Unholy Nights: A Twisted Christmas Anthology (8 page)

"I couldn't call. Not until I sorted things out. You see, I shouldn't have done what we did that night." He must have seen me stiffen, because he quickly added, "I wasn't free."

"Free?" I echoed. "Did I
make
you do anything that night? Did I, like, use a spell on you or something?" As I said this, dripping sarcasm, I had an uneasy image of the mistletoe tacked up in the library, and the unmistakable look of arousal on Author Guy's face. Not to mention Professor Jeff's.

"I was still with my girlfriend back then."

His
girlfriend
? I stared at him, feeling something black and dark start to grow in me again. All I could think was, dear god or goddess or whoever,
please
don't let me turn into Stalker Girl again. "You have a girlfriend?"

"Had a girlfriend. Willow. But that's over now."

Her name was Willow? Will and Willow?? How lame was that?

I felt weirdly calm now. "So, you had this girlfriend, this Willow, and you cheated on her with me?"

He was no longer sitting on the sofa. He had pushed the pets aside, gently, and risen. He was moving toward me where I had stalled by the door, but slowly, as if I were one of the frightened animals at the shelter who needed to be approached with extreme care. "That's what I meant when I said I'd fucked up."

I didn't say anything. I couldn't.

"I'd been with her since freshman year. She's over at Penshurst. I thought I was in love with her. But, when I met you..." his voice trailed off.

I was trying to get a grip on this. Was he saying that he and his girlfriend had split because of me? It had never even occurred to me that such a thing might have happened.

"It's not easy to talk about," he said. Indeed, he looked embarrassed. Maybe even ashamed. I was glad to see that, actually. Back in high school, the first boy I'd had sex with—my steady boyfriend—had cheated on me. It had happened at a party where he'd had too much to drink. I hadn't gone to the party. I'd been too busy studying for an exam. He'd done it with some skanky junior girl who'd been flirting with him for months. He'd felt guilty. He'd confessed it to me the next day. But as soon as he did confess it, his guilt seemed to vanish, and he expected everything to be the same as it had been before. He didn't understand why I felt betrayed. "It was no big deal," he'd insisted. "It just sorta happened."

But it had been a big deal for me. To me it had felt like a violation.

"I'd never cheated on her before," Will said. "I knew I shouldn't have done it. But I didn't regret it. I loved being with you. It was still wrong, though. My head was so messed up afterwards. It took me some time to figure things out."

He'd loved being with me
. I could feel my heart fluttering, expanding. But I wasn't going to melt, not yet. "I wish you'd told me."

"I wasn't sure how you felt. I mean, it was awesome between us, but I didn't
know
. You didn't say anything. I thought maybe it was just a casual thing for you. A sweet hookup, but nothing more."

Did he think I had that kind of sweet hookup often? My mind did a somersault as it struck me that that's what I'd thought about him. "But I called you. I asked if you wanted to hang out."
I'd like to. But I can't. I really can't.
"You said you couldn't, but you didn't tell me why."

"She was coming over that weekend, and I didn't know how to handle it. I was trying to find a way where she wouldn't get hurt, but I kept coming up short."

I had been hurt. I felt like screaming it. He didn't have a clue how hurt I'd been, or how messed up. Eating way too much chocolate, staring at my cell phone for hours willing it to ring, running past his dorm.

But I wasn't about to tell him. It was just too embarrassing. Plus, it would have seemed selfish to mention it now. Apparently I hadn't been the only person to be hurt by what had happened in October.

"So, what did you do? Did you guys break up that weekend?"

"It took a little longer to break up," he admitted. "That's why I didn't call. But it's over now. I heard she's seeing someone else." He said it wryly. "It's not like she went into mourning, or anything."

"I'd hate to think that I was the reason you and your girlfriend split."

He shrugged. "It would have happened anyway. Things had been going downhill for a while. We didn't have that much in common. It didn't feel right to me anymore, but I didn't know how to tell her. I'm not good at stuff like that."

