Wild Holiday Nights: Holiday RushPlaying GamesAll Night Long

by Samantha Hunter

  But now, more than a dozen years later, they were just strangers. Two thirtysomethings headed in the same direction, both wanting only to get home for Christmas.

  “Fine,” she said. “That’d be good. We can take turns driving.” And sleeping. That way, they’d never have to talk.

  Daniel turned back to the clerk and continued the transaction, and Carrie offered her driver’s license so she could be covered by the insurance. Just like that, she was bound to the man who’d made her teenage years especially awkward.

  Daniel Barber, with the king-size chip on his shoulder. Daniel Barber, who’d never once cast her a glance that wasn’t adversarial or at least annoyed.

  Daniel Barber, who’d driven a wedge between her and her first love, inspiring Matt to break her heart two days before their senior prom.

  He was the scourge of her youth and now the harbinger of awkward road trips.

  Though, goddamn, she thought, stealing a final glance at that stern face. The bad boy had blossomed into one stunning grown-ass man.

  2

  “SERIOUSLY?” DANIEL ASKED, standing before their rental in the near-empty lot.

  The car was tiny. And girly. An eggnog-colored Fiat 500. Under any other circumstances, Carrie would have been delighted, but there was a reason it was the last vehicle to get rented. Taking this little gumdrop of a car into an ice storm wasn’t the smartest move.

  But smart was a luxury that neither of them could afford at the moment.

  “It’s cute,” she said in its defense.

  “Let’s enter the Iditarod with a team of weenie dogs while we’re at it.”

  “Shut up before you hurt its confidence.” She grabbed the key from his hand and unlocked the trunk to stow their bags. “I’ll drive first. I want to get this thing figured out before the roads turn sketchy.”

  Daniel seemed fine with this, obediently heading for the passenger side. He moved his seat back and settled in while Carrie familiarized herself with the controls.

  “Buckle up,” she said, and then the road trip was on. “Here.” She handed him her phone. “Open the map thinger and see if you can program Grafton in.”

  “No.” He set it in the cup holder between them.

  “Yes,” she said, and shot him a look as she pulled the car out of the lot. “I’m not getting lost in the middle of a freak storm because you think you know the way.”

  “And I’m not spending the next five hundred-plus miles listening to some robot tell us to stay on I-5 North.”

  “Tell me how to find I-5, then, genius.”

  He pointed to a sign that very conveniently, very annoyingly appeared as the road curved.

  She frowned. “Fine. But I get to pick the radio station.” And once they’d merged onto the freeway, she scanned for the perkiest, pop-iest one she could find, just to punish him.

  “You’re way bossier than I remember,” Daniel said.

  She considered it. Yes, she was acting a touch pushy. Preemptively, because she was poised for him to do the same. To be all brusque and tactless. To be Daniel Barber, basically.

  “People change a lot in thirteen years,” she told him. And in more ways than simply becoming devastatingly handsome. Not that she even cared.

  “Did you go to our ten-year reunion?” he asked.

  “I did.” And though it had been more than a decade since she’d last seen Daniel, she’d mingled and danced with her heart throbbing in her throat the entire evening, wondering if he’d show. And if she’d still be livid with him. Was she livid with him now? No, not really. It wasn’t as if she and Matt had been destined for wedding bells. All they’d probably been destined for was a half-assed attempt at a long-distance romance when college started, then a breakup that would’ve ruined both of their Christmas breaks. A mercy, in the end, although so not Daniel’s place to instigate.

  “Did Matt go?” he asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “You guys rekindle your little high school romance?” he asked, a snide edge to the question.

  Oh, you mean the two-and-a-half-year, most formative relationship of my life? That you ruined, by telling Matt God knows what horrible lie about me? That old thing?

  “We did not,” she said coolly. “We danced a few times, but he’s married now with a toddler. Do you guys not talk anymore?”

  “Facebook’s not really my thing.”

  “Are telephones your thing?” she countered. “Because Matt’s vocal cords were working just fine.”

  She heard him hiss a little sigh through his nose. That sound brought back memories. If the man ever released a fragrance, she knew precisely what to name it: Derision by Daniel Barber.

  “He seems really happy,” she said. “I met his wife and she’s very nice. They only live ten miles from his parents.”

  “She cute?”

  “His wife? Yeah, she’s pretty.”

  “Was that weird for you?”

  Ugh. Why did he have to be so exactly like himself even after thirteen years? So mean, always angling to make people uncomfortable?

  “No, it wasn’t. There’s nothing weird about a guy I dated marrying somebody else ages after we broke up. No matter how attractive she is.”

  “Even though he’s the one who dumped you?”

  She gritted her teeth. “Why do you ask? Are you making notes for yourself on how human emotions work?” God knew he could use them. She glanced to the side to find him smiling to himself in the faint glow of the dash display. Oh, he had emotions all right. All the jerky ones like smugness and scorn and self-satisfaction.

  “Are you still angry about whatever it was you found so repugnant about me back then?” she asked. “Whatever it was that inspired you to convince Matt to dump me?”

  Could loyalty actually be on his short list of acceptable feelings?

