The Mistletoe Pact: A totally perfect Christmas romantic comedy

by Lovett, Jo

  She smiled at him and his breath caught.

  Thirty-Five

  Now – October 2022

  Evie

  It was Wednesday evening and Evie had to be up at the crack of dawn tomorrow to help supervise Year Nine netball practice at seven thirty – just hideous – but she was still sure about inviting Dan in. They’d had an amazing evening so far and it felt like the natural next step.

  ‘I’m very sure. I need a coffee to carry on digesting.’

  ‘Then I’d love to.’ His smile was slow and held a lot of promises.

  Woah. Evie had just had a serious stomach lurch. He was coming inside. Thank God she was wearing matching underwear. Not that drinking coffee with someone meant that you were necessarily going to undress in front of them.

  It would be seriously disappointing if no undressing happened, though.

  They held hands all the way up the stairs to the flat, which was a bit cheesy, but felt really, really nice.

  ‘So here we are,’ she said, once they were inside. They weren’t holding hands any more, because the front door was stiff and impossible to open without both hands plus a bit of a kick. Josh talked a lot about oiling it but never got round to it.

  She took all the teddies and put them in an armchair.

  ‘Thank you. This is lovely,’ said Dan, looking around the room from where he was still standing, next to the door.

  ‘It is. I fell on my feet big time being able to rent from Josh. And as I might have said a few thousand times before, I love the location. And I’ve almost stopped noticing when the whole building shakes because of the trains going past.’

  Dan laughed. ‘It’s all about compromise. Same with my flat – it’s such a luxury being able to walk to work but it’s absolutely tiny. And smells very strongly of curry, from the restaurant downstairs, which I don’t mind at all, because I love curry, other than when I’m trying to cook something different, like Italian, when you get a bit of a smell clash.’

  They were standing on opposite sides of the room, Dan with his hands in his jeans pockets but his thumbs out, and Evie with her hands clasped together in front of her.

  ‘So I’ll put the kettle on,’ she said. Mia was away this week on a work trip and Josh was staying over at Fergus’s, as he did increasingly often because Fergus’s flat was a lot closer to his office. So anything could happen right now and they wouldn’t be disturbed.

  ‘Great,’ said Dan.

  And then they looked at each other and Dan took his hands out of his pockets and Evie unclasped her hands and they moved towards each other and suddenly Evie had her hands on Dan’s shoulders and his hands were cradling her face and they were kissing, urgently, madly, wonderfully, like the world might be ending.

  They fell backwards onto the sofa, and God it was good.

  Such a good call on the matching underwear.

  Dan was kissing her everywhere and she was kissing him and between kisses she couldn’t stop smiling and he was smiling too, and this was just amazing.

  * * *

  There was a very loud ringing noise. It sounded like Evie’s alarm. It was her phone. How could it be her phone? It was the middle of the night. She was so tired. Her limbs were so heavy. And they were wrapped around Dan’s limbs. She turned herself over and pressed Stop on her phone.

  Woah. Her head was so fuzzy from lack of sleep. She didn’t really want to turn back round and look at Dan. What if this was like Vegas and he was full of regret and couldn’t get away from her fast enough? Although, really, that had been completely different. They’d been drunk then but sober last night. They’d known last night that they were on a date. Still, though.

  Their legs were still tangled together. She started to inch away from him and then felt him reach an arm round her waist and pull her towards him. He moved her hair out of the way and kissed the back of her neck and her shoulder.

  ‘Morning,’ he said, his voice sleepy and deep. It sounded as though he was smiling.

  Suddenly Evie really needed to see his face. She wriggled and twisted round.

  And, yes, he was smiling. He was smiling very broadly, looking very contented.

  ‘That was an incredible night,’ he said. He ran his hand all the way from her thigh up her side and Evie shivered deliciously. ‘What time did you say you need to leave for work?’ he said, following his hand with kisses.

  ‘Mmm,’ Evie said. She had her hands on his hard chest and he had his hands and mouth on her and she was trying to think but it was really hard. ‘I think early.’

  ‘How early?’ Oh, God, he was skilled with his hands.

  ‘Mmm.’

  Damn, damn, damn. So bloody late. Evie leapt from the cab almost before it had stopped, waved at Dan, and sprinted through the school gates.

  ‘Morning, Miss Khera, morning, girls,’ she shouted to everyone on the netball court. ‘So sorry I’m late. My Tube train got stuck in a tunnel.’

  ‘Miss, was that your husband in that taxi?’ Delilah, one of the Year Nine girls, had just run in behind her. Evie sighed. Unlucky that someone had spotted her, given that she’d been fifteen minutes late. Lucky, though, that they’d only been that late. You could shave a lot of time off your morning routine if you missed breakfast and took a cab. Expensive, though.

  ‘No,’ said Evie, shaking her head and trying not to smile, ‘just a friend.’

  ‘OMG,’ Priya – aka Miss Khera – said to her, when Evie reached the other side of the court. ‘Your smile. Who was it in the taxi?’

  ‘Honestly, just a friend who was going in the same direction.’

  ‘Please. At seven thirty in the morning?’ Priya said. ‘I’m going to need details later.’

