When she wobbled a little and started to slide down the wall, it galvanized him. He tucked himself back into his pants and stood, hoisting her up with him.
Her cheeks were red. The uninhibited goddess had gone, and Cassie the sweet bartender was embarrassed now. She gave him a lopsided smile as she blushed. “I guess it’s your turn now,” she whispered.
Oh, the very idea of what she was suggesting—it was almost enough to get him hard again. He muttered a curse under his breath. It was one thing for him to fall to his knees in the dirty snow of a dark alley, but damned if he was going to let her do it. “Don’t worry about it, sweetheart. I took care of it.”
“Holy macaroni,” she whispered.
Holy macaroni indeed.
Chapter Four
“Are you sure?”
Cassie smiled into the phone as she sat on the edge of her bed putting the final touches on her toenails—electric blue background with hot pink polka dots. She had to keep her fingernails plain to work in the restaurant, so she overcompensated with wild toes.
“Are you sure sure?” This was Danny’s eloquent closing argument in his campaign to try to get her to come to the farm with him for Christmas. The “farm” was the rural property Danny’s hippie mother had recently acquired, but since the land was mostly limestone, she wasn’t having a lot of luck planting. That, and the part where she didn’t know squat about agriculture. This past summer, as they stood and inspected an acre of dead corn, Cassie had to tell her that sometimes farmers have to irrigate.
“Irritate? What are you saying, Cassie dear?”
“Irrigate. Like, water?”
“Oh, no, Mother Nature provides. That’s the beauty of farming.”
“Huh,” Cassie had said, surveying Mother Nature’s bounty, which, this season apparently fell under the heading “scorched earth.”
“You know I love you. I even love your mother. Sort of.” Danny’s mother did things like pat Cassie’s shoulder, and feed her gluten-free, vegan, stevia-sweetened cookies that tasted like bricks, but that was more than Cassie’s own mother ever did. Danny didn’t appreciate his weirdo mom enough.
“I think my mother is having a midlife crisis.”
“Hippies are allowed to have midlife crises.” She admired her toes.
“So if you love her so much, why won’t you come with me?” Then he shifted into his generic theatrical voice. “Help me Obi-Wan, you’re my only hope!”
Cassie thought back to last Christmas. “I love your mother, but I love my apartment building’s very functional boiler more.” Oh, the cold. She was nearly having PTSD-style flashbacks just thinking about it. “And then there was the part where she decided running water was a bourgeois luxury we didn’t need. Also—television. You know I don’t get to watch TV during the school year.” She wasn’t proud of it, but one of Cassie’s great joys in life was to cram entire seasons of TV into the few short weeks she had between the end of the fall semester and the beginning of spring. Once she was “only” working fifty hours a week, her life suddenly opened up, and she filled the time with great greedy feasts of Dancing with the Stars, Doctor Who, and Glee. She wasn’t proud of her taste, but if a girl’s only guilty pleasure was watching a bunch of middle-aged “teenagers” improbably break into Madonna songs as they went about their plucky, underdog lives, really, what was the harm?
“She’s let up on the plumbing thing,” Danny offered weakly.
“Nope!” said Cassie brightly, flipping onto her back and waving her feet in the air to speed the drying process.
“Cass,” said Danny, his tone growing uncharacteristically serious, “you can’t be alone on Christmas.”
She smiled. She was a lucky girl. “I’ll go to Edward’s.” Maybe. Probably not. Her boss, who was also her late father’s best friend, was always on her case to visit more, and he always tried to lure her over for holidays. Christmas at Edward’s, though, with his funny, sweet wife and their daughter Alana and her little sister Chloe—it was too big a dose of heartbreak. But Danny didn’t need to know that. Still, she was lucky. Not everyone had people fighting over them for Christmas.
“You promise you’ll go to Edward’s?”
“Yes!”
“Do you swear on the grave of your father?”
She jumped then, when the unnaturally loud buzzer her landlord had recently installed guillotined into her brain. Saved by the buzzer.
“I gotta go. There’s someone here.”
“Oh my God, maybe your mother’s been sprung from rehab! Do you think she wants to come to the farm?”