Claustrophobic

by Bernadette Franklin

  “But would I have to sell my soul to her? Because Kristine’s dress does not fit me, Julian. At all.”

  “Personally, I think it fits you wonderfully.”

  “It really doesn’t. Breathing is mandatory.”

  “It’d be a problem if you were to faint due to a lack of oxygen. Your bag has the dress in it?”

  “It does.”

  “My mother plays a mean game of Scrabble, and if she beats us both, we go fifty-fifty on the wager. You get sixteen hours of chauffer time for me, you get me as Santa’s helper for two Sundays.”

  Kristine would never believe how my night had turned out; I thought I’d turned dinner into a disaster opening my big mouth, but Julian wanted to bring his mother over for a skimpy elf dress consultation?

  Why the hell not? How could my night get any stranger? I wouldn’t be bored, that much I was certain of. I laughed and shrugged. “It’s in the bag, and I can live with fifty-fifty if we both lose to her.”

  “She’s evil, hates losing even more than I do, and has a hobby of reading the dictionary. She hates when Dad uses big words she doesn’t understand, so she made it her life’s mission to learn all the words. All of them. It’s insanity. If we’re unlucky, Dad’ll come, too. If Dad comes, too, we may have to adjust our wager to see which one of us comes in last place, and honestly, we’ll probably be raiding my ice cream stash to nurse our bruised and battered pride.”

  “I can deal with two Sundays of dressing up like a damned elf ready to take on the entirety of New York in a single night, if their victory is so assured.”

  “I like you’re willing to compromise in the face of inevitable defeat.”

  “It can’t be that bad, can it?”

  “They give me a handicap, Chloe. It can be that bad. And I win maybe one out of twenty games. It’s been a year since my last victory. It’s terrible. They come over to play Scrabble just to remind me what losing feels like.”

  I narrowed my eyes. “And what do I get should I give them a taste of defeat?”

  “Would you accept a surprise? I’d offer to drive you around, but you’ve already snookered me for sixteen hours of chauffeur service.”

  “If I lose, too, we never discuss this again and have a rematch later.”

  “Deal.” Julian parked in his garage, closed the door, and hit a button on the visor that turned on the garage lights. “At least I won’t suffer the bitterness of defeat alone for a change.”

  I wondered if I should tell him I’d learned to win Scrabble by memorizing the highest scoring words and using them whenever possible. Add in my English degree, and I knew the dictionary well enough, including a collection of obscure words, to make do when the good words didn’t come my way.

  Nah. I’d let him discover I wasn’t actually surrendering until the last play. He also underestimated how much I liked surprises. Once a week, I could handle thirty-two hours of playing with kids while dressed as an elf. I’d just try to forget I was dressed up as an elf and let the other elves do as much of the holiday cheer as possible. I’d find some way to be a scrooge later and make up for participating in a holiday I didn’t even like.

  I could make it work.

  “Show me your Scrabble board. I’ll do a piece check and get everything ready while you summon your parents for our inevitable defeat.”

  “Well, this certainly wasn’t how I expected my evening to go.”

  While I agreed, I chuckled and focused my attention on my next challenge: entering Julian’s domain without making a complete and total ass out of myself.

  Julian had an obsessive compulsive gaming disorder and a shelf fetish. The kitchen, the only room spared from his collection of board games, seemed like a chef’s paradise, neat and orderly with a side dish of fully stocked and ready to go. I enjoyed some games, but I wanted to make myself at home in his kitchen and put his mixer to work along with the other gadgets decorating his granite countertops.

  It wasn’t until I saw his Scrabble table I realized I’d bitten off more than I could chew. Instead of a normal game, which came in a box and could be stored on a shelf, he had a custom table with four chairs, and a single touch of the polished surface revealed the game could be spun to allow all players to view the board easily.

  “This is possibly the most ridiculous yet coolest thing I have ever seen,” I admitted.

  “I told you, Chloe. Scrabble is serious business. Mom had the table made for me as a housewarming present. I think she just wanted to come over and play without her delicate sensibilities being overly offended.”

