A Princess for Christmas

by Jenny Holiday

  “Hmm.”

  He rolled onto his side. “What?”

  She smiled. “I’m thinking about the image that conjures. A man hammering away at a woman with his dick. I think I’d like to try that.”

  “It’s supposed to be a negative example.”

  “Still. A little controlled experiment might be fun, no? Besides, I am confident you would find a way. You seem to have a talent for multitasking.”

  He shook his head. “You are something else, Princess.”

  “I should stop calling you that,” Leo said, examining Marie from above—he’d propped his head on one hand, and she was flat on her back. She wasn’t sure she could move her limbs yet.

  “No you shouldn’t,” she said automatically.

  “But the whole point of our thing is that I don’t give a shit that you’re a princess. So why do I keep calling you that?”

  “It’s a term of endearment, I think.” Was that the right word? She was conscious of the fact that she didn’t want him to feel trapped, as though she had expectations of him, but she liked him, and she was pretty sure he liked her, too. “I think you would call me Princess if I was a . . . banker. Or a teacher.”

  “That’s . . . true.” He looked surprised at that interpretation.

  “I think it’s also a little dirty, sometimes. I think you like the idea of sullying me.”

  “Hmm.” His brow furrowed. “That’s also true.” He tucked some hair behind her ear, and the gesture felt almost unbearably tender. “But not because you’re a princess.”

  “No,” she agreed. “Because I’m a little . . . wound up.”

  The confusion left his face then, chased off by a wicked smile. “Yes. And I enjoy unwinding you.”

  “So don’t stop.” Please don’t stop.

  “Unwinding you?”

  “Unwinding me, yes, but calling me Princess, too. I like it when you call me Princess.”

  “Okay. But you know I’m not going to do it now because that would be too much like obeying a royal proclamation, right?”

  She laughed. “Of course.”

  He kept his fingers in her hair, playing with it, undoing the putting-to-rights he’d done a moment ago.

  “Thank you, Leo.”

  “Are you thanking me for having sex with you? Because I can assure you, it was my pleasure.”

  She was, but really, she meant it more holistically. “For everything. For coming here. For putting up with my father. For the cabin.”

  “About that. I’m not going to be able to get more than the rudimentary structure done before I leave. But if you can get it past your father, you could have Kai put in windows and floors. And we’re leaving a spot where a wood-burning stove could vent.”

  Marie hated to think of Leo not being around to see the finished cabin. She was going to furnish it in the summer, too, she’d decided, her father be damned. Make it fully functional. Maybe she’d even figure out a way to spend a night there.

  “How did you get interested in architecture?” she asked, suddenly curious.

  He rolled over and stared at the ceiling. She, having got control of her limbs, rolled onto her stomach and propped her chin on his chest, worrying belatedly that maybe she was getting too cozy. But his arms came immediately around her and he started playing with her hair again as he spoke.

  “I told you I used to work construction?” She nodded. “It was what my dad did. So he would get me on his crews in the summers, when I was in high school. I thought it was interesting. The way a building comes together physically from what starts out as a plan on paper—and before that, just an idea in someone’s head. I always assumed I’d follow him into the business full-time, but when he got wind of that he read me the riot act. Pointed out all his injuries and maladies—it was true that his back was all screwed up from that job. He said he hadn’t worked so hard his whole life so his kids could do manual labor. He marched me into the high-school guidance counsellor, and before I knew it I’d been set up to job-shadow an architect.”

  “And you liked it.”

  “Yeah.” He smiled. “It was all the stuff I loved about buildings, but also all this problem solving, you know? How to make the most of a site. How to incorporate what people said they wanted but also what you thought they needed. How to do all that and make it look good. It sounds dumb, but it kind of reminded me of a real-life video game.”

  It didn’t sound dumb. It sounded exactly like Leo. “So what happened?” She recognized that as the wrong question the moment it was out. “Well, I know what happened.”

  “Yeah. I mean, yeah. But it wasn’t . . . just that.”

