagination, and are not to be construed as real. None of the characters in the book is based on an actual person. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental and unintentional.
Table of Contents
Prologue: Jeremy
Chapter 1: Jeremy
Chapter 2: Noelle
Chapter 3: Jeremy
Chapter 4: Noelle
Chapter 5: Jeremy
Chapter 6: Noelle
Chapter 7: Jeremy
Chapter 8: Jeremy
Chapter 9: Noelle
Chapter 10: Jeremy
Chapter 11: Noelle
Chapter 12: Jeremy
Chapter 13: Noelle
Chapter 14: Jeremy
Chapter 15: Noelle
Chapter 16: Jeremy
Chapter 17: Noelle
Chapter 18: Jeremy
Chapter 19: Noelle
Chapter 20: Jeremy
Chapter 21: Noelle
Chapter 22: Jeremy
Chapter 23: Noelle
Chapter 24: Noelle
Chapter 25: Jeremy
Chapter 26: Noelle
Chapter 27: Jeremy
Chapter 28: Noelle
Chapter 29: Jeremy
Chapter 30: Noelle
Chapter 31: Jeremy
Chapter 32: Jeremy
Chapter 33: Noelle
Chapter 34: Jeremy
Chapter 35: Noelle
Chapter 36: Jeremy
Chapter 37: Noelle
Chapter 38: Jeremy
Chapter 39: Noelle
Chapter 40: Jeremy
Chapter 41: Noelle
Chapter 42: Jeremy
Chapter 43: Noelle
Chapter 44: Jeremy
Chapter 45: Noelle
Chapter 46: Jeremy
Acknowledgments
Prologue: Jeremy
It was on Christmas Day, almost exactly six years ago, that my life fell apart.
My last happy memory is of my wife Taylor lying in bed next to me, breathing hard, her round face flushed. She rolled her head in my direction, a dopey smile on her face. Any day we both didn’t have to work, we’d sleep in together, then have sex before even considering getting out of bed. I’d been with Taylor since college eight years earlier, but she still drove me just as crazy as the day I met her.
“Merry Christmas, my husband,” Taylor said, poking me in the shoulder with one of her stubby fingernails. We had gotten married three months ago, and it was still weird and kind of hilarious to think that we were really husband and wife. Marriage always seemed like something for adults, but we were still in our twenties—adults, but only just barely. We both got a kick out of referring to each other as “my husband” or “my wife.”
It was fun to say. Can’t stay late—my wife is expecting me home for dinner. Or, My wife made reservations at a French restaurant on New Year’s Eve. Even mundane sentences became more interesting: My wife has an inner ear infection.
I leaned in and kissed her on the lips. “Merry Christmas, my wife.”
Taylor giggled and waved a hand in front of her face. “Ew, morning breath!”
I rolled my eyes. “We’ve just been kissing for the last twenty minutes.”
“Yeah, but that was sex kissing,” she explained.
“Sex kissing is different from regular kissing?”
“Obviously!”
It was the kind of logic I couldn’t argue with.
“Fine.” I fumbled on the nightstand for my glasses, because I’m half-blind without them. Taylor wore glasses too, but she could walk around the apartment without them—I couldn’t. I still can’t. “I’ll go brush my teeth.”
“Thank you, my husband.” Taylor rewarded me with a huge smile that strained her chubby cheeks. My college roommate Mike used to say that Taylor had “chipmunk cheeks,” which I don’t think he meant as a compliment. Mike always tried to convince me I could do better than Taylor, that there were plenty of other girls who were into me and she “wasn’t all that hot.” I ended up ditching him as a friend and staying with Taylor. She was my soulmate—or so I thought at the time. The fact that I knew she was the most beautiful woman in the world even though those other idiots couldn’t see it only made me like her more.
My phone buzzed on the nightstand—someone was texting me. Maybe my parents to wish me Merry Christmas?
