A Mountain Springs Christmas

Chapter 8

eight

JACK

“So, these cards that your gran-gran sent you. Was shopping on one of them?”

She glanced at him as she led him toward a toy store. “It was.”

He shouldn’t ask. But hearing more about these cards helped him know her better, and he desperately wanted to know her better. It was a need that he knew was dangerous, but they were here, and she seemed to really enjoy talking about her gran-gran. So he wanted her to keep talking, knowing full well that the more he got to know her, the harder it would be for him to be around her and not pursue a relationship.

“What were your traditions around that? Because if your gran-gran wanted you to do that, maybe we should.”

He was expecting a quick response, so when it didn’t come, he glanced over at her. She seemed hesitant. He didn’t know if it was painful or because she didn’t want to do it with him. Maybe she needed to do it with her own family. He shouldn’t have asked.

But then she said, “Are you sure?” like she didn’t think he would want to.

“Of course.”

He shouldn’t have worked so hard to talk her into doing any Christmas activities with Aiden. He had his own issues with Christmas, so he should’ve respected that she had hers. He probably wouldn’t have pushed if he hadn’t already been so drawn to her. But he’d been drawn to her for so long and had kept it all in check for a year and a half. Why could he not seem to now?

They stepped just inside Taheny’s Toys, and she picked up a bucket of slime that was big enough that it took both hands. And that was when he noticed that her cheeks were a bit pink. Was she embarrassed?

“Do you promise not to laugh?”

So she was embarrassed. He nodded, a smile already tugging at his lips.

“As we shopped, we wrote bad ad copy hooks for the items we saw.”

His eyebrows rose, and a chuckle of disbelief escaped his mouth before he could stop it. “As a kid, you did this?”

“Yep. The dorkier the ad copy, the better. Gran-gran had a job in marketing, and writing bad ad copy made me want to become a copywriter. Growing up, no one else my age even knew what ad copy was or what the job of a copywriter entailed, so it was kind of a special thing only between Gran-gran and me.”

“Huh. So that’s why you’re so good at it.”

She turned the bucket of slime around in her hands. “Are you saying that writing bad ad copy made me good at my job?”

“Don’t tell me it didn’t help you recognize good ad copy.” He nodded at the slime. “What would you write for that?”

She studied it for a moment, then, in a voice he could only describe as an announcer’s, said, “It’s ooey. It’s gooey. It’s stretchy. It’s slimy. And if you get this for your kid this Christmas, then by New Year’s you’ll know just how many objects in your house a three-pound bucket can stretch to cover.”

He laughed, and they went into the store and started walking down the aisles. They made their way through the store, getting the things Rachel had asked him to pick up. He also found a few toys that he wanted to give to Aiden and got those, too.

All along the way, one of them would pick up a toy and say some bad ad copy in the same announcer voice that Noelle had first used. He held up a bin of Legos and said, “We could target parents and say, ‘Want to level-up your ability to find sharp pieces while barefooted in the dark? Get the one thousand piece set for your overly-enthusiastic child.’”

Noelle found a stuffed elf that looked more like he belonged in a horror movie than on a shelf. “Think you’ve been getting too much sleep lately? Put this creepy toy in your kid’s room, and you’ll never have that problem again.”

He laughed and pointed out an electronic drum set that was on display and fully worked, much to the thrill of all the kids in the store. “Did your brother buy your kid a xylophone last Christmas? Buy his kid these drums. It’s the ultimate one-up he’ll never be able to top.”

“Oh, and then we could do an ad with all the noisy toys on it, and the ad copy could say, ‘Think you might want noise-canceling headphones for Christmas? Trust us: you do.’”

He was pretty sure he had never had as much fun in a toy store before, not even as a kid. He definitely knew it was worlds above every other Christmas shopping experience he’d ever had.

She picked up a toy doll. “Do you want kids?”

“I like Aiden. I wouldn’t mind having some kids for myself sometime. I just haven’t found ‘the one’ yet.” Not that he’d been looking. But he was suddenly curious about her. “You?”

“Of course. I just haven’t found ‘the one,’ either.”

He picked up a box containing a race car track but didn’t really look at it at all. He needed to prod. To find out more. And the only way he could think to do that was to offer more himself. “I’ve just always kind of assumed that marriage isn’t for me. I never looked at my parents’ marriage and thought, ‘I want that for me someday.’ Not that I’m against marriage—I know there are plenty of good marriages out there. I guess I’ve just never had a lot of faith that it’d happen for me.” His issues weren’t deep, but they were still there a bit.

She was silent for a moment. Maybe taking in what he’d just said, or perhaps trying to decide if she wanted to share anything. He hoped she did. “Have you ever gotten to the point of talking about marriage with anyone you dated?” Okay, that was really pushing for personal information. He couldn’t believe he’d asked it.

She shook her head. “Not really. A few had gotten a little more serious, but I think I knew long before we broke up that it wasn’t heading toward marriage. I do look at my parents and think, ‘I want that for me.’ I just haven’t found my person. The one who will look at me the way my dad looks at my mom.”