  “What was it?” she asked gently.

  “I was the first person in my family to go to college. It was a big deal for someone like me to be in architecture school.”

  “That’s good, though, isn’t it? You should be proud of yourself.”

  He blew out a breath. “There wasn’t a day that I didn’t question whether I belonged there. If I should just give up.”

  “Of course you belonged there. They admitted you, didn’t they?”

  “Yeah, but I was barely hanging on. I worked my ass off for middling grades. I tried, but it was just . . . never enough.” He laughed, but there was no mirth in it. “Which actually turned out to be good practice for what came next.”

  “What does that mean?” she said sharply. She hadn’t meant it to come out like a rebuke, but she hated to hear him talk like this.

  “It means Gabby. I try with her, but it’s never enough.”

  “Leo! That’s objectively not true!” She had seen the love between the siblings. She had envied it.

  “It is, though,” he insisted.

  “Give me one example.”

  “Braids.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “She always wants braids, and I can never get them right.”

  “Oh, Leo.” He was breaking her heart. He didn’t see how wonderful he was. “Girls need love, not braids.”

  He swung himself off the bed without answering. He didn’t seem angry, but clearly he didn’t want to continue this conversation.

  She asked one more question anyway. She couldn’t help herself. “Do you ever think of going back to school?”

  “I don’t see how I can swing it until Gabby’s much older.” Leo darted a glance at her but looked away quickly. “As it is, we get by, but barely.”

  She was certain it hurt him to admit that. Leo was proud—though there was no shame in what he was saying. She was absurdly pleased, though, that he regarded her as a person he could say such things to. She resisted the urge to offer to pay for his school, or to help them in some way. He was only confiding in her because he trusted she wouldn’t react that way.

  “My mother used to talk about the accident of birth,” he said thoughtfully.

  “You mean like unplanned pregnancy?”

  “No. The randomness of the life circumstances a person is born into.”

  “Ahh. Meaning some people are princesses and some people aren’t?”

  “That’s one way of looking at it. But I meant more that even though some shit has happened lately, I have a good life. I wouldn’t trade my life for anything.”

  “I know,” she said. And that was what was so great about Leo Ricci.

  They stared at each other for a long moment, him standing and her on the bed. She knew he had to go back to his own room eventually, but didn’t want him to leave yet. “Leo?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Will you stay a little longer?”

  “Yeah.”

  “If you stay past midnight, it will be the twenty-third.” She wasn’t sure why she was still talking. He was already sliding back into bed. “It will be the day after the anniversary of the day my mother died.”

  “I know, Princess. I know.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  Leo got to the cabin site late the next morning, having inadvertently slept in. He’d had a hard time extricating
himself from Marie’s bed last night. It had been ridiculously cozy there, and he didn’t just mean her puffy, soft bedding, but the cocoon effect of talking late into the night. About real things like his aborted academic career and her mom’s death. But also about silly things like how the kitchen staff had allowed Gabby to invent her own cocoa flavor for the Fest, and they had been testing variations on her butterscotch s’mores creation.

  He’d been so . . . relaxed. Profoundly relaxed. Being so had thrown into sharp relief how not relaxed he had been for such a long time.

  By the time he’d finally heaved himself out of bed and sneaked back to his room, it had been three o’clock. He was bleary-eyed today, but, paradoxically, the relaxation effect endured. His steps were light as he hiked into the clearing.

  The roofing materials were all in place, neatly stacked near the structure itself. Kai, however, was not present. Well, Leo had done his share of roofs back in the day. By the time he had the ladder set up and started shuttling shingles up, Kai appeared.

  With a horse.

  Pulling a cart.

  This country was bananas. Though the single horse and narrow cart did explain how he had gotten the materials to the site via the paths.

  Leo raised a hand in greeting. “What’s this?”

  “I brought you a stove.”

  “What?” But sure enough, there was a black iron stove and pieces of a chimney in the cart.

