Maybe This Christmas

by Susannah Nix

  “Well I hope so,” Alex said with a grin, “since you’re dating her.”

  Lucas glanced over at Kelsey, who was deep in conversation with Oscar and Ana. She didn’t seem to be paying any attention to him. “Thanks for being so nice to Kelsey,” Lucas said, turning back to Alex.

  “Why wouldn’t I be nice to Kelsey?”

  “I’m not saying you wouldn’t, I’m just saying I appreciate that you were.”

  “Okay.”

  “I wasn’t sure you’d like her.” The words felt disloyal as soon as they left Lucas’s lips, and he regretted saying them.

  “Of course I like her. She’s great.”

  “Yeah, she is.”

  “Does it even matter what I think?” Alex asked. “It’s not like you’re planning to marry her.”

  “Yeah, right,” Lucas said. “Ha ha.” He actually said the words ha ha instead of laughing, which sounded more sarcastic than he’d intended.

  The silence that followed was awkward, and he looked down at his feet so he wouldn’t have to look at Alex’s face. He didn’t want to see the expression on Alex’s face, except he also couldn’t stand not to see the expression on Alex’s face, and when he sneaked a glimpse it was just as bad as he’d feared, because Alex wasn’t smiling at all.

  The way she was not smiling filled Lucas with so many conflicted and confusing feelings that he had to look away again. This time he looked over at Kelsey, who was watching him now, and he gave her a smile and a small wave, both of which felt forced.

  “So how’s life?” Alex asked finally, breaking the awkward silence. “We haven’t talked in ages.”

  “Life’s fine,” Lucas answered with a shrug. “Same as always, pretty much.” He felt like he always shrugged around Alex. Or maybe he shrugged all the time, and only noticed it on the rare occasions he saw Alex. Maybe his whole life had become one big shrug these days.

  “Except for Kelsey,” Alex pointed out. “She’s new.”

  “Except for her, yeah.”

  “Your dad’s okay? And your brother?”

  Lucas noticed Alex didn’t ask how things were going with Kelsey, which was just as well, because if things had been anything other than fine he wouldn’t have felt like he could tell her. “Yeah, they’re both good. My dad’s on his third girlfriend since the divorce, which means he’s had more girlfriends in the last two years than I have.”

  Alex’s expression turned sympathetic. “That must be weird.” The sad smile she gave him made him feel like he was being pitied, which he hated. He didn’t need to be pitied anymore. He had a job and an awesome girlfriend now. He was doing all right.

  “I’m getting sort of used to it,” Lucas said, which was true. The parade of nice middle-aged women regularly entering and exiting his dad’s life had become the new normal. Apparently his dad was something of a catch. And he seemed to be enjoying his new lifestyle, which was what mattered.

  “What about Theo?” Alex asked. “Is he getting used to it?”

  “He loves it,” Lucas said. “He’s the one who set up my dad’s dating app profile.”

  “Oh my god, your dad’s on a dating app? You have to tell me which one so I don’t accidentally swipe right on him.”

  “Ew. Gross, Alex. It’s that one only old people use, so I hope you’re not on it.” Lucas gave her a long look. “Do you really use a dating app?”

  He couldn’t imagine Alex ever needing help finding a date. But then he didn’t really know anything about her life now. He didn’t know who her friends were or what her love life was like. He wondered if she’d dated any women since Riley—not that he cared, but he was curious. He wanted to understand that part of her better, but the days when she’d tell him everything were long gone.

  Alex stooped to rummage in the cooler for a beer. “Everyone uses dating apps now. Haven’t you ever done it?”

  “No.” He hadn’t dated anyone between Alex and Kelsey, other than a few ill-fated blind dates and that one girl from his psychology class he’d met for coffee a few times and who’d stopped answering his texts as soon as the semester was over.

  Alex straightened, grinning at him as she opened a can of Modelo. “Gotta get with the times, Lucas. Tinder is the new Club Penguin.”

