You Had Me At Christmas: A Holiday Anthology(138)

“Are you okay to drive?” he asked.

“Fine.” It was a lie. She wasn’t fine. But she could drive a damn car. She could drive a car away from him.

She slipped out the door.

“Merry Christmas, Trina,” he yelled after her.

She flipped him her middle finger.

Right. Just another awful Christmas in a long line of awful Christmases.


December 24, 2011

10:22 PM

Dean fought it as long as he could. And he had a lot of fight. He was used to long, drawn-out battles over many years. He was very comfortable with trench warfare. He could—very easily—pretend last night never happened. And when he ran into Trina at the grocery store or the post office, he could pretend. Pretend to be casual. Pretend not to care.

He was so damn good at that, after all. He’d been pretending with her most of his damn life.

But quite suddenly, and all at once, he didn’t have any fight left.

And he called Trina. Or he called the cell phone number she’d given him in the bar last night.

Predictably, it went to voice mail.

“You’ve reached Trina, leave a message.”

Beeeeep.

For a nanosecond he nearly hung up. But this morning had been a life-changing event. Her in his house. In his bed. Him inside of her… He wanted that. Had wanted that forever.

And that too was worth fighting for. And he figured it was about time he fought for what he wanted.

“Hey, Trina. It’s…uh. It’s me. Dean.” Awesome. Starting with a bang. “Sorry to call so late, but I’ve just…I just feel really bad about the way things ended this morning. I said some stuff I really don’t mean. And,” he laughed. “I’m hoping that’s true for you too. That you didn’t mean some of the stuff you said.” This was not the direction he wanted to go. “Anyway. This morning, last night… it was…” the best night of my life. “Really good. And I want to see you again. I mean, we’ll probably see each other anyway, in town and everything. And I don’t want it to be awkward. And…” He took a deep breath. “And it wasn’t just a casual thing for me. With you. It could never be casual, with you. And I want to see you. A lot. So, I’m going to call, and keep calling, and sooner or later I figure you’ll get sick of that and call me back. Okay…ah…well, merry Christmas, Trina.”

He hung up and threw the phone down on the bed.

He wished he could feel good about that, like he’d made a wrong step right. But he knew Trina. And he had a really good sense that she would not call him back.

He turned off the lights and stretched out in the sheets of his bed that still smelled like her.





Chapter Four





December 24, 2012

5:45 PM

Was it her or were the numbers on the gas pump clicking over more slowly than usual? They were frozen, like the rest of Dusk Falls.

“Come on, come on, come on,” Trina muttered, stomping her feet to keep them warm.

Still slow. Forget this. She’d wait in the car.

The engine of a large truck thundered to a stop on the other side of the gas station out on the edge of Dusk Falls. She turned, catching sight of the driver before diving into the relative warmth of her car, and looked right into Dean’s startled eyes.

Her stomach crashed into her feet so fast she forgot about the cold.

She forgot about everything.

Dean.

As if she were looking through a pair of binoculars the wrong way, she watched him put the truck in park and mutter something to himself.

She hadn’t seen him once in the last year. Granted, she spent a lot of the year in Fort McMurray, Alberta. But every time she was in town she braced herself for running into him like this. At the gas station, or the grocery store. Holly’s.

Somehow it never happened.

In her more paranoid moments, she imagined he’d been avoiding her.

But that was ridiculous. After last Christmas, he’d called her five times. Five.

She had each voice mail message still on her phone. Long rambling, chatty messages that when she was alone in Canada, living out of a suitcase and feeling like there was a world spinning on without her, she’d listen to.

They stopped at the end of summer. The last message from him had been September 2. He’d been busy. And his voice sounded tired, defeated. And when he hung up, she knew it was the last time he’d call her.

Finally, she called him in November. On his birthday. And the message she left was awkward and awful. She didn’t say anything about his messages, or last Christmas Eve. She’d sounded like a nervous stranger. He didn’t call her back, and she wasn’t even surprised.

The whole thing was shameful, she owned that. Cowardly, too.

Which made this moment incredibly awkward.

He stepped out of the car and tipped his hat to her. His lips moved but the wind was howling so loud through the pumps, over the open land, that she couldn’t hear him.

“What?” she yelled.

“I said, Hey Trina,” he yelled.

“Right!” Oh wow, she was such an idiot. She gave him her widest, brightest smile, perfected by the last year working with his family. “Good to see you.”

He pointed to his ears and shook his head before he took the gas pump and flipped the lever so hard she flinched.