What I was realizing was that while I'd been obsessing and panicking because Will hadn't called me, he'd been going through his own pain. Somehow it hadn't occurred to me that that might be the case. I'd pictured him all cheerful and maybe proud of his conquest of me. A notch on the bedpost. He'd crooned a little tune, and I'd become his groupie.

But if he was telling me the truth now—and he seemed earnest enough—he hadn't called because he'd been suffering through a moral dilemma. Followed by a break-up. If I hadn't been so self-involved, I might have considered the possibility that there had been more to his disappearance than my own inadequacy.

Wow. I'd been pretty clueless, hadn't I?

I was feeling bad about this when I remembered something I'd learned in my sophomore neurobiology course: Apparently one reason teenagers were so emotional and confused all the time was that their brains were still developing toward maturity. And full brain development in the prefrontal cortex, the area where you learn to organize your behavior and inhibit your impulses, doesn't occur until we're in our mid-twenties or so. There are so many synaptic connections in the developing brain because we have a lot of things we can potentially be good at. When we grow up, truly become adults, our brains prune away the undeveloped connections, cleaning house, dusting out the corners and making everything neat and tidy and organized. Well, at least as neat and tidy as a human brain ever gets.

One of the problems with us during those years is that we're all into ourselves and our own impulses, obsessions and rewards, making it hard to empathize with what other people were going through. I'd been so sure that I must have said something or done something that had made Will decide he didn't want to see me again, when he'd really been stressing because he'd cheated on his honey with me.

I didn't know what to think about the cheating. On the one hand, I guess I had won a competition that I hadn't even known I was in. On the other, if he could cheat on her, maybe one day he'd cheat on me. And why was he telling me all this, anyway? How did I know that I hadn't been right in my analysis of a few minutes before, and that the real reason he was suddenly being pleasant to me was that he was lonely and/or horny?

At the very least, I decided, he had failed the communication test. We both had. I'd had no idea what had been happening in his mind, and he, thank god, had no clue about my crazy stalker tendencies. Small mercies.

"I was going to call you after Christmas. I thought you'd be with your family in Singapore." He smiled. "I'm really glad you're not."

Still. Not. Melting. "I have to think about this," I said.

"Okay," he said. "I get that."

"Just for a little while." Was I
crazy
? I felt that magnetism, pulling me toward him and him toward me. In just another second, something was going to snap and I was going to rush into his arms.

The door opened behind me. Julie's voice. "
There
you are! Come on. We're singing Christmas carols. Hi Will. Oh, good, you come too."

9. Mistletoed

We walked down the hallway toward the front of the house only to run into a large crowd heading the other direction. Several guests were already singing "Good King Wenceslas looked out," at the top of their lungs.

I was swept along with the crowd, who were headed for the library/music room. Julie was ahead of me and Will, I presumed, was behind. I could hear the piano playing in there now, and whoever was at the keyboard knew what he or she was doing because it sounded great. Julie slipped sylph-like through the crowd, arrowing straight for the piano "Come on, Holly!" she yelled over the merry-making. "You have to sing!"

I wasn't sure I felt like singing. Both brain and body were churning, trying to shape everything I'd just learned from Will into a new worldview. A new paradigm. But I went with the flow into the room, allowing myself to be pushed toward the piano, where I saw why Julie was so excited. It was Professor Jeff who was playing. Julie had taken a seat beside him with her fingers on the sheet music, ready to turn the page. I hadn't even known she could read music, but she seemed confident, as usual, even if her eyes were focused on Jeff's hands flying over the keys.

I've always loved Christmas caroling. Singing Christmas songs in church as a young girl was what had first called attention to my voice. No one else in my family could carry a tune, so my vocal range and tone were a surprise. Once my mom had noticed, though, she started me on singing lessons, and by the time I was in seventh grade, I was making YouTube videos of my schoolgirl performances and fantasizing about being a diva someday.

