The Thief Who Saved Christmas

Chapter 17

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

ANABELLE

Saturday, December 6, 19 days before Christmas

Inns in peril: 1

Heart in peril: 1

Santas ordered: I don’t know. I haven’t checked the website. I think I’m unwell.

Text conversation with Weston

Are you dating that thug, Belle?

Your father said he saw you at an estate sale with him the other day.

Big mistake.

It’s none of your business who I am or am not dating.

Ryan’s done a few sweet things for me, sure, but last night he made it clear that his kindness stemmed from obligation. So as soon as I got back up to my room, I removed the sweater and folded it into a neat square. A wasted effort, to be sure, since I will have to get it dry-cleaned, but it felt like a message.

Not to Ryan, who won’t see it, but to myself.

Do not get attached to this man. He doesn’t want you.

I’ve had plenty of people be kind to me out of obligation, starting with my “best friend” in middle school, a girl who was forced by her mother to spend time with me because she thought it would be good for her to learn to be accepting of “differences.”

It wasn’t the first time someone spent time with me because I was a curiosity, an oddity they wished to observe up close. It probably won’t be the last.

I want no part of it.

I come downstairs late, because I don’t want to have to eat breakfast across from Ryan with his wet hair and the knowledge that he was just in the shower, naked . But he’s not in the dining room, and I feel five seconds’ relief, which fizzles into disappointment.

No one is in the dining room, actually, so I head into the kitchen and find Cynthia stooped over the dishwasher. Guilt dances across the small hairs at the bottom of my neck. I should be helping her with this. No, I should be doing it myself.

She looks up at me and drops the dish, but it’s plastic and bounces. “Jesus. What happened? You look like you just saw the Ghost of Christmas Past.”

I almost smile, but I don’t have it in me. Instead, I pick up the plastic dish and fit it into the dishwasher. She rinses another dish and hands it to me, probably because she’s aware having a task will help anchor me—and make it more likely she’ll get information out of me.

“Yesterday was quite a day,” I say, pausing as I look for the perfect placement for the spatula she handed me.

“Jeremy told me about the pipes. He was adamant that he got you the best deal possible, but it’s hard to tell with him. He’s at least fifty percent bullshit.” Her mouth scrunches to the side as she rinses a plate. “But he did call me up and ask me about my audition, so I guess that’s something.”

Oh snap. I forgot to ask her about the audition. More guilt dances at the bottom of my neck. “Cynthia,” I say, taking the dish from her and setting it in the rack, “how was your audition? I’m sorry I didn’t ask.”

I’m guessing it didn’t go well, because Cynthia would certainly have said something as soon as she saw me if it had. In fact, she probably would have offered a champagne toast to all of the guests, including six-year-old Ben, if she’d gotten a movie role.

“I’m too old,” she says gruffly as she hands me a fork.

I drop the fork, caught off-guard, and then pick it up. “They didn’t say that!”

“Actually, they did.”

“Oh,” I say, at a bit of a loss. All I can do is offer the truth, so that’s what I give her. “You don’t look old at all. Besides, life was brutal back then, and no one brushed their teeth. You probably look like a twenty-year-old from the 1600s would have.”

She laughs, showing off her notably white teeth. “They still want everyone to be a perky blond teenager without any body hair. I almost bleached my hair last night, but Jeremy talked me out of it.”

The way she says it ignites a suspicion that’s been forming over the past few days.

“Do you like him?” I ask. “You know… like like?” Now, I feel like a teenager, but I’m not sure how else to ask.

She gives me an Oh Anabelle smile. It fades away, though, as she hands me the final fork from the sink. I stow it away and get the dishwater started.

When I look at her, she still has a far-off expression, but her eyes slowly focus on me. “He’s only twenty-nine, you know.”

“How old are you? I’ve never asked.”

“Too old for him.”

“That doesn’t answer my question.”

“Thirty-six.” She arches her eyebrows. “I could have been his babysitter.”

“Were you, though?”

“No.”

“Good, because that probably would have been weird. But you weren’t, so who cares if you couldn’t have dated ten years ago. He’s perfectly adult now. He’s a year older than me, and you and I are friends.”

I marvel over the ease with which I say it, and the conviction behind it, because it’s perfectly true. We’re friends. I value her, and she values me.

“You think he’s mature?” She gives a harsh laugh and shakes her head. “He spends half his day on social media looking at that stupid video with his bulge.”

Maybe this is where over-honesty will get me in trouble, but I like Cynthia, and I want her to be happy. I want her to be happy more than I don’t want her to be upset with me. “I feel like you would also watch a viral video of yourself over and over again. Maybe that’s something you two have in common.”

