Before That Promise

by Violet Duke

  Slipping one arm down around her waist and the other across her shoulder blades, he lifted her up and rumbled softly, “Hold on to me.”

  Her legs instantly came up over his hips and he waited until he felt her ankles cross securely behind his back and her arms circle his neck before he carried her down the hall back to her room, gently kissing the angry bump along the hairline above her left brow every few steps.

  Rational discussion was utterly failing him at the feel of her clinging to him like a vine, so he said not a word. At least this time, he wasn’t the only one affected.

  It only took a few steps before he discovered her galloping heart rate was matching his exactly. And when he looked down into her expressive, now dilated eyes, he saw her thoughts were clearly mirroring his as well.

  With a silent prayer, he slipped his right arm down to the back of her thighs to hold her in place while he reached down to turn the sleek brushed steel handle of the guest bedroom door.

  “It’s still locked—”

  The feel of her lips against his neck had him grinding to a halt on the spot. With her entire body fitting against his perfectly, and his forearm now curled around the most decadently curved backside he’d ever had the pleasure of holding, he succumbed for a fleeting moment. He buried his lips against her throat, memorizing that berry scent of hers as he trailed a path up to her ear, where he murmured, “There’s a button near the lock that you have to press down on when you turn the handle.”

  Doing just that, he clicked open the door, which had in fact not been locked, and walked them into the bedroom. “I know it doesn’t look like it, but these are the hotel’s family suites, which is why they’re unoccupied right now. That little extra button is their childproofing of the handle. And as for the shower, those sliding showerheads were designed to allow parents to rinse off their kids easier, and more effectively. There’s actually a little rubber stopper that locks it in place vertically. It was hanging from the wall next to the soap dispenser.”

  Skylar leaned back and slapped her hands over her face in mortification. “I’m such an idiot.”

  Meanwhile, Drew was pretty sure he’d managed to crack a back molar or two.

  Because while her arms were doing a minimally satisfactory job maintaining her modesty up top, her brief emotional outburst had sent her rubbing up against him down below.

  Try though he did to stop it, his arm flexed, rocking her against him even deeper. Once. Twice.

  The instant, candid, hungry little gasp that escaped her was by far the sexiest sound he’d ever heard. Which made grabbing the throw blanket on the bed to cover her up officially the hardest thing he’d ever had to do. Turning around while she wrapped the blanket around herself, he called back, “I’m going to run down to the lobby and get you some medicine for that lump on your head, along with some ice. You need anything else, sweetie?”

  For one brief heart-stopping moment, he could’ve sworn she’d answered, “You.”

  But a second later, her mumbled, “No, I’m fine,” had him promptly exiting her room.

  Walking down the long corridor to the elevators, he started thinking about his latest cyber security code case, and all the different kinds of food he didn’t like to eat, and absolutely anything except for the way Skylar’s naked body had felt in his arms.

  When he could finally, finally walk without having to hold his coat in front of him, he pushed the button for the elevator and thumbed through the unanswered emails and Facebook messages on his phone to keep himself distracted.

  There were several pages of new messages from girls who’d become friendly with him in various online chatrooms he moderated. Some were fellow or at least budding computer coders he’d met a few times, others were cyber-bunnies who differed by hacker groupies via how much clothes they wore to chat on their webcams, and a few were just creepy strangers that seemed to cast a wide, random net.

  The one thing that a lot of them seemed to share in common for some bizarre reason was that they thought raunchy Facebook messages were an acceptable, even desired mode of flirting.

  Delete, delete, delete.

  Sighing, he also pressed ‘block’ on the last one as it rang a tad stalkerish. A few dozen more deletes and he’d worked his way back to last night’s messages…where he came across one short, sweet little instant message complete with smiling emoticons that stopped him in his tracks.

  >> MERRY CHRISTMAS! I HOPE YOU’RE HAVING A GREAT VACATION. I CAN’T WAIT UNTIL YOU GET BACK SO I CAN TELL YOU ALL ABOUT THIS NEW PROJECT I’M WORKING ON. MISS YOU!