“Who’s that?” Taylor asked.
I shrugged. “Nothing important, I assume.”
“Ooh, I bet it’s Geri!” Taylor giggled. “I bet she’s just checking in.” She raised the pitch of her voice a few notches, in what was actually a very fair impression of my coworker Geri. “Oh, Jeremy, I just wanted to wish you a very, very merry Christmas.”
I rolled my eyes. Taylor was convinced Geri had a crush on me, and I couldn’t say with authority that she was wrong. Geri was always showing up to work with a plate of cookies for me, and once she requisitioned my help to work free a stuck zipper at the base of her neck. I didn’t know how many times I could flash my wedding ring at her until she got the hint to cut it out.
I slid my glasses on over the bridge of my nose, and as the world jumped into focus, a jab of pain hit me over my left eye. Ouch. Too many eggnogs last night. I picked up my phone to read the text, which actually did turn out to be from Geri:
Hi, Jeremy! Have a very, very merry Christmas!
Taylor nudged me. “So what did ol’ Geri have to say?”
“You don’t know for sure it’s from Geri.”
“Isn’t it?”
I snorted. “Okay, fine. It is. She’s just wishing me Merry Christmas.”
“You know, you’re lucky I’m not the jealous type.”
“I know,” I said. This wasn’t the first time a female coworker had developed a misguided crush on me, unfortunately. “I’m very lucky.”
Taylor’s hand slid over my thigh, and my dick instantly stood at attention, ready for another go at my sexy wife. “I know you can’t help making women fall in love with you. You’re really hot.”
I rolled my eyes again. “Yeah, yeah.”
I took it for granted then, but in retrospect, she was right. Women were always wildly attracted to me, especially when all they had was a sea of computer programmers to choose from. I’d never cheated though or even considered it. I only wanted Taylor.
And anyway, in less than ten minutes, it would all change.
“Go brush your teeth, my husband.” She smacked me on the ass. “And then we can go open our presents, okay?”
“Deal.” I turned to grin at her. “You’re going to love what I got you.”
Taylor arched an eyebrow at me. “Will I?”
Unlike most girls, Taylor didn’t go for flowers or chocolate. She was a techy chick, so I bought her techy gifts. I met her in a Compilers class during our junior year. She was the only female in the whole class. When we were told to pair up to work on our final project, I quickly approached her before she had a chance to find someone else. We spent a month agonizing over our code—the damn thing “compiles but it won’t compile!” One minute after we submitted our project electronically, I leaned over and kissed her. She didn’t slap me, and amazingly agreed to keep kissing me. And date me.
And eventually marry me.
She was the greatest woman I’d ever met. I couldn’t imagine ever feeling any different about her.
Except as it turned out, two years later, we wouldn’t even be married anymore.
“You will,” I assured her.
“Hmm,” she said. “It’s probably something you bought because you’re hoping I’ll let you play with it.”
“Sort of,” I admitted. “But isn’t that what you did too?”
“Of course. Duh.”
Taylor smiled as she ran a finger along the side of my face, stopping at the scar over my left eye. She often joked that the scar over my left eye was what made girls fall in love with me. Harrison Ford appeal, she always said. I got that scar during my one act of chivalry as a kid. I was eight years old, and while at recess, this boy was making fun of a girl in my class. I stood up to him and told him to stop, and he hurled a rock at my head. Ten stitches. I didn’t even cry because I had a crush on the girl and wanted her to think I was brave. (For the record, I didn’t score with the girl, but I’m not sure I was expecting to, considering I was eight and all.)
“Want to go again?” I asked her, in spite of my headache.
She grinned at me. “Yes, but first presents.”
“That’s a kind of present.”
Taylor just clucked her tongue at me and hopped out of bed to beat me to the bathroom. I took a second to watch her strutting around naked. Clothing is overrated. I wanted kids as much as she did, but I was glad we decided to wait a few years so we could have more one-on-one naked time.