  “I thought you could use one.”

  “For what?”

  “Do you really want me to answer that? Or should I just say that I stopped by yesterday afternoon intending to put in a couple hours of work but ended up finding the cabin occupied.”

  Leo winced. Not that he minded being caught, but he didn’t want Marie’s private business broadcast all over the place. “Listen. Whatever you think was going on—”

  “None of my business.”

  He could trust Kai. Leo didn’t quite know how he knew that, but he knew. “Thanks, man.” He started toward the cart to help unload it, but the horse made a . . . horse noise at him. He didn’t know the word. It did, however, cause him to jump like a soft city boy.

  “You just happen to have spare wood-burning stoves lying around?” he asked Kai as the horse did some kind of aggressive snorting thing again. Whinnied, maybe?

  “Hey,” Kai said mildly, “don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.”

  Gabby chattered the whole way to the cabin. Marie had to interrupt her as they turned off the main path to the smaller one that would take them to the clearing. She stopped walking. “I need to ask you a favor.”

  “Oh, anything!”

  “What I’m about to show you is a secret. No one can know. Especially not my father.” Gabby’s eyes widened. “Or Mr. Benz.”

  “I do solemnly swear to keep whatever you are about to show me a secret,” Gabby intoned with exaggerated seriousness.

  “Thank you.” As they cut through the brush, Marie told Gabby an abbreviated version of the history of the cabin.

  “And my brother is helping you?”

  “He is.”

  “Yeah. He does stuff like that.”

  Gabby was lucky to have Leo. He did do stuff like that. All the time, in big ways like cabins but also in small ways. Marie thought back to the cardboard mantel in the siblings’ apartment. She wished Leo could see himself the way his sister did.

  “How do you know when a boy likes you?” Gabby suddenly asked. The question alarmed Marie a bit. Could Gabby tell what was going on between Marie and Leo? Marie felt herself flush. She’d never had the poker face required to inoculate her against the Lucrecia von Bachenheims of the world.

  “Because I like this boy at school.”

  Right. Marie had forgotten how handy the self-absorption of youth could be. “I’m not sure I’m the best person to ask.”

  “Well, I can’t ask Leo.”

  She probably could, but Marie didn’t say that. “Dani?”

  “She just tells me that boys are no good and that I should wait until I’m thirty to date.”

  Marie wanted to laugh. “Well, some people say that when a boy likes you, he’s mean to you, which seems counterintuitive.”

  “Some people say that. Do you say that?”

  “It’s hard for me to speak from experience. People don’t act normally around me. People aren’t generally mean to princesses.” Lucrecia von Bachenheim excepted.

  “I see your point. But, like, say you’re not a princess. What does ‘mean’ actually look like, if a boy is being mean to you because he likes you? Like, he might put humiliating pictures of you on Instagram?”

  “No!” That had not been at all what she’d meant. But then, she’d been thinking more along the lines of hair pulling, but this wasn’t the 1950s, was it? “I think more like he teases you. Gives you a hard time. Maybe he has a nickname for you.”

  Princess.

  Hmm.

  “That doesn’t sound very mean,” Gabby observed.

  Marie thought of the many not-mean things Leo had done to her last night. “I think you’re right.” Her limbs felt restless suddenly.

  “What do you do if you’re pretty sure someone likes you and you don’t like them back?” Gabby asked, oblivious to Marie’s jumpiness. “That’s my actual question.”

  “Is this about someone in particular?”

  “You don’t know him.” She heaved a melodramatic sigh.

  Of course she didn’t know him. Marie had to stifle a laugh. “Try me.”

  “His name is Alex. He played the Cowardly Lion.” Marie tried to conjure an image of that character but came up blank. “I wish he would get some actual courage and ask me out so I could say no and we could be done with it.”

  “Is he a nice boy? Maybe you should give him a chance.”

  “But don’t you think I would know if I liked him? I mean, I like him. He’s fine. I just don’t like him-like him. I feel like when you like-like someone, you know.”