  Drew looked back over his shoulder guiltily…as if Skylar could see his phone screen from a few hundred feet away.

  Regardless if she never saw the message, however, he still felt like a giant ass.

  A lying giant ass.

  So, though he felt terrible about leaving the thoughtfully written message unanswered—something he wouldn’t normally do—he couldn’t bring himself to send a reply, particularly not a ‘merry’ one.

  Not with Skylar sitting in his hotel room waiting for him to return to her.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  They were about an hour from Phoenix and making good time. And during that time, Drew had watched Skylar make over a dozen lavish Christmas bows over in the passenger seat. “At this rate, we’ll get you home well before lunch. Plenty of time for you to wrap presents,” supplied Drew helpfully as he watched her rummage around for a fresh spool to start another one. “I don’t want you to get carsick making those, especially not with your fresh head wound.”

  “These are actually distracting me from the headache,” replied Skylar with a smile. “I found these special character ribbons at a craft store up in Tacoma and I know the twins are going to love them.”

  He shook his head. All this Christmas stuff really did make her light up.

  “Exactly how many presents did you buy your brother and sister?”

  “Just a few. But these aren’t for their gifts. These are going to go on the big wreath I told them we’d decorate together. I found spools of nearly every cartoon they’re into right now. They’ll be tickled pink.” Whistling a festive carol, she began making assorted loops and swoops with the colorful ribbon, cinching and twisting until it started to form a big puffy bow. “Dad said the twins can even do glitter projects without turning into a disco ball themselves now so I’ll probably even have them glitter these up before we tie them on.” She let loose a smile so radiant, he felt like a Christmas Scrooge. Or was it the Grinch? Whichever one was the big green one that didn’t like Christmas.

  “So why don’t you like Christmas?”

  It was like she’d read his mind.

  He sighed and tried to answer without deflating the bubble of holiday joy she was currently zooming around on. “I don’t dislike it per se. I’m more…apathetic to it. I guess I feel like it’s a whole lot to go through for one day.”

  “It’s not.”

  Yeah. He figured she’d see it that way.

  She looked up and clarified further, “It’s not about the day at all. It’s about what that day represents, what it has the power to bring out in people. And the happiness it can create like magic.”

  “Not for everyone,” he replied, without thinking.

  Sadness, and a touch of sympathy, clouded her eyes. Seeing it swiftly put him on the defensive. “Before you think this is some repressed thing because of how I grew up, it’s not. I didn’t have a deranged Santa traumatize me as a kid or anything. My Christmases were fine. To me, at least. Kids at school had a different opinion, however. Mostly because they thought I was a trailer trash loser.” It was surprising to feel his jaw clench in anger over the description, after all these years.

  “Funny thing is that I never really noticed the trailer. Or the trash. Not until I was in the second grade when I read the story I’d written of how I spent my Christmas to the class like the teacher had instructed us to, and one of my classmates did that dumb loser-cough when I was finished.�
�� Why was he telling her all this?

  He didn’t really have an answer, or the ability to stop, it seemed. “I’d ignored the kid, of course. But then I turned back to my teacher and saw that she was crying. Big, pitying tears. Just from hearing my story.” He shrugged as if seeing those tears hadn’t stung. “Lesson learned. My Christmases apparently weren’t as great as I thought they were. Incidentally, that’s also the first time social services came to check up on me.”

  Out of the corner of his eye, he saw that Skylar’s hands were knotted in her lap, and he could tell she was trying not to look emotional as well, so he quickly explained, “But that wasn’t when they took me away. Leo managed to help my mom get the house and everything—including her—presentable. While my mom was no prize, he didn’t want us to end up in the system. Since we were eight years apart, he was certain we’d get separated…so he lied through his teeth to paint our family as poor, but happy. With no other proof, they eventually closed the file on our case for the time being.”