  Evie rolled her eyes but it was hard not to smirk with extreme happiness. It really felt like this could be going somewhere.

  Thirty-Six

  Now – October 2022

  Dan

  ‘You look like you had a good night, mate,’ leered the taxi driver as Dan paid him outside Wimbledon station.

  ‘Yeah, we did actually,’ said Dan, knowing that he was smiling stupidly and really not caring. He was probably going to smile stupidly for the rest of the day. He wondered if it was too soon to text Evie. He checked his watch as he walked into the station. Yep, it was only about fifteen minutes since they’d said goodbye. And she’d be busy with the netball practice. He should probably play it cool. Or at least wait until, say, another fifteen minutes had passed before sending her a text, which he was pretty sure would say something goofy, because he wasn’t going to be able to help himself.

  He was pretty sure he was in love.

  He really hoped she’d be able to meet for a coffee again next week, because they couldn’t get together properly until Sunday in ten days’ time, because they both had a lot of work commitments and Evie was out with friends on Friday night and he had Katie staying over – for the first time – on Saturday night, and was meeting Zubin and some other friends for beers on Sunday evening.

  God, he missed Evie already.

  * * *

  Dan’s mother came up to London for lunch on Saturday, to spend time with Dan, she said, but he was pretty sure that her main motivation was – understandably – to coo over her youngest grandchild. She arrived laden with soft toys and books that she just happened to have spotted when she’d just happened to be passing a toy shop in Cheltenham the other day. If she carried on like this, Dan’s flat was going to resemble a toy shop itself.

  They took Katie out for a walk in her pram, after which Dan’s mum gave her a bottle of Hannah’s expressed milk before Dan put her down for her sleep.

  ‘So what have you been up to the last couple of weeks?’ he asked his mum as they ate curry from downstairs for lunch. ‘Sorry I haven’t had a chance to call much. I’ve been really busy with work and things.’ Evie. He hoped he wasn’t smiling too goofily at the thought of her.

  ‘Jenny and I started playing darts again. We’ve been practising in her friend Grant
’s pub. I can’t understand why she can’t see that he’s so obviously the man for her.’

  ‘Maybe it’s a very slow burn thing.’

  ‘Incredibly slow burn. They met at Lucie’s wedding and that was six years ago.’

  ‘Yeah, that is a long time. What about you? Have you been out anywhere else recently?’

  ‘Did Sasha say anything to you? She did, didn’t she?’ Nope, it had been Evie who’d mentioned that Jenny had told her that his mum had been asked out for dinner by a very nice architect friend. A seriously foxy silver fox, according to Jenny. ‘I decided that I’m not ready to meet anyone again yet.’ Five years since she and his father had split up and she still wasn’t ready to go for dinner with someone. Dan was really going to struggle to ever forgive his father, no matter how many tickets to the rugby he offered him.

  ‘There’s no hurry about these things,’ Dan said, feeling like he was floundering. This wasn’t the kind of conversation you wanted to have with your mother. He shouldn’t have started it. ‘Speaking of nice meals, try some of the prawn biryani. Best one I’ve ever tasted.’

  * * *

  It was a huge wrench to hand Katie over to Hannah on Sunday afternoon. Dan was busy for the rest of the day, with laundry and some admin to do before he met his friends for their early dinner, but it still felt like he had a baby-shaped hole in his heart knowing that he wasn’t going to see her again until Wednesday evening this week, and then only for an hour before her bedtime.

  Presumably as she got older it wouldn’t seem so bad, because he’d get used to it, and teenagers and adults didn’t live in their parents’ pockets, but right now it really felt like he and Hannah were both missing out not getting to live full-time with Katie.

  He was halfway through ironing his work shirts for the week, still not in the best of moods, when a message came through from his father. He hoped Dan wouldn’t mind but he was going to have to take some important colleagues to the rugby instead of him and Max and Greggy.

  He was so pissed off.

  Hurt, he was hurt.

  He was in his mid-thirties and he’d been hurt yet again by his own father. It wasn’t the rugby – they could watch that on TV if they wanted to see it – it was that in his father’s eyes rebuilding their relationship was apparently less important than sucking up to some colleagues.

  He should say something.

  Nope. He wasn’t going to stoop to that level. He was just going to ignore him.

  Nope. He wasn’t going to do that either. He was going to be polite and move on. He sent a No worries message and stared at the wall opposite for a long time until he heard a strange noise from the iron and realised he’d left it flat on top of his favourite blue shirt and burned a hole in it. Marvellous.

  God, family relationships were shit.

  You wanted to stick with just friends. Friends didn’t hurt you.

  Thirty-Seven

  Now – November 2022

  Evie

  Evie woke up latish the following Sunday morning and lay under her lovely warm duvet for a few minutes, regrouping.

  Sunday. Dan. They were meeting at two thirty at Portobello Market. And then they might go for a walk and grab an early dinner, or, say, go back to one of their flats and have afternoon sex. So exciting. It was a week and a half since she’d seen him, and she couldn’t wait.