  “Oh my god.” He rolled his eyes, groaning. “You’re never gonna let me live that down, are you?” When he first moved to Beaufort with his family, Lucas had been deeply into playing Club Penguin. He made the mistake once of mentioning he’d made friends with a girl in a chat group for fans of the online game, and everyone had called her his Club Penguin girlfriend and teased him mercilessly for two years.

  “Never,” Alex said. “We’re gonna be a hundred years old living in the same nursing home, and I’ll still be mocking you for your Club Penguin girlfriend.”

  Lucas hoped so. It sounded pretty great, actually.

  Seven

  Alex

  December 25, 2016

  Alex had just about given up on Lucas when he finally showed up at the beach.

  “Oh my god, congratulations!” Gabby screeched as she threw herself into Lucas’s arms.

  Lucas was engaged now. To Kelsey. Alex’s brain still hadn’t quite processed the information, although it had happened nearly a month ago.

  She’d heard the news first from Linh, and then from her mother, and then Gabby, before she’d finally heard it from Lucas himself.

  I asked Kelsey to marry me, he’d texted sheepishly, three full days after the proposal had been made and accepted.

  The sheepishness was just an inference on Alex’s part, since you couldn’t actually detect tone from a text. But she couldn’t imagine Lucas writing those words in anything other than a sheeplike state.

  I heard! she’d texted back right away. Congratulations!!!! She’d made sure to tack on lots of exclamation points and celebratory emojis, so he’d know she was happy for him. Not just smiley faces and the little party popper, but champagne glasses and a wedding ring. A wedding ring. For Lucas. Who was marrying Kelsey.

  Everyone had felt the need to check on Alex since Lucas’s engagement. Even her mother and her sister had been extra nice, which made for a pleasant change of pace, but Alex didn’t like the reason for it.

  She didn’t want people thinking she was still hung up on Lucas, or treating her like she’d experienced some sort of emotional trauma. She wasn’t in danger of falling apart just because he was getting married.

  Except maybe she was a little? The news had hit her harder than she’d expected, so maybe it was a good thing Lucas had waited to tell her. It had given her time to prepare herself for the conversation so she could pretend to be appropriately happy for him.

  And now Lucas was here at the beach where Alex also was, and she’d need to be happy for him in person, which was a little more work but still totally doable. She could handle this. She was all over it.

  “Where’s Kelsey?” Linh asked as she hugged Lucas. “I wanted to see the ring.”

  “She’s at her grandmother’s in Victoria,” Lucas said. “Sorry.”

  Alex waited patiently until it was her turn to hug Lucas. She’d planned to let him take the lead, but when he finally turned to her his expression was so uncertain and vulnerable—like he was afraid she’d be mad at him for getting engaged—that she stepped into his arms and squeezed him as tight as she could.

  She felt him exhale as he squeezed her back, and her body responded automatically by sagging against his. The warm, familiar scent of him surrounded her, and the back of her throat started to burn as her chest constricted.

  Then he lifted her off the ground and swung her around, and she laughed in surprise—but also to hide the tears that had traitorously sprung to her eyes.

  When he set her down, Alex was relieved to see he was smiling. Lucas should always be happy; he deserved to have good things happen to him. She never wanted to be the reason he wasn’t smiling.

  “You look good,” Lucas said. “I like your hair long.”
<
br />   Alex reached up to touch a long lock. She’d been growing it out the last couple years—though not without some feelings of guilt for abandoning her bisexual bob. She was still struggling to define herself. She wasn’t exactly butch, but she wasn’t entirely femme either, and still felt like an imposter whenever she dated men or donned rainbow gear. She wasn’t sure that feeling would ever go away.

  “You look good,” Alex told Lucas. He did look good. He was wearing a blue plaid shirt that matched his eyes and a really nice field jacket she’d never seen before. She wondered if Kelsey helped him pick his clothes out these days.

  Everyone else had drifted away, leaving the two of them on their own, and Alex tried to pretend this was totally normal and not awkward.

  “How does it feel to be someone’s fiancé?” she asked.