Was it wrong that he suddenly desperately wanted to be that person for her? Yes. It very much was. He forced himself to break eye contact with her and set down the box. “We should probably go pay.”

She nodded. He didn’t know what was going through her head just then, but he could tell that it was a lot. He needed to lighten things up a bit.

As they walked out of the store, arms laden with bags, they got away from the noise enough to hear the Christmas music filling the halls. He never listened to Christmas music by choice, but he still knew the song right away— The First Noel . “Oh, hey, it’s your song.”

“I love this song! When I was little and would see ‘noel’ everywhere at this time of year, I would always tell anyone who would listen that they spelled it wrong.”

Jack chuckled. “Did it ever bother you to have a name that was linked to a holiday season?”

“No, because I was born on Christmas Eve. My birthday is super entwined with Christmas, so it feels right that my name would be, too.”

“I’m guessing that having a Christmas Eve birthday didn’t help with feeling forgotten.”

Noelle laughed a big hearty laugh that people didn’t do in public nearly often enough. It made him smile. “No. But it has its perks, too. One year, when I was probably five, my dad had just finished reading us the poem The Night Before Christmas . At the end, he said the words, ‘Happy Christmas to all, and to all a goodnight!’ and Becca shouted, ‘Happy birthday to Noelle,’ and like they planned it, but they hadn’t, everyone else shouted, ‘And to Noelle a good night!’

“Every year since, as my family gets together for Christmas Eve, someone will randomly shout out ‘Happy birthday to Noelle,’ and everyone else will stop what they’re doing and shout back ‘And to Noelle a good night!’ My nieces and nephews especially like it.”

“That’s actually pretty sweet.”

“Yeah. What about your name? Does it come with anything significant?”

He shrugged. “I was born in January. A frigid January, as the story goes. My dad wanted to name me Jack Frost because he thought it would be funny. I’m not really sure you should choose a baby’s name based on what you think is funny, but that’s my dad for you. Thankfully, my mom wouldn’t let him. Their compromise was to name me Jack with the middle initial F.”

“If it helps, my parents didn’t give me a middle name, so my full name is Noelle Allred. Whenever I have to sign my initials, I have to put ‘NA.’ Like I’m writing that it’s just not applicable to me.”

He laughed. “Weirdly, that does help. My last name helps, too. Meadows is a word with very springtime connotations, so it kind of undermined my dad’s plan. I never knew if he wanted to name me Jack Frost in hopes that I would be the sprightly character of myths or if he named me that because he thought I was the Bringer of Cold. On days when he was sober, I liked to think it was because of the sprightly character. On days when he was drinking and was an ornery cuss—which was most of the time during the holidays—I was sure it was the Bringer of Cold.”

“Is that why you don’t like Christmas?”

He had told her the story to be funny but hadn’t thought about how much it would bring out the negative parts. “Yeah. Every Christmassy thing that my mom tried to have us do, my dad always turned into a big blowup. So everything Christmas-related is very tied to memories of my dad being at his worst and making all of us miserable.”

She was quiet for a long moment, and he was sure he was going to get pity from her, which he very much did not want. He also really didn’t want to talk about it anymore.

Instead, she asked, “Have you ever heard of exposure therapy?”

“You expose yourself to your greatest fear to get over it, right?”

“Right. So, I had a deathly fear of heights. If it was because of some traumatic childhood experience, I know nothing about it. But it was there regardless. When I was in high school, I got a job at a ski resort in Nestled Hollow. I thought I’d just be making hot chocolate in the lodge, seeing cute guys, stuff like that.”

“I think I can see where this is headed.”

“Yep. For an entire snow season, I was assigned to be the lift operator up the mountain. Every single day I had to ride the tram to the top, and I was terrified—pulse racing, heart pumping, hyperventilating, all of it. I was so convinced I was going to die. But by the end of the season, not only was I still alive, but I wasn’t afraid of heights anymore. I think it has something to do with the emotions tied to the event. So instead of terrified feelings being tied to heights, it turned to safe feelings being tied to it, since I was safe every single time.”

“And you think I should do that with Christmas?”

Noelle shrugged. “Well, right now you’ve got some pretty negative feelings tied to it, so you hate it. But if you were around Christmassy things a lot and had positive feelings tied to it, those feelings would overtake the negative ones.” Then she said, almost in a whisper, “Maybe we both need that.”

He looked at her for a long time, not quite knowing how to respond.

She must’ve switched from thinking about how much she needed it to thinking about how much he did because the next time she spoke, her voice wasn’t a whisper at all. It was full of confidence. “When I took the side job to help provide Aiden with Christmas experiences, I told you that you needed to come to half of the activities. I think you should come to all of them.”

He met her eyes. Could he commit to that? He was probably at the halfway mark of attending Christmas events right now and could easily bow out of the rest of them. If he agreed, then not only would he be facing more of a holiday he’d hated for his entire life, but he’d be spending a lot more time around Noelle.

The exposure therapy for Christmas might just work to turn it into a holiday he loved. But exposure to more of Noelle might just make him fall more in love with her, too. And he knew just how dangerous that would be to his heart.

But still, he found himself nodding and saying, “Okay, it’s a deal.”