Slay Bells Ring

Three Years Later – Kane

Three Years Later– Kane

The air is dry and cold today. I’d rather take warm weather, but Holly always had a thing for Christmas, and after what I did all those years ago, the least I could’ve done was let her choose where we end up.

And she chose this place. A small, quaint little town at the foot of the Rocky Mountains, not unlike the town we stopped and stayed in three years ago. A place where cell service is spotty and they’re waist-deep in traditions, especially around holidays, where everyone knows everyone else on a first-name basis.

I found it slightly annoying at first, but now, after three-ish years here, I’m pretty much used to it. Holly loves it, and as long as she loves it, I’ll deal.

I’ll deal because I love that woman. I do. I don’t deserve her one bit. A part of me still looks back on the events of that Christmas season and wonders just how the hell we ended up where we are today. It’s crazy, but in the best of ways.

Today is the day we decorate the town for Christmas. Somehow I wound up doing odd jobs here and there, fixing things, building things, pretty much doing anything and everything, and now I’m the guy with the truck and all the tools. My truck right now is full of Christmas lights that Barry and Tom are stringing around every light on Main Street and all the intersections around.

Holly, Maria, and Patrice are working on the other decorations. The fake vines, the fake holly and mistletoe; everything you could imagine and more. This town really goes all out for Christmas; I think that’s why Holly likes it so much. That, and the community. I’m a loner, but after spending so much of her life on a quest for vengeance, she can’t help but want to be friends with everybody.

The women are twenty feet away, working on the last light pole—they do their job after we string the lights around them—but Holly abandons Maria and Patrice, practically skipping over to me. Tom and Barry are working on untangling a string of lights from last year while I’m leaning on the bumper of my pickup truck.

But when I see Holly approaching? I can’t help but smile.

Three years have passed. She gets her hair done now—highlights or something, so her natural reddish-brown hair is full of ashy blonde pieces—but beyond that, she’s exactly the same. Can’t say the same about me. My hair has a little more gray in it, and I keep a well-trimmed, short beard now.

Ironically, when Howard Giles’s murder was discovered, it was mainly my face they plastered over the news.

When Holly reaches me, she gives me a warm smile, and her eyes twinkle—the combination of which makes me wish we were at home, in private, where I could throw her over my shoulder and carry her to our bedroom. Things may have calmed for us lately, but she’s still my little killer.

Keyword there: my. Mine. Holly Cooper is mine, and I’m never going to let her go.

I can’t resist; anytime she’s near I just need to kiss her. I bend over and give her a quick peck before she has the chance to tell me what she needs from the pickup. “We need more mistletoe,” Holly says with a lick of her lips, and Tom and Barry pause to watch me climb into the truck and rummage through the decorations that still need putting up.

We need to be more careful when we take all this shit down so it isn’t such a mess for next year.

Once I find a bag with more mistletoe, I grab it and hop off the bed of the truck. “Here, love.”

She beams at me, thanks me, and takes the bag before she skips off. I watch her go, just like I always do. Never thought I’d be a lovesick puppy dog, but that’s exactly what Holly made me, and she did it effortlessly, too.

Tom and Barry move closer. They each glance over their shoulders at the women. The two are older than me by at least ten or fifteen years. Their wives, the two women Holly’s working with, are the same.

Tom shakes his head and chuckles. “I still don’t get how you managed that one,” he says.

“Managed what?” I ask, slow to move my gaze away from Holly and land it on the two men nearby.

“Ann,” Tom says while Barry nods next to him. “She’s, what, half your age?”

I chuckle. “Fifteen years.” Of course, our age difference was something that intrigued and possibly disgusted many older people when we first moved here, but once people got over it, they were more accepting. Turns out a lot of men were jealous.

It’s not something I’m proud of. I’m not with her because she’s young. I don’t get off on the fact that she’s still so bright-eyed and innocent-looking. Holly is mine because we’ve been through a lot, we know everything about each other, and the shared trauma-bonding.

Barry asks, “How did you manage it?”

“I didn’t,” I say honestly, and my eyes glance at Holly with the others. Or Ann, as the townsfolk know her. We each had to change our names, for obvious reasons. “The funny thing is, she came after me.”

As the guys laugh, I smile in spite of myself. I do get a kick out of saying Holly came after me and it wasn’t the other way around.

If I didn’t have Holly, I don’t know what I’d be doing or where I’d be. If she took my getaway stash and didn’t want me with her, I would’ve let her go, and then… then I might’ve retreated back to another cabin and let nature take its course. Before Holly, I had no reason to keep going. The sins of the past began to weigh too much.

Holly made me forget, as ironic as it is. She made me feel better. I would never be absolved for what I did in the past, but she sees me for who I am, knows what I’ve done, and still chooses to stay with me. I owe her my life. I owe her everything.

And that’s why, this Christmas, I’m going to give Holly the ring I’ve been keeping in my pocket for the last six months.