Christmas at Fox Ridge

19. Eira

Chapter nineteen

Eira

January 3

Eira

I just saw a man with a very flat-looking ass getting off the train. Was it you?!

Lucas

If you keep telling me you’re checking out other guys, I’ll have no choice but to come there

Eira

Almost like that’s my plan or something ;)

It’s been a long week being back in the city. So many asses. None of them yours.

Lucas

Better not be adding any of those guys to your drawing spank bank

Eira

Nothing but your not-flat butt and pretty dick, don’t worry

Did you drop off Half-Pint yet?

Lucas

I need to figure out how to catch her without bloodshed first

Eira

Give her a kiss for me when you do

Lucas

Fat chance.

The door chimes, and I enter the warm café with an exaggerated shiver. Coffee aroma swirls through the air, and the milk steamer’s hiss is louder than the hum of voices in the busy room. I slip between patrons, beelining for our corner table where Holly’s already sitting criss-cross in her armchair, resting a steaming mug on her knee.

“Hey, happy belated Christmas,” I say, folding my jacket over the back of an empty chair before sinking into it with a sigh.

“You weren’t murdered,” Holly states the obvious.

“And you sound less than thrilled about it…which I don’t love.” I pick up the flat white she ordered ahead of time for me, stirring the candy cane around while eyeballing my best friend. “Arsenic or cyanide?”

“Thallium, obviously.”

I shoot a finger gun at her with a wink. “The poisoner’s poison. Good choice. How was your Christmas? Did you poison your in-laws, too?”

She blows on her hot drink before taking a careful sip. “It was good, Daniel’s brother was there with his family. We ran this ridiculous Santa 5K on Boxing Day where a ton of people dressed as Santa.”

I smile to myself, immediately starting a mental countdown timer until I can text Lucas about the running-family’s Christmas activity. We text as often as we can during work hours, and he calls me every night. Generally, there’s a light-hearted, teenagers-in-love style argument about who’s hanging up first when it’s time for bed.

“How about you? You look completely refreshed—or like you had Botox. Everything seems… lifted or something.” Holly’s fingers circle wildly around her face, pointing to nothing and everything all at once. “Take it your time away was good? Tell me all your thoughts on the cabin.”

I choke on air, frantically clutching my coffee and easing into a small sip. All at once, the room is unbearably hot and my clothes are too tight. Holly’s engagement ring taps against the side of her mug as she eagerly awaits my answer.

I knew this question would come. I just can’t bring myself to tell the elaborate lie I made up on my drive back from Fox Ridge.

“Well, the uh…wood stove was an issue. Consider yourself lucky I didn’t have cell reception, because there’s no way we’d still be friends after the choice words I had for you.”

“ Shit .” Her entire face scrunches. “Should’ve known that would be a problem. Lucas and I argued before about getting an electric baseboard heater or something as backup, but I’ll try harder to convince him we need it. Fuck. ”

The thought of him spending more money on the cabin because of me nearly makes me ill.

“I would hold off. It was definitely just me being an idiot. Maybe print out some super simple instructions, in case somebody else is as bad at survival skills as I am. Plus, once it’s lit, it’s easy to keep going.”

“Okay, yeah… yeah, it’ll be spring before we know it, anyway. Maybe before next winter we’ll invest in something else. Any other critiques?”

The lukewarm coffee scalds its way to my stomach. Or maybe it’s the lie slowly poisoning me.

“Nope. The cabin’s beautiful.” Not a lie. “And you’ll be shocked to know I didn’t fully detest the snow.” Also not a lie.

“Did you see my brother at all?”

In an effort to prevent my eyes from becoming the size of Half-Pint’s food bowl, I act like there’s an eyelash in one, blinking rapidly and shooting my gaze down toward the floor. I’m sure I look crazy, but I wasn’t expecting to get grilled like this.

“Well, yeah, actually.” I think I might be having a heart attack—this chest pain and breathlessness doesn’t seem right. Would be a convenient way out of the conversation, though.

