A Mountain Springs Christmas

Chapter 4

four

CONNOR

Today, Connor got to be on the ice with his new team in Denver and was introduced to everyone. Most players in the NHL had experienced either getting traded or having a teammate they were good friends with get traded. Everyone, himself included, accepted that it was just part of the game. They always embraced the new guy because they understood how hard a trade was on a player. Connor had done it plenty of times with players traded to the Thunderstorm.

But even though the Glaciers embraced him and welcomed him onto the team, he still got the sense that they weren’t entirely happy about the trade. Which was probably pretty common. He’d felt the same about new players to his own team plenty of times.

He didn’t know the details of their feelings about his trade, specifically, though, and didn’t know anyone well enough yet to ask. Although, one player, Erik Henderson, seemed like a cool guy. And another player, Briggs, seemed particularly unhappy about Connor’s presence.

Connor reminded himself that it was all temporary. He’d get traded closer to home soon. Maybe before the trade deadline in March, but for sure by summer. He wanted to gel with the team until then, but he didn’t want to get comfortable.

After practice, he met with Reid Allred and immediately liked the guy. He worked with players and their agents to discuss branding themselves and the team and each player’s role on the team. So he’d be working with him off and on while he was with the Glaciers.

Then, Mr. Allred explained that they’d had a few players on the team who wreaked havoc on the team’s image, harming ticket sales, especially for families. They’d traded a couple of players in the off-season, but the player they had just traded for Connor had caused a lot of damage by his actions both on and off the ice, and they were working on repairing that image.

Image repair was a pretty normal part of life for a team. So was having the players do things in the communities where they played. Being assigned to a community to do at least three activities in the week leading up to Christmas, which also happened to be your very first week on the team, was not so normal. Especially when they also had three games between now and then. It helped that the guy acknowledged that it would be a challenge for him and was apologetic about it.

It also helped that the guy recognized that Connor would be away from family for Christmas and offered to let him stay with his family during the three days he’d be off for Christmas. He probably should’ve guessed that there would be a problem going to someone’s home if they lived in Mountain Springs.

Mr. Allred just looked so much younger than Connor’s step-dad that he’d assumed the man’s daughters would be younger— the ages where they’d still be living at home, not that they’d be his age.

And he definitely didn’t expect to show up at Mr. Allred’s house and see the woman he’d plowed into last night at the department store. Sure, she was extremely attractive and he felt like he’d connected with her a teeny bit, and not in an “accidentally crashed into her physically” kind of way. But the whole experience had been embarrassing in so many ways that he’d hoped that he’d never run into her again.

When she’d made the comment about people still wanting to throw things at him, he had assumed it was a hockey thing, especially since he came from the Thunderstorm. He hadn’t recognized her from high school at all. Even after finding out he’d known her from there, he still had no flash of recognition.

His parents had a plethora of problems in his sophomore and junior years of high school, so most of his high school memories were of that. Apparently, he’d only focused on his own problems and not on anyone else at all. He might have only been in high school with two of these sisters, but by the way all five looked at him, they all knew about him.

And he had already agreed to stay with them over Christmas. Was it too late to back out?

They didn’t leave any time for stewing in the awkwardness, though, before Mrs. Allred pulled out a Santa hat and said, “Are you all ready to get started?”

Everyone shouted yes, the kids most animated of all. Even the black lab seemed excited about it. Connor leaned in toward Katie and asked, “What are we about to do?” And just like last night, when they had fallen, he felt a current run through him at the nearness. A tingle of nerve endings. It was almost as if she exuded an electric charge and by getting close, he was bound to feel it.

She turned her head to him, eyes still on the Santa hat like she didn’t want to miss anything, and said, “Each sibling is a team with their family. My parents are a team, too.” Her eyes met his. “You’re my team, by the way. We didn’t get off on the right foot in high school, and we didn’t again last night. But just so you know, we’re going to win this.”

He smiled at her conviction. He was definitely down for winning.

“We each pull out an assignment— two people get entertainment, which is a skit; two people get decorations; and two people get dinner. Except it’s not that straight-forward. There are obstacles and a time limit and a money limit, and you’re competing against the other team that drew the same thing.”

Connor nodded. Sitting around, socializing with people who only knew him as who he used to be sounded like torture. A competition, he could handle. And as much as he didn’t want to be surrounded by people who didn’t have the best opinions of him, it felt good to be around a family, even if it wasn’t his own, doing family Christmas things. Tonight, his family was decorating the big tree, and he was missing it.

The oldest sister, Becca, if he remembered correctly, drew a paper out of the Santa hat that Mrs. Allred held, and read, “Decorations!” Everyone reacted loudly. This was a group that really seemed to like cheering. It almost sounded like a hockey game in here.

