Jingle Balls: A Holiday Romantic Comedy Anthology

by Dylann Crush

  It was in the ballroom of this hotel where they’d shared their first dance. It was here where they’d first been chattered about and seen together in public. It was from this hotel that he’d whisked her away well before that party had ended, taking her to his penthouse on Lake Shore Drive, divesting her of her gown in minutes.

  “Sir?” the doorman asked.

  It was enough to kick Michael into gear. He passed through just as Darby paused at the center of the lobby rotunda, the Art Deco lines of her dress contrasting the lines and angles of the marble design on the floor. She cast a glance over her shoulder, a not-at-all innocent look, either—a sly smile and a little wink.

  All these months, Michael had thought himself the schemer, redesigning their suite and giving them a do-over on the one night neither of them would ever forget. All the while, Darby had a scheme of her own.

  “You have some nerve.” He cuffed his hand around her arm the second he reached her, his face neutral but his words spoken darkly and close to her ear. “Wearing that dress in this hotel on a night when I’ve got five million dollars to raise.”

  She smiled like the cat that ate the canary. “I told you. I came to win.”

  The Game was fun they’d invented some two years before during a particularly jammed social season that found them attending two to three events a week. They hadn’t played The Game in a long time.

  Now that Michael thought about it, the circumstances were right. The Game was all about taking back a little fun for themselves when competing priorities stole too much of their time. For the past week—maybe even longer—they’d been busy with the kids. Add in all the time Michael had been away from home working on the suite, it was even longer. Now, Darby wanted to play.

  It got Michael a little harder on top of the little bit hard that he already was—the little bit hard he always was when it came to Darby. It was part of what he loved about her: she kept things interesting. And, like him, she enjoyed a little competition.

  He squeezed her arm once more before releasing the grip of his possessive hold, the first of several small punishments he would issue her that night for her shameless distraction. By the time they reached the wide-open doors of the ballroom, her hand was in his and he pinned her with a sideways glance.

  “Game on.”

  5

  Darby

  Darby wasn’t sure how Michael outdid himself every year. Stepping into the room of any event he had planned was always magic. She had been in the Grand Ballroom at The Drake on more occasions than she could count. Most event spaces had a sameness to them. Only, if she hadn’t known exactly where she was, she would have thought herself in a place she’d never been.

  Walking inside now, Darby was transported. Silver-barked trees that adorned each table hinted at the frost of winter, but flowers in deep pinks and purples burst forth. They hung down like wisteria and were framed by bright mosses and deeper leaves of green. They combined to give a sense of vibrancy and lushness.

  And it wasn’t just the tables. Well-placed topiaries added to an outdoor feel—magnificent topiaries fashioned into shapes of characters from the Nutcracker Suite. There were soldiers and Russian dancers and fairies all finished with contrasting florals on top of the green. It felt like a garden party and a holiday scene all at once, low indigo light lending magic through its twilight illusion. Michael had created the one thing all Chicagoans longed for in the dead of winter: a sense of spring.

  “Darby.”

  On Michael’s arm, she had strolled blindly into the room, her eyes not in front of her as she took it all in. By the time she heard her name, they were near the edge of a dance floor that was mostly full. Riding in on a wave of a frocked and festooned guests, she would soon be face-to-face with Don. Apart from his high school graduation, she had never seen him in a suit. That had been three-and-a-half years earlier. The man who stood before her now—so confident and mature—made her heart grow to three times its size.

  “Darby,” he repeated a bit breathlessly. “I want you to meet Sam.”

  Whereas Don was even taller than Michael’s six-foot-two with dark brown eyes and tawny skin, the bespectacled Sam was fair-skinned and freckled. He stood at around five-foot-ten, Darby’s height. His hair was dark for his skin tone, and thick. He had a geeky sort of look about him—the same sort of look Don had sported before he’d switched to contact lenses.

  “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Dr. Christensen.”