  She’d thought they were going to meet quickly during the week but he hadn’t been able to get away from work in the end, and he’d been fairly monosyllabic with his texts over the past few days, but that was understandable given the full-on nature of his job.

  Right. She was going to get out of bed now and this morning she was going to paint her toenails, pop to the shops for some nicer coffee, just in case they came back to her flat and got as far as actually having a cup of anything, and maybe buy some fresh flowers for the sitting room, change her bedsheets, and finish some marking.

  Honestly, she actually felt like squealing in excitement about the day ahead.

  What was she going to wear this afternoon? Maybe her new jeans with a loose top over a camisole.

  Evie had just got home with the coffee, some flowers and a nice new scarf for herself, plus a book that Dan had been saying that he wanted to read that had just come out in paperback, when her phone pinged.

  It was a text from Dan. She balanced all her shopping in one hand and swiped her phone. Probably a Looking forward to seeing you message. Only a couple of hours now until they were meeting.

  Evie, I’m so sorry but I think we should maybe cancel this afternoon. I’m worried things are going too fast for both of us. I’m so sorry. Dan x

  Evie dropped her phone on the sofa, dumped the flowers in the sink, plonked the coffee, book and scarf on the work surface, and sat down hard on the sofa next to the phone.

  She read the message again and sniffed and scrubbed her eyes.

  Bastard. Or not a bastard. Yes, a bastard. If he wanted to dump her, fair enough, his prerogative, but by text for fuck’s sake. He could have had the courtesy to bloody call her at the very least.

  She went into her bedroom, closed the door behind her and sank onto her bed. Then she lay down and rolled onto her tummy and cried, a lot, for several minutes. And then she just lay there, feeling truly bereft.

  Her phone rang a few minutes later, while she was still lying there doing nothing. She ignored it. There was no-one she could bear to talk to right now.

  It kept on ringing, stopped and restarted. And again.

  Oh, God, what if this was the actual worst day of her life and something terrible had happened to her mum or Autumn. Or Sasha. She picked it up and looked at the screen.

  It was Dan. God, it was tragic the way her heart leapt when she saw his name on her screen, because maybe he was calling to say his text had been a mistake, and then plummeted again, because of course he wasn’t.

  Whatever, she might as well speak to him. Just in case.

  ‘Hi, Dan.’

  ‘Evie, hi. I’m sorry. I just… I’m sorry. I’m scared and I don’t think I can do this and I wanted to tell you in person. I’m sorry.’

  Right. No. She couldn’t talk to him right now. It hurt too much.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘I’ve got to go.’

  Evie’s mum phoned straight after Dan had ended the call.

  ‘I’m so stupid,’ she wailed as soon as Evie swiped green. ‘Alex has apparently been sleeping with three different women at the same time.’ Alex was her latest OMG-he-might-be-the-One. After her longest ever period – a good six months – on the no-men wagon, she’d fallen off about a month ago. ‘He wasn’t serious about any of us. What’s wrong with me? I always read too much into things. Like I believe what I want to believe. And you’re my daughter and I’m your mother and you don’t need to hear this about my life. And I’m going to be okay. I’m going to go to the cinema with Grant this evening and cry on his shoulder. Tell me about you. How’s your day going?’

  Evie’s day was going pretty similarly, actually. She’d been believing what she wanted to believe about Dan. She was just like her mum. Not surprising, really.

  In the same way that it was really bloody obvious to everyone except Evie’s mum that Grant was the man for her, it was probably obvious to everyone but Evie that Dan was not the man for her.

  The one difference between her and her mum in this instance was that she hadn’t really told anyone about her and Dan. Not even Sasha. Maybe she’d subconsciously worried that something like this would happen.

  * * *

  A week later, Evie had just trudged home from the supermarket with her groceries, after an entire week of trudging, basically, because the whole of life felt like a bit of a chore with Dan definitively not in it, when she got a message from Matthew. It was out of the blue; they’d only spoken once since they split up, to give each other some belongings back. Their split had been amicable, but Matthew had seemed very hurt and had said he didn’t want to stay in touch, which Evie had fel
t awful about.

  Did she want to join him for a charity quiz night the following Friday evening? Not really. Life felt too boring to be bothered to do anything. And she’d already done one quiz night this year. Two in the space of about nine months felt like overkill.

  But, actually, she should snap out of this. She couldn’t mourn her relationship – such as it had ever been – with Dan forever. He clearly wasn’t the right person for her. She didn’t want to end up like her mum. Maybe Matthew was her Grant. Maybe this was a sign. She was going to go.

  * * *

  The quiz night had been better than expected – it was actually really nice to see Matthew again, and there’d been a musicals round and a seventies music round, both of which Evie had shone in – and now she and Matthew were wandering along the Broadway in Wimbledon together in the direction of both the station and Evie’s flat.

  They came to the little junction where they’d say goodnight if Matthew wasn’t going to come back to Evie’s flat with her: decision time.

  Matthew was lovely. Matthew wouldn’t hurt her. And if you ever needed someone to answer golf questions at a quiz night he was a complete legend. In fact, their general knowledge was completely different. You could say they had little in common, or you could say that they complemented each other perfectly.