“There are a lot of details to it,” Katie continued. “We don’t need to worry about all that right now. What we need to worry about is not drawing Dinner .”

“Why do we need to worry about that?”

Another sister drew out “Entertainment!” and everyone cheered again.

“Let’s just say that every other time I’ve drawn dinner, bad things happened.”

Her sister, Noelle, the one he’d gone to school with, drew out “Dinner!” and again with the clapping and hooting, but this time with a breath of relief from Katie, probably because it just cut down their chances of pulling a dinner paper from the hat, too.

“Like what?” he asked.

“Oh, you know, just things like forgetting a pan of garlic bread was in the oven on broil until the smoke started pouring out, forgetting to put any kind of liquid in the Instant Pot when using it as a pressure cooker, a completely inedible pasta sauce. Once I forgot to turn on the burner for the eggs, realized it at the last moment, and put them in the microwave instead.

“Another time, I dropped a big pot of soup on the way to the table, sending it everywhere. And I do mean everywhere . Adding a bit too much salt, making everyone say ‘I’m headed into the salt mines’ with every bite they took. Setting a hot pad on fire. Things like that. Some of those things happened in the same year, obviously. I haven’t actually drawn the ‘Dinner’ paper that many times.”

He chuckled. “Okay then, we are crossing our fingers for ‘entertainment’ or ‘decorations.’”

“Either one.”

Another sister pulled out Decorations , leaving just Katie and her parents to draw, and if he remembered correctly, that meant there was one for entertainment and one for dinner remaining. And, of course, she drew out the paper that read Dinner . And, of course, everyone groaned.

He watched Katie as she narrowed her eyes at the little strip of paper like she was challenging it. Then, when her dad said, “You’ve got five minutes to discuss with your team, and then we’ll start the timer. Go!” Katie grabbed hold of his hand and pulled him to a small room off the kitchen with a washer and dryer.

She closed the door and met his eyes with her very fierce ones. She was standing close in the small space, so he got a good look at those eyes. They were blue at the outer rim with gold around the pupil, and her eyes were framed by dark eyelashes. As far as eyes went, they were rather mesmerizing. He could imagine himself getting very easily pulled in by those eyes. But he wasn’t going to be in Colorado long enough for that to happen.

Besides, he didn’t want to be with someone who knew him as who he used to be. It hadn’t been easy for him to become who he was now, and he expected it was just as difficult for anyone who knew him back then to think of him any differently.

“Okay, here’s the deal,” she said. “We have a budget and thirty minutes to shop for food and get back here to meet the other team. They’ll take the food we bought and we take theirs. Then we each have thirty minutes to make something out of those ingredients. The team who makes the best meal wins.”

“Oof. That doesn’t sound easy.”

“It’s not. But we have to win this,” she said. “It’s really important.”

He didn’t know if she was always this competitive, but he liked it. He found himself nodding and getting pumped up for the challenge. “So what’s the best strategy?”

“We buy about ten items for them and they buy ten for us. The trick is to buy foods that aren’t gross. Unlike the year when Julianne’s team bought anchovies, wasabi peas, sprouted wheat cinnamon raisin bread, and a cheese that smelled like feet, and Becca’s team made grilled cheese out of it. Because we are all going to eat what the other team makes, so we want it edible. But we also want to win, so we want to pick things that don’t naturally go well together.”

A smile was spreading across his face as he imagined it. They only had thirty minutes, so they’d have to race through the grocery store, but he was sure they’d be able to pick some things that would give the other team the bigger challenge. “This is going to be fun.”

“Thirty seconds,” they heard Mr. Allred’s muffled voice call out from the kitchen.

Katie side-eyed him. “Okay, you’re looking a little too excited right now. You aren’t going to start throwing any punches, are you?”

He winked. “Nah. I save that for high school dances.”

Once Mr. Allred called out that the competition had begun, he and Katie raced outside and they both got into her car. She said it had been too long since he had practiced driving on snow-packed roads— even though he’d driven to the Allred’s house fine— and probably didn’t remember where the grocery store was. For the record: he did. But he would’ve been fine letting her drive if she’d simply said she wanted to.

The seven-minute drive to the grocery store was great because they spent the time brainstorming which items to get. They decided on hot dogs (after debating whether they should be considered “gross,” and he thought about how they would affect his hockey performance), quinoa, spaghetti noodles, root beer, creamed corn, a can of cranberry sauce, radishes, and Greek yogurt.

Once they got there, they raced through the store to grab everything while he added up the prices on his phone. They still had a few dollars left after grabbing the final item and since they hadn’t made it to ten items yet, they threw in some pretzels and gummy worms. The checkout line ate five precious minutes, but they managed to hop into the car with a full eight minutes left.

