Jingle Balls: A Holiday Romantic Comedy Anthology

by Dylann Crush

As she ran a hand lightly over the leather upholstery, he got hard. Not a-little-bit-heavy-heading-to-hard, but all-out, skin-too-tight uncomfortably hard. He’d been attracted to her from the first moment he’d seen her, but this was insane. It was because of how good the sex had been. His body remembered.

  He went around to the driver’s seat and slid in, trying to ignore how delicious she smelled. Like strawberries and cream. He wanted to bang his head on the steering wheel. Instead he said, “You mind navigating?”

  “Nope,” she said, and took her phone out.

  He started the car, 360 hp of turbocharged five-cylinder goodness roaring to life under them. He never started the car without feeling a thrill.

  He turned and looked at her. She was grinning out the front window.

  “You like it?” he said, as he peeled out just a little more sharply than was strictly necessary. He remembered: During sex, she’d egged him on until he’d worried aloud that he was hurting her, and then she’d said, I’ll never let you hurt me. Only probably she’d actually just said, I’d never let you hurt me, which was different. But for a split second he’d thrilled at the promise of that future tense, and the feel of her meeting him, stroke for stroke.

  “I love it.” And shit, that just made it worse. She was a woman who could appreciate a good ride, in every sense.

  He got them on the highway and pointed the car south.

  “So,” he said. “What’s the deal with pretending we’ve never met?”

  She wrinkled her nose apologetically. “Yeah. Sorry about that. I thought it might be easiest. Not having to explain.”

  “What’s the big deal? You just say, ‘Oh, yeah, Mack and I met at a party. We have some friends in common.’”

  “Your brain works differently from mine. Mine’s literal. And I freeze under pressure. I couldn’t form a coherent sentence. If I’d opened my mouth, the truth would have come out.”

  “And what’s the truth?” Mack said, trying to keep his voice casual.

  “‘Oh, yeah, Mack and I know each other,’” she said, in a high-pitched imitation of herself. “‘We had a one-nighter at his place about five months ago.’”

  “That would have been something,” Mack said, laughing. “What would Vivi have said?”

  “She would have tried her best to be cool about it. And then she would have been all up in my business, probably trying to fix us up or something.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “Which obviously is a terrible idea.”

  He felt, rather than saw, when she turned her head quickly to try to read his expression. “Well, yeah.”

  “Because we obviously have no chemistry.”

  She was quiet for a moment. “Because it was a one-night stand.”

  He wasn’t going to get anywhere playing games with her. He’d have to lay it on the line if he was interested in finding out what had happened and where he stood. “It doesn’t have to be just one night,” he said.

  “Look.” She crossed her arms, and when he snuck a look at her, she was staring out the windshield, not looking back at him. “It was—fun.”

  “Fun.”

  “Fine. It was… good.”

  “Sweetheart,” he said.

  She looked at him sharply.

  He couldn’t help it. He was pissed. Or maybe, if he were being totally honest with himself, hurt—because she could just dismiss it like that, and he’d been losing sleep remembering. And it wasn’t because the sex had been so great, although he wouldn’t deny it. It was because of how he’d felt when they were talking, like the rest of the world had disappeared, and it was the two of them in their bubble. Like she heard him and got him, and like he heard her and got her. They’d just met, and already they were plugged into each other in a way that almost never happened to him.

  “You were there, right? I thought you were going to scrape the skin off my back. I thought the neighbors were going to call in a noise complaint. It wasn’t ‘good.’”

  He felt her shift in her seat. Excellent. He’d made her uncomfortable. That made two of them.

  “My no-repeats policy has nothing to do with whether it was good.” She was fidgeting with things in the center console. The gearshift, the brake, the cup holder. Running a thumb absent-mindedly over the surfaces. He really wished she’d stop, because it was fucking with his concentration. He remembered, very clearly, how she’d run that thumb—soft as kidskin—over the head of his cock just before she’d knelt and taken him in her very warm, very eager mouth. And he’d practically blown his wad right then and there. The only thing that had kept him in line was how much he hadn’t wanted it to end.