As I stood up from bed, the jab in my temple intensified to a pounding sensation, and I was glad we didn’t go for Round Two. I sometimes got headaches when I spent too many hours in front of the computer screen, but this was worse than my usual headache. This didn’t feel like something where I could pop a couple of Advil and be good.
“Jeremy?” Taylor peered at me from the bathroom sink, where she was holding her pink toothbrush in her right hand. “You okay?”
“Uh huh,” I muttered. “Just a headache.”
I walked to the bathroom, but it took more effort than usual. I felt off-balance, like I was just as likely to walk into a wall as I was to make it successfully to the sink. Damn, this was one hell of a headache.
When I got to the bathroom, it felt like a miracle. Taylor was frowning at me, her light brown eyebrows scrunched together. “Jer? You don’t look so good.”
I rubbed my temples with the tips of my fingers. “Yeah, this headache is a mother.”
“God, it’s probably a migraine.” She opened the medicine cabinet, rifling through her bottles of pills. For a healthy, twenty-eight-year-old woman, my wife had a crazy amount of medications in her stash. “Do you want an Imitrex? You have to take it when the migraine first starts.”
“I don’t know if it’s a good idea for me to be taking your prescription meds.”
“Don’t be silly.” Taylor pulled out an orange bottle. “It’s clearly a migraine. I get them all the time. Take a pill!”
I was about to refuse her, but in that second, the pain level jumped up several notches. On a scale of one to ten, this pain was a hundred. No, it was a million. It was the worst thing I’d ever experienced in my life. It felt like I was going to give birth to a baby through my head.
“Okay,” I managed.
Taylor opened the bottle so slowly, I wanted to rip it out of her hands and open it for her. She shook out a tablet and held it out to me.
But before I could reach for it, a wave of nausea overwhelmed me. I fell to my knees, leaned over the toilet bowl, and threw up anything left in my stomach from the Christmas Eve dinner we cooked together last night.
“Oh my God,” Taylor said as she stood over me, clearly unsure if she should stay or not. I’m sure the vomit smelled worse than my breath did a few minutes ago. “Are you okay?”
Sometimes when you throw up, it’s cathartic and you feel instantly better. This wasn’t one of those moments. I felt even worse than I did before, if that was possible. “No,” I said. And as I spoke the word, I realized my tongue felt heavy in my mouth. “I don’t think I am.”
My words sounded slurred even to me. I looked up at my wife and saw the panic on her face. It was exactly how I was feeling inside. Slurring your words randomly at ten in the morning is never a good sign.
“I’m calling 911,” she said.
I nodded, still on the floor, clutching the toilet. I tried to grab some toilet paper to wipe off my lips, but I couldn’t seem to grip it with my fingers. My right hand felt clumsy and weird. “I think I better lie down,” I mumbled.
I tried to stand up, but that proved to be difficult. The headache was now so intense, it was hard to do anything. But on top of that, my right leg collapsed under me the second I attempted to put weight on it. Taylor reached out her hand to try to help me, but I could tell it wouldn’t be enough. It was too far from the bathroom to the bed. I’d never make it.
So I lay down on the cold, hard tile floor of the bathroom until the paramedics showed up fifteen minutes later. They had to lift me onto the stretcher, because by that point, I couldn’t move my right arm or leg at all.
“What’s your name?” one of the paramedics asked me.
“Jeremy Grieder,” I told him, knowing my words were so slurred, he’d never understand me.
The guy looked at my wife, who told him my name and my other information, because I couldn’t do it. There were tears streaming down her face, and she was struggling to stay calm. She looked more panicked than I was—I was feeling very tired at this point, barely able to keep my eyes open.
I only managed to stay conscious long enough to get wheeled through the living room of my apartment, past the Christmas tree where the presents were waiting underneath for Taylor and me to unwrap.
Chapter 1: Jeremy
Thump.