  “Just making conversation.” Christ, he didn’t even bother denying being the catalyst.

  She turned up the radio.

  * * *

  AFTER TWO HOURS of uneventful travel, Carrie pulled off the freeway near Red Bluff. “I’ll do another hundred miles, but I need a pit stop.”

  “Suit yourself.”

  She pulled the car into a gas station. Daniel topped off the tank while Carrie got a coffee and stretched her legs. She watched him through the store’s front window, that familiar person standing beside the little car, his attention on the pump’s meter. In all the ways that counted, he hadn’t seemed to change. Same attitude issues, same callous sense of so-called humor. But the packaging was new. A little taller, a good deal broader. She could make out the planes of his chest beneath the jacket, and he’d filled out in the legs and hips. And butt. He was a man now, but still dragging around the same teenage boy’s baggage.

  Same eyes, too. She squeezed her own shut, feeling a headache brewing.

  And the saddest part was there’d been a time when he’d kept her up nights. When her body had positively hummed with curiosity over his, back when she’d still been with Matt. She’d considered breaking things off over it, thinking herself a monster for being attracted to her sweetheart’s best friend. What kind of girl did that?

  She’d had it all wrong, she knew now. All that attraction had indicated was that she’d been a horny teenager. Carrie hadn’t understood the difference between romantic longing and plain old sexual infatuation then. Lust—that’s what she’d felt for Daniel. And she’d read too much into it, let it gnaw at her until it had soured into guilt and nearly driven her to break up with Matt, before he’d ultimately beaten her to it.

  When she climbed back behind the wheel, she resolved to pinpoint something redeeming about Daniel. She refused to believe she could have lusted so intensely for this guy if she hadn’t sensed something intrinsically worthy in him.

  On
ce she’d gotten them back on I-5, she turned down the radio and hazarded more small talk.

  “Well, I guess neither of us lives in Sacramento, otherwise we’d be making this trip in our own cars. Where’s home for you these days?”

  “Coalinga.”

  “Is that near Fresno?”

  “More or less. You still in San Francisco?”

  How about that? He’d actually returned her conversational serve.

  “I am,” she said. “Sunset.”

  Funny, he’d remembered where she’d moved for school. Then again, the number of things she remembered about him was embarrassing. Like the way his old jacket smelled. She’d found that gray hoodie tossed over a chair in the kitchen of Matt’s parents’ house. He and Daniel and the rest of the band had been practicing in the basement. She’d given in to the urge and had brought the jacket’s collar to her nose and breathed him in. She’d caught a hint of cigarettes but other things, too. The curious scent of young manhood, kind of like Matt’s, but different.

  It had made her wonder if he’d taste different than Matt if she kissed him. It had made her wonder a lot of things that had left her feeling guilty. That curiosity had put her on the road to realizing that, counter to what the fairy tales and romantic movies suggested, loving one person didn’t stop you from craving another.

  Of course she’d wondered what her attraction to Daniel had meant. Had it meant she didn’t love Matt? Or had the fact that Matt hadn’t been able to hold her attention been proof that something about her love had been faulty or selfish? He’d been so much nicer than Daniel, after all. So much more lovable.

  “What kind of degree did you end up earning?” Daniel asked after a couple minutes of silence.

  “Business.”

  “You put it to much use?” he asked. She couldn’t tell if he was being snarky again, though no doubt he held businesspeople in contempt. He was probably a clerk at the country’s last surviving record store. Or a professional heckler, something that played to his primary talent—douchiness.

  “I manage a climbing gym,” Carrie told him.

  “Come again?”

  “You know, those places where you can do indoor rock climbing. Best in the Bay Area,” she chirped, mimicking the TV ads. “With a sixty-five-foot roof and over seventy routes for all skill levels!”

  “Weird.”

  “Yeah, a bit. But it pays pretty well and they let me try new things. It’s a good chance to make contacts, too, since I’d like to start my own business someday. Plus, now I’ve got really good arms, and there’s always lots of shirtless men hanging around. As it were.”

  He didn’t even sniff that bait.

  The chatter was flagging, so she asked, “Do you still play bass?”

  “Nah.”

  “That’s a shame. You were the only half-decent one in the band.”

  “Half-decent hardly equals an artistic calling. I only ever really did that as an excuse to hang out at Matt’s, anyway.”

  She pondered that. She’d always suspected his home life had been less than idyllic. Those suspicions had become starker as she’d grown up, met new friends with dysfunctional families and had come to realize exactly how awful some childhoods could be. Toward the end of high school Daniel had lived with his grandma, which had seemed like a red flag. Maybe she’d find the nerve to pry in the next however many hours of driving.

  The conversation lagged for a long time. Carrie caught herself squinting, her contacts growing sticky and her eyes strained. “I hate night-driving.”

  “I’ll take over.”

  “That might be smart.” The closer they drew to the Oregon border, the gustier it got. “I’ll keep going till we’re near Shasta.”