  “The pleasure is mine. Please, call me Darby. Everyone does. And I don’t practice as a physician anymore.”

  “If I may say so, that’s a shame. I’ve read some of your papers on psychopharmacological breakthroughs in opioid abuse treatment. Even outside of the opioid space, your ideas seem to be proving out. Your research is nothing short of brilliant.”

  Darby smiled in delight as Michael placed a loving hand on the back of her neck and cut in.

  “Before you got here, I was telling Sam about the research you did on the long-term effects of opioid usage on the brain. I was trying to explain AB-3135, but—” Michael cut himself off and chuckled. “You’re a lot smarter than me. Will you explain to him how the genetics piece works?”

  Darby had the presence of mind not to let her smile fade as she cast a brief glance at Michael, whose eyes twinkled with mischief that would only be visible to her. Just the week before, after having spoken as a guest on an opioid panel, she’d complained that her medical world knowledge was fading. She had quit her job as Chief of Psych at Northwestern Memorial some three years earlier to become a consultant. What most people didn’t know was that she rarely consulted in medicine—she consulted to a professional fixer about corruption and white-collar crime.

  “Actually…” She tried not to stammer. It did, indeed, take her a second to recall her explanation of AB-3135. The version she told to laypeople—once she actually remembered it—was pretty simple. Only, Sam wasn’t a layperson. He was pre-med at Stanford and she was pretty sure his level of intellectual curiosity rivaled Don’s.

  It might’ve been fine if all she’d needed to focus on was her explanation, but when Michael’s finger began a slow descent of her spine, she knew what this was. Michael would try to distract her—to flummox her so well, he would win a point in their game. No formal score was ever kept. The loser was whoever cracked and begged to be taken. It was a contest of one-upmanship played like chess, one slow move at a time.

  Most men didn’t have the skill to make a finger down the spine amount to much. Michael wasn’t most men, and Darby and Michael weren’t most couples. Michael’s touch always wielded some extraordinary power over Darby. It had happened many times: simple touches leading to sex, innocent cuddles on the sofa turning into more. The first time they’d joined the mile-high club had started with a thumb running soothingly over the top of her hand upon takeoff. Michael could play parts of her body like a violin.

  “Now, did you discover that before or after you thought through the behavioral economics of methadone?”

  Sam peppering Darby with questions under any other circumstances would have found her engaged and ready with intelligent responses. With the brush of Michael’s fingers, she was capable of neither. For anyone observing them from behind, it would look like an absent, loving touch. Only, Michael never did anything absently. He didn’t have the better of her, but she was far too slow to the uptake.

  “You know? I think at dinner, you’d better sit by me,” Darby responded instead of answering Sam’s question. Taking a deliberate step away from Michael, she took Sam’s arm. “Come on. Let’s find our table.”

  She looked behind her long enough to mouth an approving “He’s cute” to Don, then a disapproving “You’re an asshole” to Michael, who just smirked in a way that said he knew he’d won the point.

  6

  Michael

  “Good to see you, Michael.”

  Dirk Burgess, who couldn’t have been older than fifty but dressed like he was stuck in the early s
eventies clapped Michael hard on the back as he arrived at the table and began to sit down. Michael had stood to greet him upon seeing Dirk’s approach. Though the affair was black tie, Dirk wore a dark green tux with a subtly ruffled cummerbund. Either it was an impeccably preserved vintage piece, or he’d had it custom-made.

  “You remember Darby…” Michael trailed off, more a statement than a question, stepping back to make way for the two of them to greet one another. Sam and Don had begun meeting some of the other guests. They were seated at Darby’s left. Darby remained seated but extended her hand.

  After Dirk sat, Michael followed and Darby settled back into her earlier posture: holding hands with Michael under the table, leaning in slightly a little to him.