“And would I brag about all of the women dropping me messages?”

I take a deep breath and hold her gaze. “I suspect most of them would be men, but I think you would, yes. I think the real question is whether he’s messaged them back.”

She looks taken aback, and it takes her a minute to respond. “Do you think he’d tell Ryan?”

My face must display a reaction to Ryan’s name, because she gasps dramatically and grabs my arm. Her touch is slightly uncomfortable, but I don’t want to jerk away. “Something happened between you and Ryan.”

“Not really,” I say, finally pulling away. But it hits me that Cynthia might be better able to parse what happened than I am. She’s dated a lot of men and kissed more of them. I have also dated several men, but my handful is smaller than her barrel. “I…well, I suppose I kissed him.”

“Why, Anabelle Whitman,” she says with excitement, her blue eyes fixed on me. “I didn’t think you had it in you.”

“I shouldn’t have,” I say forlornly.

She darts a furtive glance at the doorway. “Was it a bad kiss? Because I find that hard to believe.”

“No, it was good…for me.” My mouth puckers. “But it mustn’t have been for him, because he apologized and told me that he only wants to be friends. Then he admitted that the only reason he’s stayed around so long is because my grandmother asked him to help me take care of the inn. And she wanted him to get rid of Weston.”

“We all wanted you to get rid of Weston,” she says, shaking her head. “But he spoke just like men always do. Out of his ass. That boy is obsessed with you. I’ve been waiting for you to notice.”

“He most definitely is not,” I say stiffly. “He wants to take care of me as if I’m some stray dog. I don’t need him to fix me. I’m perfectly fine on my own.”

She smiles again, but it’s a softer smile. “You may not need a man to fix you, and you may be perfectly fine on your own. But that doesn’t mean the people who care about you won’t want to support you.”

Her words ripple through me, disrupting my thought patterns, but I firm myself against them. “He doesn’t like me like that. He made it perfectly clear that he doesn’t think we’re suited for each other. Besides, I just broke up with Weston. I don’t know what I was thinking.”

“You weren’t thinking, for once. You were feeling. And there’s nothing wrong with that.”

“Are you going to follow your own advice?” I ask her archly.

“Maybe I’ll have a talk with Ryan.”

“Don’t!” I say, alarmed. The last thing I want is for her to make him think the kiss meant something to me. If he thinks that, he may realize that I’m starting to like like him. That would not be good, and…

“About Jeremy,” she amends softly.

“Yes, you should probably do that,” I agree with a relieved sigh. Then I remember Joe, who’s probably somewhere in Williamsburg by her—himself. With no one to talk to. And from what Ryan said, there was a breakup with Craig…

Friends should support each other, exactly like Cynthia said.

“Anything else happen I need to know about?” she asks.

“My friend Joe is actually a man, and he’s here in Williamsburg.”

“Damn.” She adjusts her bonnet. “This is what happens when you leave town for a day.”

I smile at her, and she gives my arm a pat. “I have to go, hon, but you’ll work it all out. And I mean it about Ryan. That boy has it bad. He’s showing all the signs.”

“What are the signs?” I ask in wonder.

“He doesn’t look away from you. Everything he says is ‘Anabelle this,’ and ‘Anabelle that,’ and ‘wouldn’t Anabelle like this?’ And don’t even get me started on that red velvet pancake. Do you know he mixed a whole new batter to make that for you yesterday?”

“He doesn’t seem like the kind of man who’d hold back if he wanted to kiss someone.” No, he seems like a man who’d sweep a woman off her feet, kick the door open, and throw her onto the bed… Not that I’ve been thinking it.

“He wouldn’t hold back if he didn’t give a shit, probably. Which only means that he does give a shit.”

“I don’t know anything about him, though.”

She sniffs. “All the better. The more you know, the less interesting they are. I’ll see you later, sugar.”

She turns and goes, leaving me in the kitchen with the whirring dishwasher. I take my phone out of my pocket and tap into it. I want to talk to Ryan, and I also don’t, but I one hundred percent want to talk to Joe.

I open the chatroom messaging app.

Ana-bell: Ryan told me.

Ana-bell: I’d like to talk. Where are you?

Jo-Ho-Ho: I’m on my fourth gingerbread latte at Aromas. You know how I get with my comfort drinks, and I figured it was kind of an homage to The Gingerbread House.

Jo-Ho-Ho: I’m so sorry.

Jo-Ho-Ho: When my parents found out I was gay, they turned me out of the house.

Jo-Ho-Ho: I was worried you might feel differently about me once you knew.

Ana-bell: That’s horrible, Joe.

Ana-bell: Wait. Is that how you spell your name?

