Christie Ridgway - Must Love Mistletoe

Despite himself, he glanced over at the house next door. Bailey’s Passat was still on the street. He couldn’t wait until she left town.

Then he could hunker down to make it through Christmas. Gram had specifically prohibited a funeral or memorial service, so his parents had encouraged him to head out to the Midwest to be with the rest of the family, including his new nephew, but he’d taken a pass. He didn’t plan on wallowing his way through the holiday so much as it didn’t feel right to leave Gram’s home empty right now.

Gram. Somehow, her memory didn’t hurt. That last morning, his sixth sense had failed him again. He’d had no clue that she’d pass on peacefully in her sleep, but he could accept that now. They’d had plenty of time to talk about her wishes and her attitude toward the end of life. More important, he could hear her telling him as clearly as if she were sitting beside him right now, over seventeen years she’d shared with him how to live it.

A car clattered its way around the turn at the end of the block. Finn placed his feet on the ground and craned his neck to see what was happening as the junker came to a stop behind Bailey’s car.

The passenger door popped open, and a young man unfolded from the seat. Then he ducked back in to pull out a backpack, two roly-poly duffels, and a shopping bag of wrapped gifts that he propped against the pole of the ribbon-bedecked mailbox. One more reach inside, and he drew out an extra-long sleeping bag that appeared to be stuffed from mummy toes to cinched neck with-Finn squinted as items spilled from a rip in the side-clothes. Having once been a college student himself, Finn hazarded a guess they were dirty clothes.

The boy grinned at the driver and waved a good-bye. Harry, Finn thought, home at last.

It was like that Christmas coffee commercial, when Peter arrives in the early a.m. to surprise sister and sleeping parents. But this prodigal son didn’t make it so far as the kitchen. Instead, suddenly the Christmas lights blazed on next door, and Tracy, Dan, and Bailey poured out of the front door and onto their porch.

Finn drew deeper into his corner so they wouldn’t see him, but he watched the reunion. Dan grabbed his son first, clapping him on the back, the sound loud enough to wake the neighborhood. Tracy got him next. Harry swung his mother up, and she hugged him close with one arm around his shoulders. Her other arm curled out to her husband, inviting him into the embrace. What followed was a Willis family huddle.

With Bailey smiling from several steps away.

Finn couldn’t force his gaze off her. She looked rumpled and like the teenager he’d first fallen for in her flannel PJ bottoms and little T-shirt. The Christmas lights lent her blond hair some punky red, green, and blue highlights as she absently reached over to the wreath on the front door and straightened it to an even greater degree of perfection.

The woman who had saved the day at her family’s store, the woman who had decorated the family’s house despite her avowed aversion to Christmas, stood alone, outside the circle.

Get out before things get ugly.

Bailey, always withdrawing before she got too close.

Before anything could hurt too much.

That fissure in his soul began to bubble again.

Shit. Rubbing his chest, he squeezed shut his eye and felt that familiar ache in his facial bones. And here he’d thought the beach bonfire had purged all the pain out of him. He was sure after spilling all to Bailey that night that his emotions had finally been scraped clean.

Anger, guilt, frustration, sadness consumed in the flames. It had been a hell of a way to release the coil of emotions that had put him in knots for months, but he’d thought that with Gram’s death and the subsequent confession time on the beach, it was all, finally, gone.

That he was free. And back in cool, utter control.

But now he realized he was still under the influence of one final emotion he didn’t want to feel-love.

That night by the fire, he’d thought he’d told her the truth. You, Bailey, you are nothing to me, he’d said. And in his anger and hurt, he’d been desperate for that to be right.

He opened his eye, his gaze zeroing in on Bailey. Still standing alone. As Dan and Tracy chattered to Harry, she moved into the deeper shadows of the porch.

Just as Finn had hoped to hide how he felt about her.

But it wasn’t going to work, was it?

Gram’s voice sounded in his head. She’d already done it a few times in the past couple of days and he imagined she’d be doing it for a while yet. “There’s a reason we celebrate Christmas at the darkest time of the year, Finn,” he heard her saying, just as she had a few weeks before. “To remind us that hope and light will always arrive.”