  “Lovely as always…” Dirk trailed off with a bit of the adolescent humor he seemed to carry everywhere. Like Darby, Dirk was an old money Chicagoan. They were from different age cohorts, but they had known each other since forever. Dirk was an oddball, but not without his own charm.

  He turned back to Michael.

  “I take it it’s no mistake you and I are sitting together. The end of the year is in nine days and I haven’t made my pledge.”

  There wasn’t much cloak and dagger with fundraising, let alone at a benefit gala. The big fish knew they were going to be asked. Michael knew the donors he courted well enough to know what they needed to hear.

  “You’re the last person I have to convince about the work the foundation does. Tonight is about thanking our supporters and recognizing the heroes who are making strides around treatments and cures. I’d love to see you join our Leadership Circle to the extent you’ve been important to the direction of the organization. But I’ll let the program speak for itself. For now, just have a good time.”

  As if taking this advice directly, Dirk picked up his wine glass the second the passing waiter filled it up, taking a long gulp before pointing at Michael to punctuate his thought.

  “That’s what I like about you.”

  Michael chuckled. “You like that I didn’t just ask you for money?”

  “I like that you don’t beg. Some of these fundraising types are so busy kissing your ass and giving you a reacharound, you leave feeling like you got rode hard and put away wet. I like that you don’t bust my ball.”

  Dirk also liked to work testicle references into conversation. He always talked in the singular form about his own. Dirk didn’t give to testicular cancer causes just because he was a multimillionaire. He gave because he was a survivor.

  “That happened to Michael once at an event,” Darby chimed in. “At a wedding, actually. Cougar at eleven o’clock. Had her hands all over Michael’s goods before they even served the chicken.”

  Darby leaned in conspiratorially, as if coming closer so as not to repeat such a risqué story so loud. Neither Dirk nor anyone else would suspect that—at that very moment—Darby’s hand was creeping up the inside of Michael’s thigh.

  “Oh yeah?” Dirk asked with interest, his gaze now on Michael’s face and—thankfully—not on Darby or on points lower. After the high jinks of the past half hour, Michael might have expected Darby to pull something like this.

  Twenty minutes earlier, Don and Sam had been talking through plans to backpack through Europe for the summer. They’d asked Darby and Michael to recommend where to go. It didn’t take Michael long to put together, Darby’s suggestions were very specific: she was only mentioning places where they’d had sex. The Piazza della Repubblica in Rome. The steps of Notre Dame. A balcony in the Basque Country during the running of the bulls. When she told them to take a night train to Zurich and steer clear of the crowded cars, Michael had given her a good pinch on her thigh.

  “Not the best wedding dinner I’ve ever been to…” Michael tried to keep his end of the conversation going even as Darby’s fingers found his lengthening cock. She gave it a maddeningly slow stroke from the outside. There was something glorious about that particular friction—the fabric of his pants against the silk of his boxers—the silk of his boxers against his skin.

  It was far from the first time Darby had fondled Michael under a table. The first time had been at a yacht party in Mallorca. That one had ended with Darby feigning seasickness and the two of them disappearing to the back of the boat to “get some air”. While their friends had enjoyed dessert, he had bent her over the railing and fucked her hard.

  “So what’d you do?” Dirk asked with interest.

  Michael turned toward Darby, telling a half-truth in his response. “Actually, Darby saved me that night. Swooped in on a rescue mission. Gave us an excuse to not have to go back to that table.”

  Darby chimed in with agreement. “Yeah, there was no going back. Her husband was right there.”

  Dirk pursed his lips and let out a long breath. “Man, some women are just hot to trot. But can you imagine if you did that at a wedding as a guy? You’d leave that place in handcuffs, man.”

  From there, Dirk launched into a diatribe about double standards for physical boundaries and the objectification of women vs. men. If Michael had been in better control of his faculties, he might have been impressed. But he was not in control of his faculties—not with Darby touching him through his pants just the way he liked it. Not when they’d been so preoccupied with the kids, they hadn’t fucked in a week.

