A Holly Jolly Deal Read online

  Either boys or girls we’re all about the same when we’re children and it’s all about playing, then we grow up, the lines of communication are cut off and we turn into trains that never seem to run on the same rails again.

  After that Christmas, when we got back to school, Chris stopped sitting with me at lunch, preferring to hang out with his male friends.

  We soon stopped seeing each other outside of family gatherings.

  It wasn’t that we weren’t friends anymore, but he was distant all the time, and then when it was time for him to leave for college, a year and a half earlier than most — even then he was a math wizard and a genius— he picked Columbia and left the state.

  For a while I toyed with the idea of picking the same university, but then his calls and texts became few and far between, so I stayed in California and went to Berkeley.

  Now we speak maybe once or twice every month or so, but when we get to Aspen every year it feels like we almost go back in time for a while: we don’t share personal stuff and we’re definitely not as close as we were fourteen years ago, but we do have our laughs, especially in our concerted effort to escape the never-ending attempt at matchmaking with all and sundry we’re subjected to; Moira, his mother, can be as bad as my own, so we can definitely sympathize with each other.

  The best part of visiting Frosted Ridge Resort is still hang out with him, if I have to be honest, I’m still fond of him and despite our distance, he is still the dearest friend I’ve ever had in the whole world, but even the prospect of seeing him can’t cheer me up if I think about all the nagging our mothers will do about the both of us being single, despite being the oldest, and about how terrible it is that we work so much and haven’t managed to start adding to the pile of grandbabies with a half a ton of our own each.

  I wish there was something that we could do to stop the madness.

  Every year the moms get more determined and something tells me this year’s gonna be even worse since we are now getting closer to thirty and are both still alone, the horror!

  I frown, still looking outside the window, then I turn and pick up my iPad again.

  I push play once more.

  The kids are still singing about ‘having a cup of cheer and kissing somebody waiting for you under the mistletoe’.

  I stop short.

  Those are definitely not the original lyrics, not exactly anyway.

  I laugh to myself, shaking my head.

  She freaking changed the words to send some subliminal message or something to me!

  “Mom, you’re such a tinsel-wreathed basked case,” I murmur to myself.

  I sigh.

  We’re so gonna need to come up with better hiding places than last year; or find some other way to deal with them.

  Deal.

  Hmm.

  I smile to myself.

  Now, there’s something to this thought.

  A mutual protection pact of some sort.

  A Deal. Just until we stay there.

  I get his mom off his back and he does the same for me.

  My smile gets bigger as I plot to myself.

  There’s just one thing that would shut them both up and let us enjoy our vacation in peace: we need to play along, give them what they want.

  We’re gonna bring someone to Aspen this year, someone special: each other.

  I nod to myself, okay, maybe I’m crazy but this kind of sound like it has merit.

  I play the girlfriend, he the boyfriend, better yet: the fiancé.

  We play turtledoves, we dazzled the crap out of them, and we finally get them to stop pairing us off with every whore or loser roaming that resort.

  Maybe this year we get to one up them for once with a little holly jolly deal, just for the holidays.

  The only thing I need is for Chris to play along.

  I smirk and pick up the phone.

  Chapter 2

  CHRISTOPHER

  I’m sitting behind my desk in my sprawling office at Hudson & Perry, one of the biggest commodity trading firms in New York, I’ve been just promoted from VP to Chief Investment Officer and the world should be at my feet right about now, just like Wall Street is, but it’s not the case.

  It’s only twelve p.m. and I’ve already made my company a quarter of a billion, for all intents and purposes I should feel ten feel tall, but instead I feel the size of a teacup chihuahua as I stare at the screen of my computer where the thumbnail of my mom’s video-Christmas card is still glaring at me.

  Normally, it would have been your average, run-of-the-mill, guilt-laden phone call that she would have employed to get me to leave New York behind and fly to Colorado to spend the holiday season with her, the rest of my very big, very loud family and the Snows, who are old family’s friends and pretty much like relatives to us.

  This year she upped her game and had my considerable number of nephews and nieces —I’m the oldest of five children, one brother and three sisters, and they are all happily married and have been popping kids left, right and center for the better part of seven years now; I’m the only one who’s childless and hopelessly alone as ma’s fond of saying— rap me a personalized arrangement of ‘Please Come Home For Christmas’. And yes: she also rapped some of the lyrics.

  I shouldn’t be wary of spending a week with my parents, family and friends, in a beautiful snowy resort in Aspen like we have done for as long as I can remember, but I am.

  The truth is that I’ve come to hate December and dread what my mom and Mrs. Snow, my father’s best friend’s wife, have come to call our ‘Seven-Days-Of-Total-Christmas-Holiday’.

  It’s not like I’m one of those Scrooge types that hate Christmas and wish they could speed through it and get to January in the blink of an eye: I used to love it. When we were little, my siblings and I, along with the Snow kids, always had a blast between snowball fights, skiing, hiking, playing hockey and doing all the holiday stuff our hearts desired, all the while fueled by way too many cookies, hot cocoa and melted marshmallows.