  Lucas shrugged. “About the same, really.”

  “Have you set a date for the wedding yet?” The word left a sour taste in her mouth. Wedding. Ugh.

  Alex had been working as an assistant to a wedding planner in Austin, so her job was all weddings all the time. She used to think weddings were romantic, but she’d grown to loathe them. So many bridezillas and dysfunctional families and miserable couples who clearly cared more about the spectacle than each other. It made her feel ill to think of Lucas being caught up in all that.

  Not that he and Kelsey would be miserable. They’d undoubtedly be happy as clams. They were a pair of perfect clams destined for marital bliss. It was so cute you could vomit.

  Alex reminded herself she was supposed to be happy for them and smiled a little wider.

  “No date yet,” Lucas said. “We’re saving up for the wedding and to buy a place of our own, so it’ll probably be at least a year. We want to do it right, and Kelsey has her heart set on a big wedding.”

  “So in the meantime you’re still living at home?” Alex asked.

  “Yeah, and Kelsey’s still living at her mom’s. It’s easier to save that way.”

  Alex nodded as though she understood, but she didn’t. Not at all. If she ever decided to spend the rest of her life with someone, she wouldn’t want to wait until she had the right house. She wouldn’t care what kind of dump they lived in, as long as they were together.

  Not that she was in danger of spending the rest of her life with anyone. All her relationships since Riley had been short-lived. You’d think doubling your dating pool would make it easier to find Mr. or Ms. Right, but so far she’d had no luck finding anyone with staying power. She was starting to wonder if she was cut out for happily ever after.

  But Alex wasn’t Lucas, and she certainly wasn’t Kelsey. She wasn’t living their lives and didn’t have to understand their priorities.

  Although, if there was one thing she’d learned from planning weddings, it was how very little they mattered. Weddings were all basically the same, no matter how much pomp and circumstance you tried to inject. When it came right down to it, the big, outrageously expensive weddings were no more fun than the simple, intimate ones—in fact, they were often a good deal less fun. The only thing that really mattered was how much you loved each other, and how happy your friends and family were to celebrate with you.

  Lucas started telling Alex about the kind of house he and Kelsey wanted. Something historic, but not too big. Closer to downtown than to the beach. It all sounded very nice, but also completely foreign to Alex, who lived with two roommates in an ugly three-bedroom rental house behind a strip shopping center.

  As Lucas talked about the dream house he planned to share with Kelsey, Alex thought about the fact that he’d never be hers again.

  She’d always felt proprietary about Lucas, even when they weren’t together. He’d been her best friend, and then her boyfriend, and after that he’d been her ex who was still her friend, and who she had a special connection with on the rare occasions they saw each other.

  But this engagement permanently severed that connection. Lucas was no longer someone she could think of in relation to herself. He was Kelsey’s fiancé, soon to be Kelsey’s husband. His connection was with someone else now. Alex was going to have to get used to that.

  “How’s Austin?” Lucas asked. “Are you still working at the same place?”

  “I am,” Alex said. “Although…” She hesitated, because she hadn’t actually told anyone the next part yet. “The company’s opening an office in Houston, and I was thinking about asking for a transfer.”

  “Would you be doing the same thing you’re doing now?”

  “It’d be a bit of a step up, actually. I’d get to do more corporate events instead of just weddings. Conferences and trade shows and retreats. That sort of thing.”

  “Sounds great.”

  “Maybe. I don’t know. I may not go for it. I haven’t decided yet.”

  “Why not?”

  She was a little intimidated, truthfully. A new city and a new job all in one fell swoop felt like a lot to take on. Things were okay in Austin, even if they weren’t great. It was familiar and manageable. She had friends and knew what bars she liked to go to. Did she really want to start over somewhere new? What if she hated it?

  “My boss is staying in Austin,” Alex said, unwilling to admit how scared she was of change. “She relies on me, and I’d hate to leave her in the lurch.”