And Holly doesn’t seem the least bit phased by my caginess. “Did he seem okay? Mom’s been worried about him since we had our family conference call on Christmas. He acted extra eager to hang up, and then I guess when she called him on Boxing Day, he didn’t answer at all.”

Goddamnit, Lucas . I hope we suddenly developed telepathy, and he hears the mental cussing out I’m doing. Because he couldn’t just have a nice, healthy conversation with his mom, I’m now forced to choose between letting his family continue to worry, or admitting to my best friend that the reason her brother was eager to hang up the phone was so he could bind my limbs with tinsel.

“Holls…” I chew incessantly on my thumbnail. “He, um… He seemed fine.”

Can’t wait to see how hot the flames are in hell.

“I told Mom he was probably just exhausted and stressed from working so much lately.” She shrugs casually then dives into a long rant about a conversation she recently had with her wedding photographer.

And I feel like a shitty friend when my focus wanders almost immediately. I can’t help that there's a couple cozied up in the coffee line and it makes my mind drift to Lucas again.

“You hang up,” I whispered sleepily, eyes already shut and growing harder to open with each passing second.

“No, you,” he said through a yawn.

I laughed. “We’re like a couple of teenagers.”

“And our parents grounded us for fucking under the Christmas tree, so now we can’t see each other for a while.”

“Exactly.” I tucked the comforter tighter around my chin. “I love our discreet prison calls.”

Except that it was starting to feel like a life sentence.

”Me, too, Doodlebug. I’ll come see you soon.”

Mere days since I’d left the ranch, and he’d mentioned visiting me no less than twenty times. I knew his intentions were genuine, but the more I heard it, the less I believed it would ever happen.

The slam of the café’s glass door snaps my attention back to the present. Back to where Holly’s still rambling about a “first look” for their wedding.

Somehow the fact that Lucas and I will be in the wedding party together in five short months skipped our minds. Granted, it’s so far away, I suppose having a conversation about how we’ll approach that situation would be a bit premature. Who’s to say what things between us will look like by the time the wedding rolls around. I did the college spring break bullshit when I was younger—I’ve spent more than five days shacked up in a hotel room with a guy before, and it never led to anything. Maybe this won’t be any different.

Except Lucas is different. Better .

With him, I’m home.

“I guess my point is… elope. This experience so far is about a seven out of ten on the stress scale.” Holly cradles her mug in front of taupe painted lips, stopping just shy of taking a sip. “Tell me something good. Any wacky dick pics? Maybe a penis inside a sub sandwich?”

I snort. “No, thankfully. Love that size of dick in my monster smut, but I’d run for the hills in real life.”

“Yeah, nobody wants to have a man literally rearrange their organs.” She cringes. “You always have freaky dating stories, so give me something .”

“I always have stories because you’re usually picking the guys for me,” I point out. “And I haven’t seen you in a couple weeks.”

“Did you open the app in Fox Ridge?”

I didn’t. “Yeah… nothing but men holding up fish that were varying degrees of impressive.”

“ Fish? ”

I nod emphatically, raising a closed fist as if I’m dangling a giant trout next to my face. “Fish.”

I don’t actually know if that’s true for Fox Ridge, though I’m pretty confident in my conviction. I’ve seen enough women lamenting online about their dating prospects in small towns like that.

“Weird.” She holds a hand out, fingers clapping against her palm. “Let’s see what new guys we can find in the city.”

Like I was just body slammed by the huge finance bro waiting in line for his triple espresso a few feet away, all the wind is knocked from my chest.

“Oh, well…” I gulp. “I deleted the app.”

“The fish men turned you off that badly?“

“No,” I say through an awkward laugh. “Holls, I actually met somebody really great, and I don’t know if it will ever— could ever— be something real. But…”

I want to try.

Holly’s face lights up. “We’ve been here for twenty-five minutes and this is the first you’re telling me about this? Who is he? How did you meet? Please don’t tell me it’s the hot dog guy. Like… I’m not opposed to a hot dog bar at your future wedding, but just know I’ll never be able to look at your husband and keep a straight face.”

“First of all, it’s not our Oscar Meyer buddy. Secondly, cool your jets because I literally just told you it’s nothing serious, and you’re already talking catering.”