  Skylar’s voice was more emotional than he’d ever heard it when she asked, “You said you thought your Christmas had been great that year, until that boy and teacher made you think otherwise. Why? What made it great to you and not them?”

  He hesitated and thought long and hard on whether he wanted to go down this road. While he’d meant what he said about his not having any repressed issues on his childhood Christmases, the little second grade boy in him—the one that had run to the school bathroom and cried his eyes out when everyone began telling him how horrible his life was—was afraid of seeing the same expression of sympathy in Skylar’s eyes that he’d seen in his friends and teacher that day.

  When he looked up to see if she was circling around to pity city, however, something in his expression must have revealed something to her. Because her eyes widened and she shook her head. “You don’t have to tell me. Forget I asked.”

  That’s when Drew realized that he wanted to tell her. His second grade Christmas was the last one where he’d felt the same way about Christmas that she did. So for the first time since he’d made the mistake of telling that story in class, he began to tell another human being about his first—and last—magical Christmas.

  “What that kid said about us being trailer trash, it was partly true. We lived in a trailer home and we had very little money. But honestly, I really didn’t notice at the time. Especially not that Christmas. Leo got us a little Christmas tree that year, my first ever. He’d been fifteen then, working part-time to basically keep me fed and my mom watered.”

  Skylar flinched. But there wasn’t any pity there yet.

  He’d checked.

  “It wasn’t until years later that I discovered the ‘tree’ that Leo had gotten us that year was actually a thick branch that had been trimmed off a twenty-foot tree to make a perfect triangle ‘foyer tree’ in some big ole mansion in Scottsdale. The reason why we knew that was because some of Leo’s classmates were working those tree lots as holiday labor. I hadn’t understood back then how much pride he’d had to swallow to ask one of his buddies if he could have one of the brown tree trimmings they were all set to throw out since it was already mostly dead.” A tinge of the shame he’d felt that day crept up on him but he shoved it back and pummeled through.

  Fixing his eyes on the road, he described the next part of the story, the only rough part, in as unaffected a tone as he could manage, “The next day, after Leo had come home from work, he told me to grab my coat because he was going to take me shopping to get a big surprise. He ran to our room to get the shoebox out from under his bed while I waited. When he came sprinting back out a minute later, however, he wasn’t smiling anymore. In fact, he was livid. He ran straight over to the couch and started yelling at our mom, who was of course, drunk off her ass. He began screaming at her to give him back his money, his hard-earned money he’d been saving for months. Money he’d apparently had earmarked to buy me presents and colorful lights for a Christmas tree. The ones that flashed. Leo was fixated on that part. On the colorful flashing lights. The ‘good’ kind he’d said, over and over again. After the third time, our mom-of-the-year just slapped him and told him to get out of her face and grow up.”

  Clenching his jaw, Drew tried not to put himself back there. Back at the dirty window that had never had a curtain as long as he’d lived there. Back at the window he’d had his nose pressed up against while he watched his brother run to the lot behind their house to punch and kick the chain link fence until he couldn’t punch or kick anymore…because he was crying too hard to see straight.

  “My mom was passed out by the time Leo came back. And though I’d never done anything like it before, while he was making the two of us dinner, I snuck into my mom’s room and looked in the drawer I’d seen her put money in once. There wasn’t much in there but I took it all, every last penny, and ran back to put it all back in Leo’s shoebox. Then I brought it out to him and asked him that if we didn’t get me any toys, if the money was enough to get him the ‘good’ colorful lights. Because I knew he really, really wanted them.”

  His hands fisted against the wheel as he remembered his brother’s face that day—ready to cry again, but in a way different from how he’d looked earlier at the fence.

  “Instead of answering me, Leo put my coat on and we walked over to the store where he asked the store worker for a box of ‘twinkle lights.’ And when we went back home to wrap the lights around the tree, he told me that the ‘twinkle lights’ were the very best kind of Christmas lights—because they were cool and white like snow. Then he got out a box of stuff he’d been collecting all year and we spent the rest of that night making all sorts of cool ornaments out of liquor bottle caps, beer can tabs, and knick knacks he’d found around town. Leo even made a big star to put at the very top out of six-pack plastic rings.”