  “Alexandra.” Lucas touched Alex’s arm with such gentleness that the heat of him felt like it would burn right through her jacket. “It’s okay to ask for things you want.”

  He was wrong about that. So wrong. Because Alex was pretty sure what she wanted was Lucas, and it definitely wasn’t okay to ask for that.

  But she wondered, just for a fleeting second, what would happen if she did.

  “Maybe I will,” she said, and Lucas took his hand away, leaving her feeling suddenly cold.

  “Tell the truth,” Lucas said in his teasing voice. “You only want the job so you’ll be closer to me.”

  “You caught me,” she said, joining in on the joke. “That’s exactly what it is.”

  They both laughed like it was the funniest idea they’d ever heard.

  Eight

  Lucas

  December 25, 2017

  Alex was running late, and Lucas was worried. She’d said she was coming to the beach tonight, but it was past ten o’clock and she still wasn’t there.

  Is everything okay? Lucas texted her. Are you still coming?

  Her family had been going through some stuff, and she’d been having a hard time with all of it. Just after Thanksgiving, Alex’s dad had moved out of the house and into an apartment near the Marine Science Center where he worked. It turned out he’d been having an affair with a woman he’d met at the nature preserve where he went bird-watching every Saturday morning. The whole thing had come as a shock to pretty much everyone—the whole island was talking about it—not least of which Alex and her sister and mother.

  Mr. Bonner had always been such a mild-mannered, slightly nerdy, pleasant sort of guy. He wasn’t at all the type you expected to be carrying on a torrid affair under his family’s noses. Well, maybe the affair wasn’t actually all that torrid—they’d met while bird-watching, after all—but it had still been a shock to learn he’d been leading a double life for most of the last year.

  Alex hadn’t taken it well at all. She’d always been closer to her father than her mother, and learning he’d been lying to them had been a blow. She was having a hard time reconciling the father she thought she knew with the man who’d betray her mother, and reconciling the mother she’d always rebelled against with the wronged woman who now needed her comfort and support.

  Leaving soon, Alex texted back. Wanted to stay until Mom went to bed.

  I’ll save a s’more for you, Lucas replied.

  He’d talked to Alex more in the last few weeks than in the five years before that. It felt nice to be needed again. To be able to offer her something. He was enjoying having Alex in his life again, even if the circumstances behind it were terrible.
r />   Not in his life, in his life. But as his friend.

  “Where’s your better half?” Farley asked, opening a fresh beer as he sank into the camp chair beside Lucas.

  Yale didn’t seem to have changed Farley at all. He was still the same friendly, down-to-earth guy he’d been in high school, even though his family owned half the town and lived in the biggest house on High Street, where all the most expensive houses were.

  “At her grandmother’s in Victoria again.” Kelsey had asked Lucas to come with her this year, but he hadn’t wanted to leave his dad and his brother.

  “Is that who you’re texting?”

  “No, I was just texting Alex to see if she was still coming.”

  Farley nodded and took a sip of his beer. “Did I see you two at Murphy’s the other night?” Murphy’s was the pub downtown that most of the locals frequented, since it was removed from all the tourist traps down by the beach.

  “Yeah, you did.” Lucas had met Alex for a drink when she got back to town. She’d needed to vent about her parents to someone, and her sister wasn’t always the most sympathetic ear. “I didn’t see you. Why didn’t you come say hey?”

  Farley shrugged. “You two looked pretty cozy. I didn’t want to intrude.”

  “We weren’t…cozy.” They hadn’t touched or anything. Lucas had been very careful not to touch her, even though she’d been upset and he’d wanted to hold her hand. “We were just talking. She’s got a lot going on right now.”

  Farley was smiling like he always did, but his voice was serious. “Lucas, what are you doing?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “With Alex.”

  “I’m not doing anything with Alex.”

  “You’re texting her all the time.”

  “Not all the time.”

  Farley arched a skeptical eyebrow. “You’re going out for drinks with her? Just the two of you?”

  “She’d just gotten home and she needed to talk—about family stuff. There’s nothing wrong with that.”