She wags a finger at me. “To be fair, I might be onto something with the hot dogs. That sounds a lot more affordable than what our caterer is charging.”

The teensiest part of my brain wishes I could just tell her I’m dating the hot firefighter who sent me the questionable dick pic before Christmas. We’d have a laugh— at my expense —and move on like normal. At least there would be no risk to our friendship.

“So, tell me about this guy.”

“We met a while back actually, but just, um, had the chance to reconnect. He’s nice… funny.” I’m stalling, and she knows it. She takes a bite of muffin, rolling her free hand to encourage my bean-spilling as she chews.

“Holls… it’s Lucas.”

And that’s the moment I kill my best friend.

Almost.

She chokes on the banana oat muffin, shrapnel spraying from her mouth in an unavoidable coughing fit. Frantically, she reaches for a drink, and I meet her halfway, handing the cup to her. I watch her chug coffee with tear-filled eyes and lungs that are fighting to function. While my own blueberry scone is sitting safely on the table, I’m still struggling to speak, thanks to the obtrusive uvula blocking my throat.

“ Lucas? ” she croaks, finally able to utter a single word between coughs. “My… brother?”

“I know, I know. I’m the worst friend.” I wince, waiting for an indication that she agrees with my statement.

But Holly’s staring at me in a sweetly similar way to how she eyes up the Sipsters bakery case.

“I swear I didn’t go to the ranch with any intentions.”

“Yes, you did,” she counters. “You said you reconnected. So there was a whole-ass ‘connection’ before that you failed to mention.”

Shit, I did say that, didn’t I?

“You saw us talking at the bar during your engagement party. That’s the connection.”

“Okay, so… shit, really? My brother, Lucas? Are you sure?”

“Yes, Lucas,” I say with a smile that I can’t help anytime I think about him. “Tell your mom I’m really sorry he worried her on Christmas. We were together, and I think he didn’t trust me and Half-Pint not to destroy the house. That’s why he was so eager to leave.”

She blinks rapidly at me. “Half-Pint?”

“The kitten we rescued out at the—”

Pinching the bridge of her nose, she interrupts. “You share a cat?”

“We just saved her from freezing to death, but he’s taking her to the shelter today. They were closed over the holidays.”

“So you’re, like, fully together? How is that going to work?”

My anxiety-driven racing pulse and clammy hands turn into melancholia. With an intense quiver in my bottom lip, my voice cracks when I open my mouth.

“I d—I don’t know, Holls. He keeps promising he’ll come visit, but with the situation at the ranch, it’s too much for me to ask when exactly he plans to do that.”

“Nah, it’s not too much to ask.”

“He wants to… I know he wants to come see me.”

“If he wanted to, he would.” She's practically shouting, her hands clapping together to punctuate each word, causing the neighbouring table of twenty-something girls to look our way and give a hurrah in solidarity.

Sometimes I really love women.

“Okay, okay. You’re right.”

“Always am.” She sits back, crossing her arms over her chest and adjusting the sleeves of her wine-coloured sweater. “I’m actually really annoyed with myself for not thinking of this. You two just seemed so unlikely, given your entirely different lifestyles. But clearly finance bros and tech guys in the city aren’t doing it for you.” After mulling it over for a second, she adds, “You know what? I am going to take credit for this, actually, since I convinced you to go to the ranch for Christmas.”

Her priorities definitely add up here.

“You’re not pissed I didn’t tell you sooner?”

“Well, yeah, duh. If you’d told me, I could’ve found a million sneaky excuses to force that reconnection months earlier than I did.”

My heartbeat’s slowly returning to normal, thanks to the genuine—albeit somewhat conniving—smile on my best friend’s face.

“I think things were meant to happen the way they did,” I say.

“Let me just say, our rule about you showing me every wild dick picture you receive has officially gone out the window. But, God , I love this. I love both of you.”

“Like I said… It doesn’t seem like the type of thing that will ever work out long term. So don’t get your hopes up.”

“Blah, blah, blah. Get me a hot dog bar at your wedding as a thank you.”