by Nella Tyler
“What else is there to do on Christmas Eve?” Mackenzie shrugged, the smile tugging at the corners of her lips driving me almost crazy with the desire to kiss her. “I can never sleep on Christmas Eve anyway—ever since I was a kid. I might as well be doing something.”
“I hear you there,” I agreed. You could be having sex. That’d be a great way to spend Christmas Eve: making love all night until Landon wakes us up. I pushed the thought aside, remembering what Mack had said about not thinking she was destined to have kids, or even get married.
We wandered from one store to another, and while I tried to think of a way to bring the conversation around to our relationship, I couldn’t think of anything. I bought a few odds and ends for Landon’s stocking, a few little things for my nieces and nephews; all of the kids in my family were still at an age where they were more excited by the fact that they had presents to unwrap than by the actual presents themselves. Even Landon, in spite of his list of things he wanted, had been thrilled the year before just to tear paper off of packages, to see what surprises were in store for him. “How do you do Landon’s presents?” I looked up from a big wall of puzzles at Mackenzie’s question.
“What do you mean?” I picked one of the easier puzzles and tucked it under my arm; it would be a good family present for my sister’s family—something they could all do together on a rainy day.
“I mean do you stick with his list, or do you split it up with the rest of the family, or some of what he wants and some of what he needs?”
“He gets a few things from his list, a few things that I know he needs, and a few things that I think he’d like, but that he didn’t ask for.” I shrugged. “The whole family exchanges lists, so we keep track of who’s getting what for the kids. Landon gets most of what’s on his list, but he doesn’t get everything and then some.”
“That’s a smart way to do it,” Mackenzie said. “When I was a kid, the rule was: something you want, something you need, something to wear and something to read.”
“Big book people?” Mackenzie chuckled.
“My grandfather only had a seventh-grade education,” she explained. “But he managed to educate himself well enough to become an accountant, back when you didn’t need a degree for it. So he was always super passionate about reading and books.”
“Sounds like a good guy,” I said. “Maybe I should start getting Landon into reading more.”
“It’s a great thing,” Mackenzie said. “I like the way you’re doing it though—it’s good to have some surprises, some things you never would have expected to get.”
“Landon’s at that age, you know?” I picked up another puzzle and then put it down, deciding against it; I couldn’t think of anyone in the family who would actually want it. “As long as he’s tearing wrapping paper off of presents, he almost doesn’t really care what it is inside.”
Mackenzie laughed. “One of my nephews is at that age too,” she said.
“You must be the favorite aunt,” I pointed out. “With—with no kids of your own, you’re not as stressed out. And you’re great with kids.”
“I’m great with kids in part because of my nieces and nephews,” Mackenzie said. “Lots of practice, and lots of seeing them at different ages.”
“So Aunt Mackie,” I said, trying the nickname out for size. “Do you get them all the coolest toys?”
“I get them some cool toys,” Mackenzie said. “But mostly I’m good at picking out things that their parents don’t think of. I’ll see something in a store, and it’ll remind me of one of the tykes.”
“It’s a shame that you don’t think you’re going to ever be in the position to spoil some kids of your own,” I said, taking the plunge. “I think you’d be great at it.” Mackenzie shrugged.
“I’ve mostly made peace with it,” she said. “I mean after all, if I can’t find someone to have those kids with…” she stopped short, looking at something in a display. “Can you do me a favor, Patrick?”
“What’s that?”
Mackenzie picked up a little make-your-own kite set and showed it to me. “If I buy this, will you give it to Landon, from me?” she blushed. “I can’t really give it to him at the clinic—it’d be mean to the other kids. But he was telling me the other day that you and he talk about flying kites when it gets warmer.”
“I can do that,” I said, smiling. She wants to buy a present for Landon. She’s thinking about him. That has to mean something. “Are you going to get me something for Christmas too?” Mackenzie’s blush deepened and she turned away, taking her wallet out of her purse to pay for the presents she’d selected.
“I have actually been agonizing over whether I should,” she admitted. I caught the sight of her licking her lips in profile. “Especially these last couple of days I didn’t know if I was going to see you in time to be able to give you a gift…”
“And now we’re shopping together,” I said. “It wouldn’t really be a surprise then, would it?”
“Nope,” she agreed. “So you kind of shot yourself in the foot, suggesting we do our shopping together. No Christmas present for you.”
We went up to the fifth level, and grabbed dinner from Potbelly’s: Italian for me, and roast beef for Mack, and we settled into the first seats we could find to eat. Stop hedging and just ask her, I thought, watching Mackenzie closely as she took bites of her sandwich and sipped her milkshake.
“I was hoping that I might be able to see you again, now that things aren’t so crazy,” I told her. I was still hedging, still avoiding asking her outright—I’d become a complete coward. “I’m going to have the week from Christmas Eve until New Year’s Day off.”
“I’m not sure what my schedule’s going to look like,” Mackenzie said quickly. “They’re putting off the roster for holiday overtime until the last minute, same as last year.” She looked at me for a moment and then reached down to tug one of the slipping shopping bags closer to her. “Plus, you know—family. They want to spend as much time with me as possible, and the holidays are really the only time everyone’s free.”