  They made the switch a half hour later, and just in time. Carrie’s headache was intensifying, the caffeine leaving her dried out and dim-witted. She sighed as Daniel merged them back onto the freeway, the end nowhere in sight. “We should both be in Grafton by now. And I should be on my second glass of wine with my mom, staring at the Christmas tree.”

  Daniel didn’t volunteer his own plans, and she tried to guess what they might be. She’d never been inside his parents’ place—a dumpy little house on the outskirts of town with a steadily rusting hot rod parked on the side lawn. The kind of place where people stocked twenty-four packs of beer and argued a lot. Merry Christmas from the Barbers.

  “Did your dad ever fix that car that was always sitting in your yard?”

  “No. He never finishes anything.”

  “Do they still live in that same house, by the pond?” she asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Is that where you’re staying?”

  A light drizzle had begun to fall, and Daniel switched on the wipers. “No, at my grandma’s house. My mom was supposed to pick me up from Portland and drop me there. I’m sure she’s happy the storm’s saved her the trip.”

  “Grandma’s house... Now I’m picturing you sipping tea and eating homemade cookies.”

  “My grandma’s not that wholesome, though she does bake good cookies.”

  “Frosted with sprinkles?”

  He shook his head. “Gingerbread.”

  “Hot toddies?”

  After a pause. “I don’t drink.”

  “Oh.” Interesting.

  “Not for a few years now, anyway.”

  “Do you have issues with it or...?”

  Another curt, “Yeah.”

  “Like addiction?”

  He laughed softly. “No. More like it turns me into an even bigger asshole than I usually am.”

  “Ah.” A corner of Carrie’s heart softened to hear him admit he was a jerk. “Well, that’s a good reason to abstain. I like what a glass of wine does to me. Gives my brain permission to quit overthinking stuff for a couple hours.”

  He smiled faintly, eyes on the road. “You were funny drunk.”

  “Oh, God. I don’t drink like that—like I did at those parties.”

  Amateur hour, for sure. Who knew how dumb she’d looked to sober outsiders. To Daniel. She remembered a party at one of the popular kids’ houses, drinking a couple too many tumblers of Sprite and vodka, and Daniel showing up late in the festivities, grudgingly at Matt’s insistence. He’d been sober. She’d been drunk. She remembered sitting on the floor, giggling at something or other. Some people had been playing a video game and Daniel had crouched beside her. She couldn’t recall what she’d said to him, but more than a decade later she knew his response word for word.

  You’re super wasted, aren’t you? He’d said it with a little smile, a glimmer that she’d taken for true fondness amid the teasing. Not that her judgment could have been trusted. He’d probably been mocking her.

  She told him now, “I’ve graduated to beer and wine—and moderation—since then. You still smoke,” she added.

  Daniel shook his head.

  She laughed. “You think I can’t smell you?”

  “I quit when I was twenty-two.”

  “High time you washed your— Shit, look out!” A large delivery truck was fishtailing in the slow lane.

  Daniel scanned left and merged, giving the truck room to right itself. “Jesus.” He sounded rattled.

  “Black ice must be forming already.” She put a hand to her pounding heart, checking the side mirror and finding the truck stable again. “Nice maneuvering there, Barber.”

  After a minute, he asked, “What were you saying about me needing to wash something?”

  “Your jacket. You kinda reek.”

  “It’s from my job.” His tone had changed, tinged with a little defensiveness. Would wonders never cease?

  “Jeez, what do you do? Bouncer?” It was the only job she could think of that involved standing around soaking up people’s second
hand smoke.

  “I’m on a wildfire crew.”

  She blinked. “Oh.”

  “This jacket was stuffed in the same bag as the last shirt I worked in,” he said, sniffing his sleeve. “Forgot about it until it was time to head out the door for the airport.”

  “Wildfire crew,” she murmured. “That’s very...manly.” And very admirable, which didn’t quite square.

  “It’s a job,” Daniel said. “Interesting one.”

  Interesting and dangerous. Ah. Putting her finger on it, Carrie had to laugh. “You always did have a death wish. Just like my brother—and he’s coming back from Afghanistan tomorrow.”

  “Shawn’s in the service? Damn.” Then, after a moment’s thought, “I could see that, actually. He was bound for that or pro football.”

  She smiled, surprised he even remembered her brother’s name. “Yeah, whatever gave him permission to put on a uniform and go tearing toward enemy lines. Trust me, I wish he’d made pro. I’d take the concussion risk over the dangers he faces over there any day.”

  “Sure.”

  “How do your folks feel about the fire-crew stuff?”

  He shrugged. “We don’t talk much. They seem fine with it. They’re probably impressed I have a job at all.”

  “What about a girlfriend?” Carrie asked, a lump lodging in her throat. “I don’t know how I’d sleep if my boyfriend was out in the middle of that stuff. The news footage is terrifying enough without worrying about someone you know.”

  “A woman who cares enough to worry about me isn’t a problem I’d know much about,” Daniel said.

  She stared at the swatting wipers, her emotions humming static, caught between two frequencies—sadness and relief. The sadness was novel. Daniel had always been too prickly to inspire sympathy, at least when she’d been younger. The relief was simply alarming. Why on earth should she care if this man was single?