  He sighed.

  She sighed, too. “I don’t want to talk about this.”

  And shit. That was going to have to be it for him. Because he was not the kind of guy who pressured. Not the kind of guy who cajoled, coerced, or manipulated. He hated guys like that. They were the lowest of the low. And how could you enjoy sex when your partner wasn’t in it with you?

  Sex with Phaedra had been amazing because of how “in it” she’d been. He didn’t want Round Two unless he could have it his way, which was to say: her way.

  “Okay,” he said. “We don’t have to talk about it. Can I say one thing, though?”

  She was quiet. Thinking it over. Then: “And after that we don’t have to talk about it anymore?”

  “After that we can never mention it again. It will be that which shall never be named. We can go with your version of reality. Never met before.”

  “Okay. Shoot. One more thing.”

  He hesitated, because once he said it, it could never be unsaid. And he’d just be hanging out there, and she could shrug or laugh or whatever the hell she wanted.

  On the other hand, if he didn’t say it, and they never talked about it again, he was a hundred percent guaranteed not to get another chance to kiss her. And wouldn’t that suck.

  He took a deep breath and went for it. “It was the best sex I’ve ever had. There. Done. Now we can never have met before.”

  He could hear her breathing. It was a little faster than it had been a moment ago. He couldn’t help it; he felt victorious. Like he’d won the battle even if he’d lost the war.

  They drove through the tunnel under Neahkahnie Mountain and started climbing into the state forest. He loved this part of 101. It was so dark and primitive, you could totally believe woolly mammoths would come stomping out of the woods at any moment.

  They cruised for a long time without her saying anything. She wasn’t going to respond to what he’d said. He resigned himself to it.

  And then:

  “Do you mean that?” Her voice was low, barely audible over the purr of the engine.

  “I don’t say things I don’t mean.”

  “That can’t be true.”

  “Why not?” he asked.

  “I mean, you have to have had girlfriends and stuff.”

  “Plenty,” he said.

  “And lots of one-night stands.”

  “It’s not really my thing, but a few.”

  “So that can’t really have been the best…”

  She didn’t seem to be able to finish the sentence.

  He guessed he’d been wrong, somehow. It had sucked for her. She’d been faking it. He’d misread the cues. Now he was just…embarrassed.

  “Okay. Look. I read you wrong. And I’m sorry. So…we can just forget I said that. And, um, go back to the default position where we’ve never met before. Right? You can tell me what you do for a living, and I’ll tell you, and we’ll talk about our grandmothers and their dementia and maybe your aunt and my dad and how happy they seem. Or, I don’t know, we can put some music on and play it just a little too loud for comfortable conversation.”

  He was expecting her to agree with relief, but she was quiet. He glanced over to find her rubbing the knuckle of her thumb and looking—uneasy.

  Shit. He’d really blown this. He was about to apologize—even more profusely—when she said,
“No.”

  “No—what?”

  “No to the reading me wrong. You didn’t. Not at all.”

  Oh. Well. His heart started beating fast. And the blood was rushing in his veins again. It was, in fact, moving quite aggressively below the belt.

  She cleared her throat. “Look. Can I—tell you something?” Her voice was serious now. Confessional.

  His stomach lurched, in a good way. She was going to confide in him, and that shouldn’t feel like such an enormous victory—but it did. “Of course.”

  “I was supposed to get married. In a week and a half. Christmas Eve wedding. But he called it off. Six months ago.”

  He did some quick math. Six months ago was about a month before they’d had the sex that had rocked his world. She’d been on the rebound—from a near-jilting. Suddenly things made so much more sense. And suddenly he felt—hopeful.

  “That sucks,” he said, and meant it. “I’m so sorry. What a dick. What an idiot.”