  “Is your table better than hers?”

  “It really is. They use it as an excuse to visit as often as possible. Of course, I hadn’t realized that was their plan at the time.”

  After my father’s death, my mother had avoided me for a few years; I’d reminded her too much of him. Then my stepfather had come around, and he’d done his best to put together the pieces. It’d worked to some degree.

  I no longer ran from her, she no longer ran from me, but we still hadn’t gotten the hang of being a functional family, especially around the holidays.

  My father’s death had done a good job of ruining our enjoyment of anything dealing with Christmas, and my Claustrophobic tendencies, when I was able to admit it, came more from losing him than any actual dislike of the holiday.

  “Clever,” I conceded, picking a seat and going on a hunt through the letters to make certain all pieces were accounted for.

  Julian watched me, chucking every now and then. “You have the piece counts memorized, don’t you?”

  “Nothing sucks more than knowing there should be the letter you need either in the bag or on someone’s rack to discover it’d fallen on the floor before the game started. After losing a few games like that, you better believe I know how many of each letter there are!”

  One day, I would get to use oxyphenbutazone. One day. I’d have to work the board in new and interesting fashions and hope the competition would ignore my efforts. Trying would lose me the game, but as Julian seemed to believe I’d lose anyway, I’d try for the hell of it.

  I’d enjoy beating people at Scrabble through the power of science.

  In reality, I’d try to maximize my use of the letter x, pray for a q, and if the letters were with me, hoard all the triple word scores and savor my victory while they tried to show off their vocabulary rather than win the game. My quixotic play style would only make sure I lost extra hard in the face of Scrabble masters.

  While I did a piece check of the board, Julian took my leftovers to store in his fridge and headed to his kitchen to call his mother. I listened to him laugh while issuing a challenge to come over, fix an elf-dress disaster, and prove she was actually half as good at Scrabble as she liked to believe. Then, as he either lacked common sense or enjoyed defeat, he suggested his mother should bring his father along for the fun.

  He strode into the room with a grin plastered onto his face. “They’ll be over in a few minutes. Mom’s a little bouncy, so I hope you don’t mind an invasion of your personal space. She forgets herself when it’s late and Scrabble is involved, so she’ll probably try to hug you.”

  “She’s an extrovert, isn’t she?”

  “An incurable one. She thrives when busy stealing the souls of introverts. I’d say I’m sorry, but it’s hilarious to watch. There’s this moment the introverts exposed to my mother realize they’ve been adopted, often against their will, and socialized to my mother’s satisfaction before releasing them back to their lives. She calls it her catch and release program. If you pretend you’re an extrovert, she’ll likely leave you alone without sucking out your soul to fuel her wicked ways.”

  “Does your mother know you call her a soul sucker?”

  “She’s the one who informed me of this critical fact of life from a very early age. If she didn’t want me warning people, she wouldn’t have said it.”

  I laughed, put all the pieces in the velvet bag, and placed it on the center of
the table. “That sounds reasonable to me.”

  “I have my moments. Honestly, my board game collection makes it pretty clear I’m not a reasonable person.”

  Normal people would’ve called the room a living room, and while he did have a nice television mounted on the wall, it was surrounded by shelves upon shelves of various gaming systems and their controllers. I recognized one of them, and I pointed at it. “I’ve played a game or two on that one, but I have no idea what I’m doing on it. I like the car racing games where your goal is to trash your cars in cool ways.”

  “Burnout?”

  I snapped my fingers. “That’s the one. I was good at that one.”

  “I have a copy. Instead of going out to bars or taking vacations, I buy games. Honestly, I have so many games I doubt I’ll ever play them all in my life. Even if I try a new one every day until I die, I won’t be able to play them all. I just see a new game, and I can’t help myself.”

  “Hey, whatever works for you. It’s your money. You could be buying excess cars instead or something. I mean, you have a spare spot in your garage.”

  “I’m saving that spot.”