Jo-Ho-Ho: Ugh. Yes. I’m sorry.

Ana-bell: Well. You know I would never turn someone away because of something like that.

Jo-Ho-Ho: Logically, I understood that. But tell that to my anxiety.

Ana-bell: I get it. Of course I get it.

Jo-Ho-Ho: I’m a mess. If you don’t want to meet me, I totally understand.

I pause, my fingers poised over the keys. Aromas is just around the corner. I could be sitting across from Joe in five minutes. Five minutes after all this time.

I’m tempted to defer our meeting. To tell him that he can come to happy hour tonight, which will give me more time to process everything that’s changed and changing, but Joe has been my number one confidant for a long time now. I want to meet him, even if he’s not the person I’d envisioned him to be.

Besides, what good has waiting done for me lately?

I’d sensed something was off in my relationship with Weston for months, and I’d let it go because I was too upset over Grandma Edith to even think about making a change. If I’d been proactive then, neither of us would have needed to experience that awful proposal.

Ana-bell: I’ll be right there.

It’s chilly outside, and as I walk down the cobbles, my head tucked, I feel butterflies and snakes uneasily coexisting in my stomach. I almost turn back twice, but I steel myself and continue on.

It’s Saturday morning, and even though Colonial Williamsburg hasn’t opened yet and most of the college students probably won’t roll out of bed for hours, several people are still milling around, pointing to the red bows adorning gates, one of Williamsburg’s notoriously bold squirrels, or a distant sheep in a pen. The air smells like winter—crisp and with an edge of cinnamon and campfire. I love the smell of winter air. It’s something I yearn for in the middle of summer when Williamsburg is a swamp and everything smells like sweat and suntan lotion.

I try to soak it in now as I get closer to the coffee shop.

A few more steps, past a group of tourists with a small blonde child and a dog, around a college student so sucked into their phone they don’t seem to notice the world around them. Then the door is in front of me. Then I’m opening it. The scents of the shop meld with the winter scent of the air, and I try to let that steady me.

It’s only now, standing in the doorway of the coffee shop, that I realize I have no idea what Joe looks like. The snakes are starting to overpower the butterflies, but as my gaze sweeps around the shop, I see him.

I know it’s him in my chest.

Not because of his dark hair and glasses or even because of his amazing Santa water-skiing sweater, but because he’s Joe. He radiates Joe.

I take a deep breath, release it, and approach his table. He turns to look at me as I approach, his eyes rounding, and suddenly I feel tears pressing at my eyes. Joe’s here, after all of this time, and it doesn’t matter that he’s a man or that I didn’t have enough time to plan for this meeting. I’m happy he’s here.

He gets to his feet, and I’m hugging him before he can even say anything. He starts laughing, and then we’re both laughing, practically dancing on our feet.

“It’s you,” I say. “It’s you.”

“I got you a gingerbread spice latte,” he says when he finally pulls away, taking his glasses off to wipe them on his sweater.

“Be honest, is it just your fifth latte?”

“No, it’s really for you,” he says, laughing. “When I ordered it, I could hardly believe that I was ordering a drink for you. That we were going to be here together.”

“Me either. It’s pretty spectacular.”

I sit down across from him, happy that we were able to meet in this familiar place, which doesn’t take up much of my bandwidth, so I can give more of it to him.

We smile at each other for a moment, and then my smile slips. “Ryan told me what happened with Craig, Joe. I’m so sorry. Does this mean he was cheating on you?”

He rubs his mouth wearily. “He says he broke up with me because I didn’t trust him. But I found a string of texts between them. He said I was taking everything out of context, but one of the messages was about wanting to shove his dick in Dean’s mouth, so I don’t know how I could misinterpret that.”

“That jerk ,” I say with a gasp. “And to think, I really believed he was a keeper.” My mouth purses to the side. “Then again, I also thought you were a woman, so I’ve been making all kinds of mistakes lately.”

“Tell me what happened with Weston,” he says. “I want all of it.”

I sigh and tell him about the proposal mishap, reliving the embarrassment and claustrophobia as if it were happening right this moment. I can practically feel eyes on me, enough that I look up midway through telling him the story—only to discover that the barista and two of the customers really are looking right at us. The snakes in my belly take the advantage once again, because surely this means they’ve seen the videos, but I finish telling the story.

“Oh, honey,” Joe says, and I’m relieved by how natural it feels to be sitting here and talking to him. It feels ridiculous that we waited this long to meet in person.

“I could say the same to you,” I tell him.

He pushes his glasses up. “You know what else Craig said? He wants to live, and what I do is the opposite of living. He told me I was dragging him down.”

“How dare he!” I say, affronted on his behalf. Maybe on mine too, because how many times have I been accused of living too much in my head and missing the world around me?