  He could hear her smile when she said, “Thanks. He, um, met someone else. Someone who—his words—made him realize what love really meant. Which was inconvenient for me, because he was what love really meant for me.” She was trying very hard to keep her voice even, but he heard the pain, and it made his chest ache. “I wish I could say I realized after he dumped me it was all for the best, but nope. So I went on kind of a tear. You were the—” She thought about it a minute. “—fifth guy I’d slept with that month.”

  “Huh,” he said.

  “I was safe,” she said defensively.

  “I wasn’t judging. And I know we were safe. I was there.”

  “What does huh mean, then?”

  He lifted a shoulder. “It means what it sounds like. I was thinking about what you just said and what you must have been going through. Did you keep going after that?”

  “Does it matter?” Her tone was still sharp.

  “Let’s say I’m curious.”

  Out of the corner of his eye, he saw her shaking her head. “I quit after that.”

  “Huh.”

  “What does that one mean?” she demanded.

  He smiled, because he liked how she didn’t let him get away with anything. “It means, did you quit because I turned you off revenge sex permanently? Or because I was so good you just gave up finding anything comparable?”

  She made a sound that just might have been a laugh, which he took as a good sign.

  “I…”

  She stopped. He didn’t try to look over at her. He was afraid if he did, she’d stop talking.

  “I quit because I freaked out that night.”

  4

  “Freaked out?”

  She hadn’t meant to say even that much, but he had this way of making her feel safe. Open. That night, when they’d met, she’d talked so freely, telling him all kinds of random stuff. She told him that even after living in Seattle for five years, she wasn’t sure how she felt about the West Coast, that she still missed the Midwest. She told him she was closer to her aunt than to her own father—and that she felt guilty about it. She told him she loved her job—designing packaging for a small company that produced organic snacks. And a whole assortment of other weird shit. The philosophy behind her Instagram postings. Why she loved Katherine Center’s books.

  He’d talked, too, plenty—but he’d listened more than most guys. And better than most guys. And he kissed…

  He kissed like he meant it. Like he could feel what she felt. Like when he changed an angle or deepened the pressure or slid his tongue against hers? He knew exactly what he was doing to her.

  By the time he’d playfully tossed her onto his bed, she’d been totally out of her mind. It made the four hookups that had preceded him seem like a whole other sport. Sex with Mack is to sex with other men as rugby is to ping-pong.

  Somewhere around the time he found the exact right pressure and the exact right pace to drive her toward orgasm, she opened her eyes to find him looking right back at her. And he’d held eye contact with her as he’d kept up that pace. It had felt so intensely personal—not like a hookup. Not like revenge sex.

  Like a connection.

  She hadn’t been able to look away or close her eyes, and the pressure on her clit and the wringing pleasure building in her low belly were nothing compared to the sudden tightness in her chest. Longing. She wanted this. Him. She wanted this. More. Again. Tonight, tomorrow—

  It shouldn’t be possible for someone to have an orgasm and a panic attack at the same time, but that was exactly what she’d done. Or maybe it was more consecutive than that—the orgasm to end all orgasms, followed by an immediate, sudden, and overwhelming sense of impending, absolute doom. She was lying on a strange bed in a strange apartment underneath a total stranger. They didn’t even know each other’s last names.

  What the fuck was she thinking? And how had she managed to do this four other times without freaking out?

  Seized by panic, she’d practically jumped out of bed, thrown on her clothes and—there was really no other word for it—fled.

  She thought of it as her Come to Jesus moment. The moment when she’d realized that revenge sex or rebound sex or whatever it was—wasn’t going to take away how much she still wanted Chris’s love. It was only going to remind her that she’d lost it.

  “Freaked out,” she repeated, although it was pretty damn inadequate.

  Her breath was feeling tight in her chest, like it had that night. Her face was hot. She reached out and cranked the passenger-side temp control to freezer range. Just then, they flew by an early sign for Reardon Bay.

  “Shit, hang on, let me get my navigation act together. You’re…um…going to turn right off the exit ramp. And then go for a mile or so.”

