You Had Me At Christmas: A Holiday Anthology(55)

She covered her mouth with her hand to cover her breathing. Her car was parked out front, but maybe if he couldn’t hear her, he would think that she had gone out with friends. She used to go out with her friends, especially before she’d adopted her mom’s solution and started waitressing as many hours as Babe would let her. If she wasn’t at school, she was working.

Gary ran into another piece of furniture, and she cringed. Tonight had been one of those nights when her exhaustion had caught up with her and she’d needed to come home to sleep.

He pounded on the door. “Selina!” he slurred. “I know you’re in there. Let me in, baby.”

Baby. Bile rose up in her throat at the endearment. Gary always started off nice. Baby. Sweetie. Good time.

Gag.

Before the night was over, baby would turn to bitch and he’d stop promising her that she’d like it. They both knew he didn’t care if she would like it.

God, her eyes hurt. The rims, her eyelids, and the skin under her eyes all ached. She hadn’t known it was possible to be this exhausted. But even if Gary stopped twisting the handle of her bedroom door right now, she wouldn’t sleep again tonight.

The door rattled as he banged on it, the fading bruises on her back still tender from the last time he’d gotten this drunk and she’d been home. The tiny door lock wouldn’t hold him for long. Sometime in the future, he’d be in the perfect spot between drunk enough to try something and sober enough to be able to kick the door down.

She glanced across the room, in case tonight was the night. There, sitting under the window, was her backpack with a spare toothbrush, pajamas, jeans, her favorite sweatshirt, and twenty dollars. It wasn’t much, but it would be enough to hold her over until she could get back home and pack up the rest of her stuff.

Gary’s footsteps retreated down the hall, and she eased her way back to a stand. She’d fallen for the retreating-footsteps trick once. This time, she picked up her nightstand and moved it in front of her door.

The backpack and escape was a nice idea, but the truth was that she had nowhere to go, making fortification more realistic than retreat.

After she pushed everything she could think of in front of her door, she lifted her heavy limbs into bed and curled up in a tight ball, her eyes zeroed in on the door while she waited for her stepfather to pass out.

Like she did every other night she’d been trapped in her room, trapped in her house, and trapped in her life, she imagined the moment when all her hard work paid off and she was handed her diploma. That diploma, and the nursing job that would come with it, was her out.

Out of this house. Out of this town. Out of this life.

Whatever banged on the door next couldn’t have been Gary’s hand. Or his foot. The bang, and the accompanying crack in the wood, indicated something much bigger. Panic coursed through her, and very real and very scary possibilities drove her out of her bed. As the doorframe cracked behind her, Selina grabbed her coat and her backpack. She didn’t bother to hide her groans as she shoved at the window. She welcomed the cold air that blasted her face.

Her bedroom door broke open and crashed to the ground just as Selina was slipping through the open window and out into the night. The freezing early-December air made goose pimples rise on her bare arms, her breath visible. She raced around the side of the house to her car and climbed in. Besides the clothes in her backpack, she had a blanket in the car. She could sleep in the diner’s parking lot if she had to, but she was never going back to that house.





Chapter Two





“Curtis, you’re not listening to me,” Marc Murcowski said into the overly warm air of the car as he navigated the twisting road up and around the mountain.

“What’s the big problem with Terry?” Curtis asked.

Terry had been their pet name for the encrypted text message app they’d sold for millions of dollars. Who knows what it was called now? Something that sounded more secretive, no doubt, and probably boring, too.

“Right now, Terry needs mutual contact-list entries to generate a key. But I’ve figured out a way around our problem.” He tapped his steering wheel excitedly. The solution was so simple, so elegant; they should have seen it months ago. Maybe they could have sold the company for more if they had.

The silence on the other end of the line lasted long enough that Marc glanced at the screen on his dash to make sure he still had service. Just as he was about to reach over and shake his phone—not that it would have any effect, but doing something would make him feel better and he couldn’t shake his best friend and former business partner into listening to him—Curtis cleared his throat.

“It’s not our problem,” he said. “The contact-list entry is my problem. You. Sold. Terry.”

The way Curtis enunciated every word made the joints of Marc’s jaw ache, but he didn’t give in to his irritation. Curtis had something Marc wanted. Namely, Curtis still had access to the app they’d developed and Marc didn’t.

“Technically,” he said, struggling to keep his voice jolly, “we both sold the company. You simply chose to stay on after all the checks were written.”

Marc slowed his SUV as he approached the next hairpin turn. He should be appreciating the scenery of the Idaho mountains in the early winter. After all, he had cancelled the lease on his Seattle apartment and driven off with the intent of seeing the country and skiing at all the best resorts. But pine trees and snowy mountaintops were competition for the way his mind had rolled over the contact-list problem since he’d driven out of town in search of . . .