I close my eyes, trying to shut out the sound of a ball hitting the wall just outside my apartment. It’s the second time in two days. The second goddamn time.
Thump. Thump.
I feel a seedling of a headache starting in my left temple. I open my eyes and stare at the computer screen in front of me, filled with code. If I get a migraine, there’s no way I’ll be able to get any work done. I’ll be lucky if I can get out of bed.
Thump. Thump. Thump.
I grit my teeth. I know it’s a lot to expect absolute silence at three o’clock in the afternoon on a Sunday, but there’s something about that sound that gets me. The fact that it’s not quite rhythmic. The way sometimes there’s a gap in the thumps and I think it’s finally stopped, but nope, there it is again.
I know who’s doing it. It’s that kid. That goddamn kid. I don’t know his name, but his family moved here a couple of months ago, and ever since winter hit for real, he’s been playing out in the hall with his rubber ball. He throws it against the wall as hard as he can, then he catches it. You’d think he’d get bored of it eventually, but he never does. He never. Fucking. Does.
Thump. Thump.
I don’t want to be the asshole who yells at a little kid for tossing a ball around in the hallway. I don’t want to be that guy. Nobody likes that guy. Remember Dennis the Menace and his grouchy old neighbor, Mr. Wilson? Dennis the Menace was always messing up Mr. Wilson’s lawn or knocking down half his house or pulling down his pants to reveal polka dot boxers, but somehow Dennis was still the hero. Did anyone root for Mr. Wilson? No, nobody did.
I don’t want to be Mr. Wilson. I don’t. I’m just really sick of the sound of that goddamn ball. I’m not going to be able to pay my rent if the kid keeps it up.
Thump! Thump!
To hell with it. I’m going to say something. Maybe the kid can go throw a ball on the floor above or below. Or anywhere else besides right outside my door.
I take a breath, steeling myself for the effort it will take to stand up. I reach with my left hand for the forearm crutch I always keep leaning against my desk when
I work. I lace my left arm through the metal loops, then slowly haul myself to my feet like I have hundreds of times before. I have a false start, where it seems like I’ll fall right back into my chair, but I don’t.
I’ve gotten good at this over the last several years. I barely remember a time when standing up from a chair didn’t involve any effort at all. It feels like that was a whole other life.
I guess it sort of was.
I limp in the direction of the door. I keep the path from my desk to the door cleared of dirty clothes, rugs, or other paraphernalia that can and will trip me up. It’s about twenty feet from the desk to the door, but it takes me a good minute to traverse. My left leg does fine, but my right drags along behind me like dead weight, even with the plastic brace I’ve got supporting my ankle. It goes without saying I don’t go on any long hikes these days.
I get the door open just as the kid is hurling his rubber ball at the wall with an impressive overhand for a kid his size. I don’t know how old he is, because I don’t have much familiarity with children. He’s somewhere between kindergarten and adulthood. Seven? Eight? Something like that. My clues are he’s two heads shorter than me and has no visible facial hair.
He catches the ball, cupping it between his hands. A jab of jealousy hits me right in my rib cage. I can’t do that anymore. Throwing. Catching. I throw worse than a little girl with my left, and my right… well, it’s obvious I’m not throwing with that one anymore. I’m not doing anything with that one these days. Not that I was any Babe Ruth before, but I could toss a ball around without humiliating myself. I used to sometimes pitch on my company’s softball team and could always be counted on to strike a few guys out.
Before.
“Hey!” I say.
The kid turns and looks at me, startled. He’s a cute kid—big brown eyes, messy brown hair, and a runny nose. I wonder if I’d stayed with Taylor, if we’d have a kid of our own by now. Probably we would. Taylor wanted three and I wanted two. We used to argue about it.
I clear my throat, not wanting to come off as too harsh. I don’t want to be Mr. Wilson. “Hey,” I start again. “Listen, when you throw the ball against the wall, it’s too loud…”
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