  Then things changed because of one in particular of those Snow kids: Hope.

  It was the Christmas when I was fifteen.

  I remember we used to be inseparable up until that summer, she was a total tomboy and I loved hanging out with her, she was cool.

  I was really good at math and stuff even back then, the path of financial wizardry I would end up following already traced in front of me, my teachers told my parents I would be ready to leave for college early and that going a way to follow a specialistic math course for a few months would really help me in furthering my skills.

  My mom was reluctant to see me go, but my dad convinced her. He and I have always been great friends, despite being about as different as two people can be. When I was a small kid, at first he didn’t know what to do with me, I was the nerd of the family, very different from my siblings, even the girls, who liked to build stuff with him and visit him on his construction sites, but he always encouraged me to follow my passion for numbers even if that meant we had very little in common.

  So that July I left San Francisco for Washington DC to follow those special lessons. I stayed away for four months and by the time I was back home, Hope, who then was my best friend in the whole world, had left for Los Angeles for a two-month-long stay for a painting course. She was an artsy type even back then and a killer painter and I was told those art lessons would help her built her résumé when she got older.

  That’s how we ended up not seeing each other for almost six months.

  I can still recall quite clearly my first sight of her.

  Gone was the little chubby tomboy that I remembered and used to consider ‘one of the guys’ and in her place was this beautiful curvy angel standing in the snow.

  Since I already loved her almost more than anyone else in the world, with the exception of my parents and siblings, falling in love hard and fast wasn’t that much of a stretch for me, thus begun the most a
wkward holiday of my life and it would end up being the first of many.

  I couldn’t shake my love for her, no matter how much I tried, and she was always there, looking confused when I gave her the cold shoulder and refused to hug her or hang out with her when my body was in a state of constant need for her.

  Only she didn’t know that. She only felt my slight, I guess, as we drifted more and more apart.

  I debated telling her how I felt once, when I turned sixteen, right there in the same resort where I first discovered my love for her, but then I talked myself out of it.

  It was clear she didn’t see anything more than a friend in me, why would I make an already awkward situation even worse?

  So I held my tongue and waited for those feelings to dissipate.

  They never did.

  Staying in San Francisco meant it was impossible for me to avoid being in her presence almost constantly since my sister Rosie was dating one of her brothers, Nathan, and our parents were still the closest of friends.

  It got to the point where I had to stop myself from throwing myself at her. I would not sleep for days on end just thinking about her and the more the distance I needed to keep to survive grew between us, the more I missed her, but to her I wasn’t more than a nerdy childhood friend, no matter how much I wished she would really see me and guess the feelings I kept hidden in my heart, without me having to say a thing.

  It was such a painful situation for me that I changed all my plans and busted my ass even more in school so I could leave for college even earlier.

  I picked Columbia and moved to New York, hoping against hope that a physical distance would help my feelings cool down, go back to ‘normal’ again, but they never did, even though I forced myself to try a couple of times.

  No other girl could do it for me and things haven’t changed much in the last fourteen years. I don’t think I’ve ever smiled once and meant it since I felt myself fall for her.

  I’ve been living in a voluntary exile for all the years she’s had my heart without knowing it, but once a year, on Christmas time I’m forced to break it and suffer through an entire week in her presence.

  Fourteen years and fourteen Christmases and still the mere thought of living New York for Denver and then for Aspen on the twenty-two of December can throw me in a near state of panic and this year is no different.

  And is this the only thing I need to dread about our annual stay at Frosted Ridge resort? Nope. Not by a long shot, because there are also my mother and hers, not to mention my sisters, that every year use those seven days to try and fix me up.

  So every time I get to hide a constant hard-on for Hope amidst dodging a million kids and awkward moments with her all over the freaking place, surrounded by snow and zero distractions on all fronts, all the while trying to look like I’m enjoying the hell out of the whole experience while escaping the women’s attempts of matchmaking me to ninety-three percent of the female population of Aspen, both resident and visiting the snowy retreat, that is, when they are not outright scolding me for ‘insisting on being single’ when everybody else in the ‘clans’ is married and has a house crawling with babies.

  Lucky, lucky me.

  My cell starts to ring, and I absentmindedly grab for it, pushing my swiveling chair away from my desk.

  I half expect it to be ma, calling to make sure I’m ready to leave on the twenty-two even though it’s more than a week away from now, maybe already start to put in a good word for this or that ‘just perfect for me’ woman; my eyes widen after they drop on the screen’s read-out.

  Hope.

  What the fuck?!

  Did I just conjure her to screw up my day even more or something?

  Usually, I try as hard as I can not to think about her and most of the time it even works considering I keep my brain buried in spreadsheets, statistics and market’s tendencies predictions every hour of every day until I fall face-first in my bed, utterly exhausted, but when December comes around, there’s no escaping thoughts of the woman I love, since I know I will be seeing her soon, but why would she call now?