  “How do you know?” And who was the one giving the advice here?

  “You’re constantly aware of where they are,” Gabby said. “Like, literally in the sense that you probably have his class schedule memorized. But also, when you’re in the same room, you’re kind of . . . hyperaware of him.”

  For some reason, Marie thought back to that last night in New York, at the Riccis’ apartment, when she was fixated on the inch of space between her forearm and Leo’s. But, no. This was about Gabby. “So there is someone you like.”

  “You don’t know him, either,” Gabby said quickly and sped on ahead, signaling the end of the conversation—which Marie had to admit had been delightful.

  Also, perhaps, illuminating for her own purposes. To a worrying degree.

  When they emerged into the clearing, Marie forgot about her worries because the cabin was . . . done?

  Almost, by the looks of it. Kai and Leo were on the roof, which was still unfinished on the one end. Her heart sped up with happy excitement. When Gabby took off running, exclaiming, “Oh my gosh! This is the best thing ever!” Marie had to agree.

  “Hey, kiddo.” Leo waved to Gabby from the roof and looked around like he was looking for someone else.

  Stupidly, it wasn’t until his eyes landed on her and he grinned that Marie realized she was that someone else. “Good morning!” she called.

  The men came down from the roof and Marie showed Gabby around. She filled her in on the history of the cabin, telling her about her mother’s plan for it to be a family retreat. “I can almost feel her with me when I’m here,” she said, her voice catching a little.

  She didn’t want to grow maudlin, so she cleared her throat and flashed the men a smile. “Gabriella and I are going down to the pub for lunch, and we thought you two might want to join us.”

  Leo looked at Kai, who nodded. “Lemme show you one thing before we go.”

  That thing turned out to be a wood-burning stove, which the men had just installed.

  “This
place is so cozy!” Gabby was turning in circles inside the small cabin, oohing and ahhing over it as if it was as magnificent as the palace itself.

  “So now it’ll be all warm and toasty in here,” Leo said, ignoring Gabby and staring rather intensely at Marie. “If you know what I mean.”

  She felt the blood rush to the surface of her skin. “I do surmise your meaning.”

  “Let’s go eat,” she said as her face flamed. “Are you hungry?”

  She realized too late that she’d asked that same question last night.

  “I am,” Leo said, not even bothering to disguise how hard he was checking her out, “but—”

  “Let’s go, then!” she exclaimed before clearing her throat and adding a more refined, “Shall we?”

  He winked. “We shall.”

  Lunch was great. The pub crowd, headed up by Imogen, was a lot of fun. Unstuffy fun. Even Kai had thawed a bit, pulling out a drawing and asking Leo’s opinion on his expansion plans for his workshop. Imogen kept dropping by and sitting with them for little stretches in which she and Marie would get to yakking like old friends—which he supposed they were.

  Soon the two of them were organizing an impromptu hayride for the village kids. And Leo was stupidly happy to learn that Gabby was being included. In fact, Imogen’s niece, who was a little older than Gabby, was bussing tables since she was on break from school. But in reality she was spending more time with Gabby talking about the fact that they had the same favorite YouTubers than she was actually working.

  “You can take them, right, Kai?” Imogen asked.

  Kai looked at Leo. Leo knew he was thinking about their plans to finish the roof this afternoon. He made a dismissive gesture. “It’s almost done. I can finish it.”

  “What’s almost done?” Imogen asked.

  “Nothing!” Marie glared at Leo. Shit. He should have been more careful.

  “Okay, you all think you can keep a secret from me, but you’re forgetting that I basically run this village—no offense, Marie—so—”

  “Would you like to come to dine at the palace tonight?” Marie asked suddenly. If the aim had been to divert Imogen with a new topic, she succeeded, because it turned out that yes, Imogen definitely wanted to come to dinner at the palace. “You remember when I used to eat with you up there when we were in school? Your cook used to make the most amazing spätzle.”