“I hear that,” I said. “I was just thinking—you know. I feel really bad about canceling on you, and then sort of dropping off the radar for a while.”
“It happens,” Mackenzie said. “I get it. I’m a pretty busy person most of the time too.” She gave me a brief smile. “And I don’t even have a kid. So don’t worry about it too much.” I wished—god how I wished—that I could suggest that she could come home with me. I thought that if I could get her alone, if I could just spend a little bit of time with Mackenzie, that I’d know for sure how she felt. Every time you’ve had sex with her it’s been great. She’s been great. I’d gone so long without it that now that I’d gotten a little taste, I was thinking about it at least five times a day. “I think I’m done,” Mackenzie said, surveying her bags. “I mean—unless you had something else to do.”
“I’ve got to make sure Landon isn’t driving his aunt crazy,” I said. “I could walk you to your car though.”
When we got to her car, I managed to scrounge up enough courage to kiss her; Mackenzie melted against me, and the urge to call and tell my sister that I’d be late to pick Landon up was almost unbearable. But a little voice inside my head told me that I was just delaying the inevitable. I kissed her one last, quick time. “I’ll get in touch after the holiday,” I said. “I’d love to see you again, and soon.”
“That would be really nice,” Mackenzie said. I turned away to find my car, and tried not to wonder how I could spend almost two hours with a woman and not know for sure whether she loved me or not.
Chapter Five
Mackenzie
I had expected that the date with Patrick would finally make everything clear to me; I’d know for sure whether or not he was interested in me, or if he’d moved on. Instead when I went home I had been more confused than ever. To make matters worse, the day after the date was my day off from work; I was going to be spending the whole day by mys
elf, dwelling on the strangeness of the date and trying to figure out what to think.
Patrick had said that he wanted to see me again—sometime during the holiday week. But he hadn’t made any specific timeframe, and he hadn’t texted me after we’d parted for the night. He hadn’t even mentioned wanting to come home with me; though that might be as much because he had to think about Landon as anything else. We’d made out—and it had been as hot as ever—but before that the whole date had been awkward. And then, of course, there was the fact that he’d been avoiding me, and he hadn’t given me any kind of reason for it. Something about his excuse about being busy just didn’t add up to me, though I couldn’t say what.
Instead of torturing myself all day, after I got up and had some breakfast, I called Amie. Even if I wasn’t sure whether or not I could fully trust her with information about my relationship with Patrick, I wanted her company, and she was one of the only other people in the office who had the day off so close to Christmas. “Hey, Amie,” I said when she picked up the phone.
“What’s up? I would’ve thought you’d be hanging out with Patrick.” I rolled my eyes, even though I knew she couldn’t see.
“He’s at work,” I pointed out. “I was wondering if you’d want to come over and help me wrap presents.”
“Sure! As long as you’ve got some wine for me to drink when I get there.”
“Are you even supposed to be drinking with the medications you’re on?”
“I’ll skip a dose; I’ll need to do that anyway, with having to take the bus to get there.”
“I can pick you up,” I pointed out.
“Nope. I’m going to hop the bus in ten minutes—it’s going right by my place to your place. Don’t even think about getting in your car. The roads are icy.” Before I could argue the point—to try and tell Amie that if the roads were bad enough that she didn’t want me to drive, they were bad enough that walking to the bus stop, especially with her injuries, would be miserable—she hung up on me. I shook my head and chuckled to myself, and got up to get ready for her to arrive.
I grabbed a cheap bottle of red wine that one of my patients’ parents had given me as a Christmas gift and poured it into a pot with some spices, sliced an orange and a lemon and added them too. I set it on the stove to heat up a little bit—Amie would definitely be even happier to have not only wine, but hot wine to enjoy when she got to my place. I pulled out all of the things I needed to wrap, including the presents I’d gotten for the clinic’s holiday party the next day. We had two big gift-giving things for the party: one was a Secret Santa with a limit of $15, and the other was a $5 “stuff the stockings” gift.
In twenty minutes, there was a knock at my door, and I hurried to let Amie into my apartment. “I can smell wine,” she said, giving me a quick, awkward hug with her injured arm dangling, a big bag full of gifts to be wrapped hung on her other shoulder.
“Not just wine,” I said, leading her into my kitchen. “Mulled wine.” I turned off the heat and added a little bit of sugar and big splash of brandy from a bottle I kept around mostly for cooking, and in a minute we were sitting at my kitchen table together, drinking our wine, talking about the office gossip.
“Who’d you get for secret Santa?” I rolled my eyes; no one was supposed to know, but since Amie was going to be helping me wrap presents, there was no point in even trying to keep it a secret.
“I got Mary-Ann,” I said. “I got one of those gift sets from Bath and Body Works for her, since she wears all that lotion and stuff.”
“I got Jim,” Amie said, making a face. “I got him a couple of mini-bottles of bourbon on special and a gift card to the hardware store.” I laughed; Jim was another one of the physical therapists, and one of the manliest men I’d ever met in my life—he’d be delighted with the present Amie had gotten him. “If it wasn’t for the fact that he’s got a wife already, and a kid on the way—only you didn’t hear it from me—I’d ask him out.” Amie sighed.