The drive back to the Allred’s house was less great. No brainstorming was needed since they wouldn’t know what foods they had to work with until they returned, so the awkwardness of realizing he was in a room with people who had experienced the high school version of himself returned.

And for some reason, Connor wanted to win Katie over. Why? He wasn’t sure. He knew it wasn’t because she would be videoing him, and it wasn’t because he normally had a need to win people over. But it was there, and he decided that the only way to get past it was to address the elephant in the room— the school dance.

“Can I explain about the dance?”

“Connor, you don’t need to explain about the dance.”

“I know. But can I anyway?” He wasn’t the same person that he was in high school, and he was pretty sure that she was still seeing him as that guy. She nodded, and he suddenly wished he would’ve thought through what, exactly, he wanted to share. But since he hadn’t, he just started talking and hoped for the best.

“My parents’ marriage started going downhill my sophomore year of high school, and I really struggled with it. But not as much as I did at the beginning of my junior year when my dad left. Just before he did, he pulled me and my sister aside and said that his leaving didn’t have anything to do with us and that he still wanted to see us all the time. Typical divorce stuff, I guess. But it didn’t take long before he was off, living his best life, forgetting about us completely. I didn’t handle that so well and kind of became a hotheaded idiot.”

That was an understatement. He’d been so bitter and angry about not only not having his dad around, but also seeing what it was doing to his mom. He was hurting and showed it by acting out a lot, catching so many people in the crossfire.

Why was he telling this to Katie? The fact that there were circumstances that led to the state of mind he was in at the time didn’t change the fact that he did what he did. Maybe he was telling her so that he was more than the memory of a kid who made bad choices. So she got that there was more to him. And for some reason, he really wanted her to see the real him.

Katie kept her eyes on the road, but she nodded slightly, and he could tell that she was paying very close attention to his words so he continued. “I was in a club hockey league with other high school players in our county. Trav Donovan was in the same league, but we were on different teams. We were both captains and didn’t like each other much. But I especially didn’t like him when he asked my little sister, Laura, to the Christmas dance.”

Katie glanced at him for a second before her eyes were back on the road. “The fight started with the two of you?”

“Yep. He came over and made a hurtful, if not clever or unique, comment about how he’d heard that my mom didn’t have a big, strong man at the house anymore and asked if he needed to step in. Given the state I was in at the time, that alone probably would’ve been enough to provoke a fight with me. But then he said something crude about what he was going to show my sister later that night.

“Not that it was any excuse— there are plenty of kids who experience the same things with their parents that I did, and then have someone talk crap about their mom or sister, but they don’t get their school’s dance privileges taken away for four months.

“And I don’t know if he was just trying to bait me or not. In his defense, I was easy to bait back then. So, I threw the first punch. Everyone kind of assumed that we were fighting as captains of two different hockey teams, so anyone at the dance who was also on one of our teams joined in and turned it into an all-out brawl.”

“That was why so many people joined in so quickly?”

Connor grimaced. “Mostly. Trav and I also both played on the high school baseball team, so all those players joined in, too.”

Katie stopped at a stop sign, looked both ways, then said, “And none of them thought to ask what the fight was even about?”

He chuckled. “Listen, most high school boys who are dealing with some crap in their life need a reason to fight, but they don’t necessarily need to know the reason. I don’t know if I was glad for the support, or if I was just in my own troubled world so much that I didn’t even care what else was going on.

“But the worst part about it was that someone gave me a good hit to the gut, and it made me back into the refreshment table. I was so mad that I shoved off that table to go after the guy, completely toppling it over. I spun around just in time to see the punch bowl go flying and dowse some poor girl.”

Katie raised her hand. “Hi. That was me.”

His eyes went wide. “You’re joking.”

She shook her head as she turned onto her parents’ street. “I was soaked from the top of my head to the toes of my heels.”

Connor ran his hands over his face and then around again until his fingers were steepled at the top of his nose. No way that after ten years, chance brought him into the same car with the recipient of the punch bowl that his anger had sent flying, at Christmastime, even. To add to it, that person was going to soon be videoing him as a hockey player with his new team. Was this what being mortified felt like?

He removed his hands from his face as she pulled into the driveway. “I am so sorry.”

“Connor, it’s okay. It was a long time ago. Besides, it wasn’t even my dress that got ruined— I had borrowed it from my sister.”

“I think that makes it even worse. Okay, we are going to win this contest for you. Right now.”

Katie nodded once as she put the car into park. “I’m down for that.”

“What’s at stake?”

“Officially? A trophy that we get to keep for a year, along with bragging rights. Unofficially? A curse lifted and future smack talk about me drawing the ‘Dinner’ paper abated.”

He glanced over at Noelle and Jack, the couple who were competing against them, as they pulled into the driveway next to them. Then he turned back to Katie. “Okay, we’re doing this.”