  I could make a few guesses why he’d be saving the spot, and it probably involved a pretty woman who could handle his obsession for games while bringing enough to the table to be his equal. I could handle the gaming obsession part of the equation, but the rest was beyond me.

  We all wanted to find that missing piece of ourselves we only found in someone else. Of all the gems my father had left in my life before his death, that one had stuck with me. I still believed his words had been meant for my mother, who’d watched him waste away until the cancer had finally claimed him on a cold, snowy Christmas morning.

  Not even Kristine knew why I hated the holidays.

  To cover my dismay, I pointed at the shelves upon shelves of board games meticulously stacked on wall-to-wall shelves. He’d organized them by color, decorating with his passion. “How do you find a specific game you’re looking for?”

  He laughed and strolled over the shelves. “I numbered the shelves and have a spreadsheet I use if I don’t remember where I put a game. It got to the point I’d spend more time looking for a game rather than playing it, so I spent a weekend making a list. Now I just update my spreadsheet every time I get a new game. I figured if I was going to have them everywhere, I could try to make the place look nice at the same time.”

  A knock at the door was the only warning I got before an older man and woman, shedding snow, stepped through the front door. I recognized the woman from a fashion magazine, although I hadn’t done more than glance at the article, but from what I recalled, she’d been proclaimed as a fashion designer.

  Crap. I could handle attorneys, but a fashion designer was beyond me. The only designer anything I wore was for work, and I did my best to buy similar things so no one could ever tell if I wore the same clothes twice in a week.

  “Where is this elf-dress disaster?” she demanded, and Julian’s mother locked onto me. She smiled, and I wondered how fast and far I could run in my heeled boots. “You’re too pretty to be a disaster.”

  Well, if nothing else, I’d be able to tell Kristine a fashion designer playing at being a personal shopper thought I was too pretty to be a disaster. “Give me five minutes,” I muttered.

  Julian snorted and rolled his eyes, and his mother’s brows shot up. “Unless the dress doesn’t fit, there’s no way you’ll look bad in red. You have the right skin tone for it, and your hair color is good, too. A lot of women try to wear red when red is just not a good color on them. As such, it’s not a disaster.”

  “According to her, she’s about to pop the seams.”

  Julian’s mother huffed. “Idiots. Putting someone in a tighter dress isn’t going to make you prettier or sexier. Mall elf?”

  “Unfortunately. To be fair, it’s not my dress. It’s Kristine’s dress. She just stuffed me into it and demanded I take her place for today. As I’m a pushover, I covered her shift.”

  “Well, that explains the disaster part. Dress first, Scrabble after. Get changed and strut your stuff, missy.”

  “Chloe,” I said, hopping to my feet and snatching the bag with the dress of doom.

  Julian pointed towards the kitchen. “Bathroom is down the hall, first door on the left. If you need help getting back into that disaster, give a shout. Mom’s probably qualified to assist.”

  Julian’s mother raised a brow. “Probably?”

  “You might get your sewing kit out of your purse and try to fix the dress rather than doing the nice thing and helping her change into it.”

  “You have a smart mouth, Julian. I knew I should’ve sewn it shut when you turned two.”

  I fled to the bathroom and scrambled into the damned elf dress for a second time in one day, which was two times too many for the entire year. Had I been smart or exercised my common sense, I would’ve let the wager stand and played to beat the Carters.

  Damn it, I wanted to know what Julian considered to be a surprise, which meant I had to beat all three of them.

  Sometimes, I wondered how my mother, a fairly docile and dependent woman, and my father, who had been a self-sufficient but struggling man, had produced me. I could out-stubborn a rock. Both had learned to bend in the wind, somehow avoiding being brought down in even a hurricane. My father hadn’t been able to beat his cancer, but he’d approached it like he had everything else in his life.

  When the winds changed, he changed with them, and he went where life took him with indomitable cheer.

  I needed a hefty dose of his positivity.