“Please! As if you need another man in your life. You’re juggling what—three guys right now?”
“Two,” Amie said, shaking her head. “Me getting injured freaked Dave out and he split on me.”
“Men are shameful creatures,” I told her, doing my best Southern Belle impression.
“You say that when you got one of the good ones?”
I shrugged it off.
“What’s going on with you and Patrick, by the way?”
“Let’s get this wrapping started,” I suggested. I took another sip of the hot, strong wine and stood carefully; it was already starting to hit me.
“Well if you don’t want to talk about it…” Amie followed me into the living room with her wine and we got down to work on wrapping our different presents. She had gotten a bunch of nice pens for everyone for her “stuff the stocking,” in different colors so that everyone would know which was whose; one of the most common rights in the office was the chronic shortage of pens—with everyone accusing everyone else of stealing “their” pen.
I put on some Christmas music and we got down to work, chatting about what we wanted to do over the holidays, comparing New Year’s Eve plans. I figured that I would be spending my night with my family, and told Amie as much. “Are you bringing Patrick to meet everyone? It seems a bit soon for that.”
“Probably not,” I said with a shrug, concentrating for a moment on a tricky corner on one of the presents for my Dad. “I’m sure he’s probably got plans already.”
“Probably?” I glanced at Amie’s face to see the look of surprise on her features. “Probably? Amie—if you’re dating him, you should know whether he’s got plans for New Year’s or not. Did you even invite him to your parents’ party?”
“No.” I finished taping down a tail of wrapping paper and turned the box around to make sure it didn’t look weird. “I don’t know if I want him to come with me to the party.”
“Why not? He’s cute, and it’d get your parents off your back for at least a few weeks.”
“Yeah, and they’ll spend half the night asking him about how many dates we’ve been on, about what he does for a living, whether he’s planning on having kids…” I felt my cheeks burning as the real reason for not inviting him nagged at me: I didn’t know whether or not I was, strictly speaking, even still in a relationship with Patrick.
“You’re hiding something from me about the guy,” Amie said, frowning and crossing her arms over her chest. “Come on, Mack. If he’s done something to hurt you…”
“It’s not really his fault,” I said. “At least—I don’t think it is. I mean, it’s just gotten weird between us. That isn’t anyone’s fault, right?”
“That depends,” Amie told me. “How has it gotten weird?”
“Just…” I sighed. “Let me get us both some more of the wine. I’m going to need it to explain.”
I stood up and gestured for Amie to stay where she was, seated on my living room floor. I went into the kitchen and refilled our glasses, taking as much time as I dared. When I came back into the living room, Amie had finished off another one of her pen packages and was waiting for me to start talking.
“Okay, so…”
“So the other day, he had to cancel one of our dates,” I explained. “I didn’t really think anything about it; he said he had a business dinner he had to go to, which I guess makes sense.”
“You had to cancel on him the night I got hurt,” Amie said. “So what’s the deal?”
“In the back of my head I was…” I frowned and took a sip of my wine. “I guess I was suspicious but I didn’t really say anything. He promised to make it up to me with a date that was twice as good, and that he’d bring me flowers, the whole deal—you know?”
“Sounds like he’s better than even I thought!” Amie worked away at another package. “Where does it get weird?”
“Well after he canceled, I figured he’d text me or call me that night to reschedule, you know? At least to set a date. But he didn’t. And w
hen I texted him the next morning to ask how the dinner was, he said it was just about how he’d expected…but normally he kind of gets flirty when he replies.”
“That can’t be it.”
“It isn’t. You haven’t been working, so you haven’t seen Landon coming into the clinic alone.”
“Alone?”
“His dad’s out in the car. Supposedly working. You know—busy since it’s about to be a week away from the office, and he has to make sure everything is as it should be before everything shuts down.”
“He could work in the waiting room. Or at your desk.”
“Exactly,” I said. I shook my head. “So I started to feel like he was avoiding me, but I didn’t really know what to do about it. Finally, last night I called him to just basically ask if we were okay.”
“And what was his reaction?” Amie took a long drink of her wine.
“He said he’s just been really busy, and he asked if I had any plans last night. I didn’t, so he suggested that we do some Christmas shopping together.”
“That sounds promising.”
“It kind of was,” I agreed. “But then I got to the mall and everything was weird between us the whole time. He hugged me and kissed me but there was—it was like there was some weird thing between us. Like we weren’t talking at the same speed, even though we were.”
“Ah.” Amie nodded. “So how did the date end? Did you just throw yourselves at each other and go up in a blaze of awkward passion?”
“Nope.” I sighed. “We made out a little bit and then he had to go pick up his son. We couldn’t have gone home together even if it hadn’t been so weird.”
“You’re right; men are all shameful creatures,” Amie said. She raised her glass and I clinked mine against it, and for a while we went back to wrapping presents without even addressing the topic of Patrick.
We finally finished up both of our wrapping chores, and managed to finish off the wine, too. Instead of taking the bus, Amie decided that she was going to spend the money to catch a cab, and I offered to give her some leftovers out of my freezer so she wouldn’t have to cook.