  To Darby’s credit, she carried most of the conversation with Dirk. On second thought, she owed Michael. It was the least she could do for the state she had him in. Michael was saved when the microphone was tapped and the Executive Director took the stage. People at all tables quieted. Before lending his attention to the program, Dirk looked back to Michael one final time.

  “Call me Monday. I’ll write you a check.”

  7

  Darby

  “Gorgeous dress.” A woman who Darby didn’t know complimented her as they passed one another on the outer perimeter of the gala. Darby had excused herself from dinner long enough to go to the ladies room—not before doing Michael the courtesy of zipping him back up. She hadn’t gone so far as to pull him out, which would have been impossible to do without unfastening his pants button given his size. But her own small hand could fit inside the zipper opening.

  Throughout the first two speeches, she’d kept him on the brink with squeezes and strokes. Ostensibly, they sat huddled, his arm around her as they watched the speakers. To an outsider, the words he spoke to her from time to time might have been whispered observations. In truth, they were growled warnings of all the filthy ways he would punish her.

  “Thank you.” Darby smiled and took the compliment from the woman as she walked on. She knew the halls of The Drake well enough to slip back into the ballroom through a side door, which would let her shortcut back to her table. The dramatic columns that flanked the main area had open space behind. Right then, they were simple corridors—back channels between the columns and the wall.

  Darby nearly jumped out of her skin when someone slipped in next to her, taking her elbow and halting her walk. She was halfway to jerking away—and protesting loudly—when she heard the warning rumble of Michael’s voice.

  “Looks like I win…”

  Darby was still getting over her shock when he pulled her aside. Based on the angle where he placed them behind the column, they would be outside of any partygoer’s view, though anyone who used the shortcut in the same way Darby had would see them just fine. Speeches continued on the main floor of the event. Darby recognized the voice of one of Michael’s board mates. Someone was getting an award.

  “How do you figure that?” Darby smoothed the front of her dress. By her estimation, Michael wasn’t winning at all.

  “You’re the only one who called for mercy. But each time you tried to get me, I held my own.”

  Darby rolled her eyes. “The speeches started in the middle of your conversation with Dirk. You won that round by default. Everything that happened after was just a bonus.”

  He leaned in close to her then, pinning her
against the column in a very pleasing way.

  “What do you say we settle this upstairs?”

  From nowhere, he produced a touchless key card bearing the hotel’s name.

  “Didn’t you say you had five million dollars to raise tonight?”

  Last Darby had checked, it was barely nine o’clock. In her experience, generosity flowed more freely after a few drinks at the end of the evening.

  “I just got a text with some very good news. Besides, all work, no play makes Michael a dull boy.”

  Darby got serious for a minute, knowing that despite their little game, this was his event and it probably behooved him to stick around. It brought up some guilt. Maybe she had gone too far.

  “Michael. I’ll still be here at the end of the night.”

  The flash of humor that had crept into his eyes faded. “I know with this project I’ve been working on…I’ve been scarce.” He brought his hand up to her face, letting the side of his finger trace her jaw. “I’m done with fundraising. The night is ours. And this is a hotel. I got us a room.”

  “So you wanna make it up to me?” The playfulness returned to her voice. He leaned in closer, the press of his body against hers swelling her own arousal. Teasing him had turned her on, too. Darby had a good poker face, but she was more than ready.

  “How are you gonna do it?” She loved the way he smelled when he was this close—his cinnamon gum and Scotch Whiskey and the fresh tobacco and citrus of his soap. Even in the dark, his blue eyes smoldered.

  “Very, very thoroughly,” he murmured. “Meet me up there. I’ll be up in five. I just have to let Andrew know I’m heading out.”

  He pressed the key into her hand at the same time he pressed a lingering kiss to her lips. It made her smile and swoon and want to snake her hand around his neck to pull him in for more. Before she could, he disappeared as quickly as he had come.