Joe smiles sadly.“But he was right, wasn’t he? You know how many hours I clocked on my laptop last week?”

“But that’s your job . And we bring joy to people. How is managing a supermarket any more meaningful?”

Not just any supermarket, but one that always smells like rotten broccoli. Or at least the Williamsburg branch does.

His smile turns more genuine, but a feeling of sadness oozes off him. “He looks good in his uniform.”

I find this doubtful—I don’t think anyone truly looks good in a supermarket uniform—but I nod, trying to appear sympathetic. “Where did you stay last night?”

He plays with his coffee cup, which is probably empty. Joe isn’t greatly affected by caffeine, so he drinks about five cups of coffee a day. Coffee makes me buzz, which feels good—until it doesn’t.

“I stayed at Comfort Zone,” he says.

“You didn’t,” I reply, making a face.

Weston’s hotels are awful . Full of fluorescent lights, chemical smells, and sadness.

“It’s fine,” he says kindly.

“It’s definitely not. I don’t have any rooms tonight, but there’s space starting Monday, presuming the inspector doesn’t put me out of business. Until then, we can set up an air mattress for you on the floor of my room. We’ll figure it out. And when a room opens, it’s yours, for however long you want it.”

I think of Ryan’s room, right next to mine, and how perfect it would be if I could offer it to Joe. And yet…

The thought of Ryan leaving, of never seeing him again, makes my stomach drop.

I will never, ever forget what it felt like to kiss him and be his sole focus, if only for a minute. Ryan has a physicality unlike any other man I’ve ever dated—he’s more present in his body. It makes me wonder what other things would be like with him.

I’m disappointed. Bitterly disappointed. But I’m not really angry at him anymore. I’m more upset with my grandmother. If she felt she had to recruit a stranger to help me, she didn’t have much faith in me at all.

As if Joe is reading my mind, he says, “Actually, Ryan told me I could crash on his other bed for a while. Would you be okay with that?”

“He really said that?” I ask, shocked, feeling the butterflies within me steal the advantage from the snakes. It’s such a kind offer. Maybe Ryan only decided to stay because my grandmother asked him to help me, but I’m guessing she didn’t ask him to also help Joe.

Just like she didn’t ask him to buddy up with Jeremy Jacobs and Cynthia.

Joe nods. “He also told me he’d help me get my stuff from Craig’s apartment, but I don’t know where I’ll put any of it. I don’t know what to do in general, or where I should go. You know I only moved to Charlottesville to live with him.”

Joe is from a small town in Southwest Virginia, but based on what he said to me earlier, he won’t want to go back there.

“Here,” I say firmly. “You’re supposed to be here, with me. Don’t you feel it?” The butterflies take flight, and I grip the edge of the table to ground myself before remembering it’s probably been touched by hundreds of sticky fingers since its last cleaning. “Joe, we need to combine our online businesses. You can do all of the reselling, and I’ll specialize in making Franken-Santas from what we can’t save. And, if you want, we can work on rebranding The Gingerbread House together.”

“Really?” he asks, already grinning at me. “You want to take over the Christmas world with me, sister?”

“Yes! And you’ll stay with me, of course. You can live at the inn.” My mind drifts to Ryan and lingers, recalling the solidity of him. I clear my throat. “You can stay with Ryan at first, and then we’ll move you to one of the guest rooms after someone leaves.”

There are five guest rooms, including Ryan’s. Not including mine.

He gives me a lopsided smile. “I’m almost glad Craig left me.”

He doesn’t mean it, not yet, but I vow to myself that he will mean it. I’m not going to allow anyone to break my friend’s spirit. Certainly not the manager of a subpar grocery store.

I don’t mean to, but I find myself asking, “What do you think of Ryan?”

He watches me thoughtfully as I sip my latte. “My first thought was that he looked exactly like the kids who’d made me miserable in school. All that thick muscle. So good-looking, and doesn’t he know it. But there’s more to him than there appears to be. He’s the good kind of surprise.”

Part of me is certain he’s wrong.

Part of me is terribly worried he’s right.

I sigh heavily. “I like him too.”

My phone buzzes, and I take it out to find a text from my father.

Anabelle, I need to speak with you. Please come over tonight at 5:30 for a talk. It’s very important, honey. It’s about your grandmother.

There he goes, saying the only thing that could possibly convince me to agree to see him right now.

With a huff, I tuck the phone away.

“More bad news?” Joe asks sympathetically.

“Yes,” I say, “but I’m not going to let it bring me down this time. I’m sitting here with you, and we’re going to make the inn fabulous, and I don’t care what anyone else has to say about it.”