He didn’t know about hope and light. But he had held on to something for ten years-and this was just the right season to give it away.

Bailey Sullivan’s Vintage Christmas

Facts & Fun Calendar

December 24

Headline over an editorial in the September 21, 1897, edition of the New York Sun: “Is There a Santa Claus?”

The cyclone fence gate clanged shut, a depressing sound to go with the day’s weather. After weeks of clear afternoons, the sun had been no match for today’s thick fog. The dreary stuff weighted down roofs, wrapped itself around stoplights, wiggled between the leaves of the trees. It made it even easier for Bailey to turn her back on the mint-green stucco apartment complex she’d just visited. No, she wasn’t sad to leave the depressing place, just as she wasn’t going to be sad to leave anything else in Coronado.

Telling herself she should be happy to check off one of the final impediments to her departure, she turned toward her car, then stumbled as she stopped short.

“Watch out, GND,” Finn said, materializing out of the gray gloom. “If you trip and fall on Christmas Eve, it’ll mean a long afternoon in the emergency room waiting your turn among the results of all those family brawls and ugly scotch tape incidents.”

“Who’s the cynic now?” she murmured, ducking her head to observe him through the shield of her lashes. Since that beach bonfire, his car had come and gone from his grandmother’s house and she’d seen people knock on the door with casseroles in hand and then go away without them, but she hadn’t seen Finn. Today he was all cool pirate again, his expression unreadable, even with bright presents stacked high in his arms.

“It looks as if we both can be soft-hearted on occasion,” he said. “Unless you only dropped by our friend Angel’s place to debunk the Santa myth this time.”

All I can tell you is that you just gotta believe.

She’d told the little boy that, which meant she’d had to follow through with providing a small measure of Christmas magic, didn’t she? Gifts from a couple of near-perfect strangers should do that.

“The family isn’t home,” she told Finn, which she thought made the whole thing even better. Anonymous gifts were pretty darn close to Santa Claus, weren’t they? “But I left mine with the landlady and she promised to pass them along once they return later today.”

“I’ll do the same,” he said. “Thanks for the tip.” With a businesslike nod, he started to move past her. As if they were near-strangers.

“Finn.”

He paused. “Yeah?”

“Well…Um…” Bailey wiped her palms on her jeans and tried not to remember that this was the man who’d made love to her with such fierce tenderness that she could still feel the imprint of his mouth on the skin between her shoulder blades. She tried not to remember the heated scorn in his voice when he’d told her on the beach she was nothing to him. That he didn’t trust her.

She’d known from the beginning he was a man without patience for pretending.

“My mother wanted to invite you over for Christmas Eve dinner.” Bailey didn’t add that she’d immediately nixed the idea, but Tracy would be happy to add another plate to the table even now. “We’re having turkey and all the trimmings around five.”

“You tell her thanks for me…but no.” He made to move off again.

Move out of her life. Okay, she was the one leaving, but just like…like this?

“Finn.”

He turned again.

And he was so beautiful to her, she didn’t think she could choke out a good-bye. Maybe she didn’t deserve one.

“GND?”

Bailey jerked the thoughts out of her head. Tried a smile. “Nothing. Just…nothing.”

And the last she saw of him was the shrug as he walked away.

The fog deepened as she traveled the half block to her car. Champagne bubble-sized drops of moisture clung to the ends of her hair. As if there was anything worth celebrating, she grumbled to herself, unlocking her door.

Except, of course, the fact that she would be back in L.A. tomorrow.

She slipped inside, then reached over to dump her purse on the passenger seat. It was already occupied.

On it sat a small package, wrapped in Christmas paper printed with mistletoe. As if it might bite, Bailey put out a finger and touched the cool top. There wasn’t any gift tag.

But it had to be for her. And she knew of only one person whose early career included breaking into cars.

There weren’t any instructions included either. Nothing that said, “Wait until Christmas” or “Open me now.”

There didn’t have to be. Even without any words, it was already shouting at Bailey. Get out before things get ugly.

When is that? Bailey thought, staring at the package. Maybe she should have asked her father the question ten years before. When is it too soon…and when is it too late to save what’s left of your heart?