Total pages in book: 91
Estimated words: 86828 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 434(@200wpm)___ 347(@250wpm)___ 289(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 86828 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 434(@200wpm)___ 347(@250wpm)___ 289(@300wpm)
I wait for her footsteps to stop sounding in my ear before I take a seat.
Just as fast, one of Santa’s eyes pops open. He drags it to the left before pulling it to the right.
Only once he’s confident the coast is clear does he speak. “Is she gone?”
Although shocked by his quick recovery—he was flatlining only hours ago—I nod. “She said she’ll be back in an hour.”
“She said that five minutes ago, and I was barely alone for a second.” He yanks off the blanket covering his legs, displaying he’s placed back on the boots the first responder officer removed at the scene of his collapse. “I almost got caught.”
“Should you be doing that?” I ask when he commences ripping off the pads of the heart monitor. “You collapsed. Your heart—”
“Is perfectly fine,” he interrupts as he removes the final pad.
As he enters the cubicle next to us to gather his Santa jacket, he asks, “How’s yours? Looked like it took a bit of a beating earlier as well. Understandable with your whole they’re-better-women-because-of-me speech.”
“It’s good. It’s fine.” Its crumpled remains aren’t up for discussion with a man I don’t know.
I grow panicked I said my inner monologue out loud when Santa breathes heavily out of his nose. “I thought you were ready, but I may have jumped the gun a little early.”
“For?” I ask, confused.
My bewilderment augments when he replies without pause for thought. “For the wish you made when you were ten.”
That was the year Casey told me Santa didn’t exist. I was super pissed, not solely because she had stolen the magic of Christmas from me, but because it meant it was less likely my wish would come true.
I wished not to become my mother. I wanted one true love, not a dozen, because I didn’t want anyone to hurt me how my mother hurt my father when he came to collect us that Christmas Eve to learn she was engaged for the fourth time since their divorce.
Only when I got older did I understand the gap between my mother’s third and fourth marriage. She’d given my father a sliver of hope that we could be a family again before she’d bumped into my little league baseball coach three weeks before Christmas.
Santa squeezes my shoulder, pulling me from my thoughts. “Maybe next year?”
I nod before realizing I don’t know what I’m agreeing to. “Next year for what?”
As he breaks through the curtains of the cubicle meant to keep him alive, he shouts, “To try to re-grant your Christmas wish.”
I lose the chance to tell him I don’t have to wait another year—Kelsey is the best gift I’ve ever received—when my charge through the curtains has me stumbling onto a handful of nurses staring at me as if I am talking to myself.
They’re acting like a patient didn’t just dart past them, and the concern on their faces triples when I ask, “Did anyone see which way Santa went?”
16
ZANE
Casey sighs when I rip at my bow tie with the tenacity of a shark. I’m moody, tired, and wearing a stupid-ass groomsmen suit for the ninth time in my life.
After assuring the nurses from the ICU that I didn’t need a psych evaluation, I raced to Kelsey’s apartment, determined to prove Santa wrong that I wasn’t ready to have my Christmas wish granted.
I’d already met the girl of my dreams, so I only needed to tell Kelsey the truth.
All I found at Kelsey’s building was an empty apartment and a receipt for my donation to the charity Santa the night I returned home.
I’ve tried Kelsey’s cell a hundred times, and when my desperation reached fever pitch, I went to her old place of employment to see if she’d given them a forwarding address.
I even asked Noelle, who was acting far too heartbroken over a man like Peter, if she knew where Kelsey would go.
Every direction I took was a dead end.
I’ve never had a case backfire so severely before.
I startle when I realize the inaccuracy of my last thought. Kelsey isn’t a client of mine. She isn’t a case number. She’s just clueless because Santa fucked everything up when he stalled proceedings by faking a heart attack.
“Fucking Santa.”
“Don’t blame him,” Casey snaps out, over my shit. I’ve been a grouch all day. “I’d make you wait a whole lot longer than a year if I had discovered you were profiting off women’s heartache.” My family was clueless about what I did for a living until Casey followed Peter and Noelle’s storm out of my suite. “You used vulnerabilities exposed by their exes to weasel your way into their lives for profit. Then you made them our mother.”
I pfft her. “I did no such thing. I built them up before making them realize they deserved better.”
She holds her hands out as if to say, Exactly, before she thrusts them at the aisle our mother is due to walk down in under an hour. “You built her up so much, Zane, she never comes back down. She goes through husbands like underwear because you’ve made her believe she can do no wrong. How has that helped her?” Before I can speak, she mutters, “And if you’re helping them be ‘better women,’ why do their exes pick up the tab?”