  We are no longer in the habit of talking over the phone much; mostly we text and even then it’s only a couple of times every month or so and definitely never in December since we know we’ll be meeting soon anyway.

  I debate with myself about just letting her record a voicemail, but then I think better of it.

  “Fucking grow a pair, Winters,” I mutter to myself and answer the call.

  “Hello?”

  “Chris, hi, how’ve you been?”

  Miserable, thanks for asking.

  “Just peachy. You?”

  “I’m in hell…”

  My eyebrows rise high in my forehead and I’m immediately worried sick. “Why? What happened?”

  She huffs out a long-suffering breath. “Guess.”

  I frown to myself and then start to laugh. “You got a video-message too?”

  She groans. “You bet, with all the kids and twinkling sweaters…”

  I smirk. “I think I have you beat then.”

  “Why? Was there dancing?”

  I sigh. “Worse, there was rapping.”

  She burst into giggles and I smile, loving the sound of it while my heart squeezes in my chest. God I miss her so much, I miss the way her smile lights up her green eyes and this laugh more than anything else in the world.

  “And did she start on you already?”

  “Actually, she’s been at it since my birthday this year and she never got around to stop this time.”

  She tuts. “Well, you are growing long in the tooth for them, what with being still trapped in singledoom at 29…”

  I chuckle, but even I can hear how robotic it sounds. “What about you, did Tornado Noel hit already?”

  “Oh yeah, she had the babies do her dirty work and actually had them ask for a new uncle for me.”

  “Sneaky,” I joke, but I still feel my stomach churn thinking about the day when someone will snatch my woman up and she will really show up at our yearly gathering with some bastard pawing at what’s mine.

  I clutch the phone too hard in my hand as she tells me about the song, the parchment and stuff.

  It’s easy to slip back into my best friend role with her, everything is easy with her, everything but loving her.

  I feel myself grow hard at the sound of her sweet voice and feel like a total pervert.

  Better cut this short.

  “Did you call for something in particular, or was it just to commiserate with me about our impending downfall at the hands of those two old lunatics?”

  “A little bit of both, actually. I called because this year… cue evil laugh, I have a plan that could help us avoid much of the crazy matchmaking and the embarrassment of being paraded all over Aspen. Hello ladies, come close! Here’s a 6’5 tall handsome specimen that lives in New York City and has appeared on the cover of Forbes twice already. Magna cum laude from Columbia, he is very well behaved and has perfect teeth. The bidding starts at—”

  I growl. “Alright, alright, I get it! Been there, done that, remember, Miss Great Child Bearing Hips? Oh, guys, she loves to paint nude subjects and speaks fluent French,” I tell her, quoting our moms myself.

  I hear what sounds like a slap to her forehead and I laugh.

  “Thanks for reminding me about that year. Massive doses of therapy had just barely started to make me forget that trauma.”

  “What’s this plan you have?”

  “Well, it’s more like a deal, really. Say you’ll do it.”

  I shake my head. “Hell no, I won’t say yes if I don’t know what’s going on in that batshit brain of yours, Noelle is still your mother after all, so I don’t trust your crazy ideas.”

  She groans. “Fine, I’ll tell you, but you can’t say no, Chris.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense…”

  “Pretty please with whipped cream and a cherry on top!
”

  I roll my eyes. “Just tell me.”

  “Okay, listen here. I figured we could show up together this year…”

  “And how would that help in stopping the moms?”

  She sighs. “I meant like together together, Chris.”

  I’m momentarily stunned by her words.

  “You mean like a… couple?” I finally ask.

  I can hear the smile in her voice as she starts to plot. “Exactly. Think about it, Chris: they will be so ‘wowed-out’ because of it that they would hardly have anything to say and for once in years we’ll finally enjoy our stay in that nice resort. What do you say?”

  “That I was right: you are batshit crazy and need to be committed.”

  She huffs. “Oh, come on, Chris! I need you to do it. I’ve been so stressed lately, I really need this vacation and well, I know for a fact you’re stressed all the time, so you can’t tell me you’re ready to spend a week with our moms driving us insane about our need to settle down and start to play house while they try to foist possible axe-murderers and obsessive stalkers on us.”

  “How would it even work?” I ask, hating that I’m actually considering this, that I could be so easily capitulating at her request.

  Hope claps her hands on the other line, and I realize she must have put me on speaker. She’s not one to stay still long and she’s probably all over the place right now.

  “Well, there were a few roadblocks here and there, but I hammered them out since I had the idea.”

  “Which was when exactly?”

  “Like twenty minutes ago.”

  I look up at the ceiling. Typical impulsive Hope.

  “Let’s hear it.”

  “Really? Yay! Okay, I thought we could just show up there together, maybe meet up at the airport, either in New York or here in San Fran, fly to Denver and then rent a car. Picture the scene: the moms have already a whole bunch of losers waiting in the wings to molest us, and we show up holding hands and acting all cute and coupley. We get there, we kiss, we stun the crap out of everybody, the crowd goes wild and then we launch into storytelling-mode. We say we’ve been together for a few months and–”