  God, when was the last time he’d conjured up this memory? A decade? Probably. “It took us all night to finish but when we hung them all up and turned the lights on…I swear, I thought it was the most majestic thing I’d ever seen in my life.”

  He could hear Skylar crying quietly from her seat but he kept going anyway. Because this really was one of his best memories, as sad as it may have sounded to her.

  “I went on to bed and when I woke up the next morning, there were two presents waiting for me under that tree. One from Leo and one from Santa.” He smiled, seeing it all again in his mind’s eye. “But my absolute favorite part came after, when we made these amazing microwave popcorn balls that one of his teachers had given him the recipe to. I don’t actually remember the ingredients, but I do remember melting a bunch of gooey marshmallows, and having a grand old time eating the white spider webs of pure sugary bliss that got stuck to the bowl after it cooled back down. Then I nearly passed out from excitement when I saw that Leo had gotten us bags of M&Ms and candy corn to decorate the popcorn balls with.”

  He shook his head, remembering the wonder of it all. “When we’d finished our cavity-inducing masterpieces, I distinctly recall thinking this was probably what they ate every day over at the North Pole.”

  “Afterward, we sang carols and he watched me open my two presents, with the biggest smile I’d ever seen on his face. Which only got bigger when I gave him the present I’d put under the tree for him. Since I was only seven, it wasn’t anything grand—a ceramic handprint I’d made in school, but I had put, ‘To The Best Big Brother In The World,’ and he treated it like it was the greatest thing ever. Then for lunch, after making sure I ate a few carrot sticks with my sandwich, he made us instant hot cocoa and we proceeded to eat every last popcorn ball.”

  He exhaled slowly, strangely more emotional than he thought he’d be from reliving the memory. “My classmates might have thought I was a loser, but I considered myself the luckiest kid in the world. Because of Leo.”

  Gazing out at the red rock mountains off in the horizon as he started turning up and down familiar streets, he brought the story full circle to the pr
esent. “I was eleven when Leo went MIA in Afghanistan. And without him here, my mom fell off the wagon big time, hitting the bottle hard again, and hitting me even harder. One day, Lia discovered the big bruise on my arm I’d been trying to hide, and she had her foster brother Caine use his contacts at the police force to get me taken away from my mom that very night. I spent a few weeks in the system until I was officially declared the Spencer’s newest foster kid.”

  Smiling, he finished with a touch of reverence, “I remember the day I arrived at their house like it was yesterday. The only things I had with me were those two gifts Leo had given me stored safe in a small backpack, a trash bag with my clothes, and my laptop, which I’d never let out of my sight—my very first one. It was the last Christmas present Leo had given me before he deployed.”

  After a few minutes of silence, he pulled the car to a stop and lifted the parking brake. Skylar was still carefully processing it all, as he knew she would be, so he just waited quietly for her reaction.

  “Drew, that kid in your class didn’t have a clue what he was talking about. That was by far one of the most amazing Christmas stories I’ve ever heard. So if anyone was a loser, it was him for not being able to see that. Not you. Never you.”

  Of course she would think so. Not many people saw the world the way Skylar did.

  Drew cupped her face gently and gestured out the window. “We’re here, sweetheart. And it looks like your family came home early this year. I think they were waiting for you.”

  They both turned and sure enough, saw the twins come barreling out of the house along with her cousin, all three squealing, “Skylar’s home, Skylar’s home,” with her dad Brian and stepmom Tessa trailing right behind them, along with her Uncle Connor and Aunt Abby.

  Not wanting to keep them all waiting, Drew popped open the trunk and rounded the car to open Skylar’s door for her. But by the time they got the luggage out and onto the driveway, Tessa and Abby had ushered the kids back in the house. Presumably to give him and Skylar some privacy. Meanwhile, Brian and Connor had planted themselves on the porch chairs. Presumably to give them no privacy at all.