  “You should have told me.” His voice was quiet. Low. It rumbled under her skin.

  “What?”

  He gave her a half glance, not quite turning his head. “That you were freaked out.”

  “Why? What would it have changed?”

  “Maybe I would have thought of the right thing to say to un-freak you out. And we would have had more sex.” The corner of his mouth lifted.

  She bit her lip to hold back a smile. “Um, I don’t think anything you could have said would have stopped me from freaking out.”

  She couldn’t deny that more sex had some appeal. More than once since that night, she’d wished for it. She loved her assortment of toys, but he’d worked some serious magic, right before she’d left, wrung out and panicking.

  “What was it about? The freakout?”

  “Screwing a stranger,” she said.

  His lips twisted—he was hiding his own smile. “I would have thought you’d be used to that by then.”

  She realized she was trying not to smile, too. “I think it snuck up on me.”

  “It took five one-night stands before you noticed you were doing it?”

  “Pretty much,” she said. “Wait! Turn left up here!”

  He did, and she steered him around a few more turns and into the parking lot of a small hotel, inconveniently named Cape House.

  “No wonder Grandma got confused,” she said.

  Her grandmother was sitting on a bench on a patch of grass near the entrance to this Cape House, waiting patiently, her handbag on her lap. Phaedra got out of the car and hurried over to her.

  “I’m sorry to be such a nuisance, Phae,” Grandma said sadly. “I could have sworn it was Reardon Bay.”

  Sometimes Phaedra thought it would be a blessing when Grandma’s memory was so far gone that she didn’t know she was losing her memory. And sometimes it broke her heart to think of the moment when her grandmother would look at her and not remember her.

  “No worries, Grandma.”

  Mack came to stand next to her. He felt good there, which made her heart pound and her breath catch.

  “Mack was nice enough to drive me down here in his super-hot car.”

  “That is a hot car,” her grandmother said, eyeing it
.

  “Mack, this is my grandmother, Lillian Ambrose. Grandma, Mack is Michael’s son.”

  “It’s very nice to meet you, Mack,” Lillian said.

  “You, too, Mrs. Ambrose. And that is a beautiful dress,” he told Phae’s grandmother.

  “He’s such a charmer!” Grandma said to Phae. “You have good taste in men.”

  Mack cocked his head to one side and gave Phae a look. She turned away before she could get sucked into his smirky grin.

  “You can have shotgun, Grandma,” Phae said.

  Mack took her grandmother’s arm with a gallant gesture that made Phae’s heart stutter and guided her to the front passenger seat.

  Phae slipped into the back seat. She had to turn her knees sideways, but she didn’t mind. Mack was making conversation with her grandmother, asking her how her flight to PDX and limo ride to Reardon Bay had been and whether the other Cape House seemed like a nice hotel. Within minutes Phae’s grandmother was telling Mack all about the independent living place where she had a wonderful apartment and the most marvelous 24-hour care.

  Phae’s heart squeezed again; her grandmother didn’t know this yet, but she was going to be moving to a memory care facility near Phae and Vivi soon.

  But she didn’t get to dwell on that long, because then her grandmother asked Mack, “Is this wedding going to be as lovely as yours?” and Phae’s stomach lost its bottom.

  5

  “Mine?” Mack hoped he didn’t sound as confused as he felt.

  “I thought your wedding was the loveliest,” Lillian said. “You and Phae made such a beautiful bride and groom.”

  With a jolt, he realized she was addressing both of them. He sought Phaedra’s eyes in the rearview mirror, hoping this would make more sense to her, but her eyes were round with surprise, and she was biting her lower lip. Again. He wished she would stop doing that. It was the softest, sweetest, plumpest lip he’d ever licked. And given that he might not get a second chance at it, it felt like pure torture that she kept worrying it. That lip made his mouth water, despite the weirdness of this conversation.

  “Are you thinking of my mother’s wedding?” Phaedra asked. “To my father? Cara and Henley’s wedding?”