  Wiggling until I was certain I wouldn’t be giving Julian and his parents the wrong sort of show, I emerged from the bathroom, resisting the urge to give the dress a final tug. If I pulled it down too much, I wouldn’t have to sneeze to give everyone a good view of my bra.

  I needed to remind Kristine I really didn’t fit in her clothes.

  The instant I stepped into the living room, Julian’s mother prowled towards me, circling like a shark ready for lunch. “The owner of that dress has smaller breasts?”

  “She has a smaller everything.”

  “It’s Kristine’s dress, Mom. You’ve met her.”

  “Oh, the brunette who likes to rearrange her internal organs trying to prove she’s a size zero when she’s really not? That puts you at a size two, and a good size two. Your bust is too big for most size twos, so you probably go with a three and either deal with the waist issue or have the dress adjusted.”

  Yep, Julian either had no idea what his mother did for a living or liked deluding himself into thinking she just helped with clothes. The woman likely designed her clients’ wardrobes from scratch. “I wear dresses?”

  Julian sucked in a breath, shook his head, and made cutting gestures across his throat. I stared at him and burst into laughter, which didn’t work well when I could barely catch my breath.

  “Julian, I’m not going to play dress up with her unless she wants me to, but that dress is a disaster. Chloe, stop laughing and get out of that thing before you faint. She’s not at risk of popping a seam. She’s at risk of asphyxiation. How long were you wearing that thing today?”

  “Eight hours.”

  “And you didn’t faint?”

  “No, but she caught an ice cream cone with her cleavage. The second one she caught with her hand. She’s a quick learner.” Julian snickered. “I had no idea playing Santa could be such an adventure.”

  Julian’s mother huffed. “You’re an awful Santa Clause. I have no idea why you’re subjecting everyone to that.”

  I pointed at Julian. “Are you insane? Have you looked at him? Every damned mom in the mall wanted on his lap. Do you have any idea how many times I had to tell women only the kids got to sit on his lap?”

  “Obviously, you should make an agreement with the nearest optometrist’s office. They’d make a fortune. Julian can’t wear red. At all. And he’s too young to play Santa. He probably looks
like a weasel attacked his face when he wears a fake beard. He needs at least twenty more years before he’s quality Santa Claus material.”

  Julian sighed and bowed his head. “I’m doing it for the kids, Mom.”

  “You look like a moldy strawberry when you wear white and red. Stick to classic black suits, and you’ll be written up for being too handsome for your own good, but red is not your color. Now, put this lady in a red dress and showcase her next to you in a good suit? You’ll turn heads. But the only red good on you is a woman who can wear the color well.”

  Ouch. I thought my mother could be critical about my life choices sometimes, but Julian’s mother made it perfectly clear he hadn’t made the cut. Unable to stop myself from playing with fire, I said, “Looks like you lose again, Julian.”

  He shot me a glare, which only made me grin wider.

  “Darling, go get the size three red dress out of the main closet, grab every single white fur thing you can spot, and bring me my good fabric scissors, please. If you threw out my sewing machine here again, Julian, I’m shoving you up my chimney so you can better play Santa.”

  I decided I both loved and feared Julian’s mother. “It’s really not necessary, Mrs. Carter.”

  “Like hell it’s not! You’ll die. Die, I tell you. Be free. Flee that dress!” Julian’s mother shooed me in the direction of the bathroom. “Oh, darling?”

  Julian’s father sighed. “What else do you need from the house?”

  “There are two white lingerie boxes for 30-E sets in the same closet with the red dress. Bring both. The poor woman probably goes broke finding a half-decent bra, and I’d bet my socks she’s wearing crap instead of a good bra under that mess. Kristine’s a D, so it’s no wonder you’re suffocating. Go change, Chloe.”

  I obeyed, taking a few moments to regard my lacy bra with a resigned sigh, wondering how she’d guessed I’d been forced into the skimpiest bra I owned to make the dress fit. Almost. When I emerged, finally able to breathe freely, Julian stood beside his Scrabble table rubbing his forehead without either of his parents in sight.