There's something about Christmas carols that turn me all warm and fuzzy inside and bring back fond memories of our family Christmases: the tree, sparkling with tiny colored lights, glass ornaments and tinsel, our stockings hanging jauntily on the hearth, and the scent of Christmas cookies baking in the oven.

The holidays were always an adventure for a family like ours, since we were posted to countries all over the globe, some of which didn't celebrate Christmas. Somehow my dad always managed to find a tree, even if, some years, it was a variety of palm rather than fir. Wherever we were living, we would deck the halls and gather round our tree, singing carols and sipping eggnog. It might not be snowing in Ankara or Buenos Aries or Singapore, but for a couple of days, at least, my parents made it feel like Christmas.

O Little Town of Bethlehem
, which everyone was now singing, was one of my favorites. So I joined the carolers, approaching the piano and slipping between the guests until I had a good view of Julie and Jeff. When we finished that one, we moved into
Hark the Herald Angels Sing.
I wasn't singing loudly or trying to project my voice, but I did get absorbed in the music. That always happened when I had been singing for a few minutes. The world around me tended to slip away. When Jeff began to play
O Holy Night
, I noticed that many of the other voices had dropped. By the time I got to the line, "Fall on your knees..." I was soloing and everyone was watching me.

I began to perform as I had done so many times before. Jeff had no flaw as an accompanist. People moved back a little, giving me room, and when the song was finished, they clapped and cheered.

"That's Holly, my roommate," I heard Julie say proudly. I guess she had forgiven me for taking her place under the mistletoe. "Sing another. Will? You sing, too."

I had already turned my head, looking for him.

"Play
Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas
," he suggested from behind me.

He was there, just a few feet away, with the soft light from the fire playing on his hair. Jeff began to play, and Will began to sing. His sweet voice, deep and mellow, swelled to fill the room. After the first verse, he nodded to me, and I heard my own voice rise up to sing the second verse, almost without my volition. At the bridge, we joined our voices and continued thus through the final verse, harmonizing effortlessly as we finished the song.

The applause was louder and more enthusiastic than before. It made me happy, not for myself, but because people were appreciating the wonderful gift of Will's voice. I felt tears prickle behind my eyes because it was so beautiful. That smooth beguiling voice poured over me like honey, lulling any fears or inadequacies I had left. It felt the way it had felt on the night when we'd sung karaoke in the bar. Blending our voices was a preliminary to joining our bodies. It was as if Will and I were destined to go a-wassailing together.

"Encore," somebody cried, and a chant began. People had cleared a space around us now, as if they thought we needed room to breathe. I looked at Jeff at the piano, unsure whether he had music for anything we might choose, or if he was good enough to accompany us without a score. He grinned and said, "I've got the perfect song for you two." He played the first few bars of
The Holly and the Ivy
, and few people who knew us smiled.

Jeff said, "Traditionally, men and women used to sing older versions of this song at Christmas. It was a male-female competition, the men singing some verses and the women retorting with their own versions." This was the first time in the evening that Jeff had favored the company with any holiday historical wisdom. "In the verses that have come down to us, the holly represents the masculine virtues while the ivy represents the feminine, although there's some evidence that it used to be the other way around. But tonight, our Holly is the female principle and our ivy—that would be Will MacIvey for any of you who don't know him—is the male. Do you want to begin, dude? Let's celebrate the holly on this Winter Solstice, the longest night of the year."

He struck a chord and nodded to Will, who, grinning, began to sing:

His ex's name was Willow, I remembered. Did he have a thing for trees?

From there on, we sang together, although Will soloed the initial line in each verse that described the holly's attributes. At the end, we repeated the first verse, and Will's eyes were intent on mine as he sang once again,
Of all the trees that are in the wood, the holly bears the crown.

He was singing to me.

During the carol, we had moved a bit, the way performers on a stage move, approaching one another, teasing, putting our heads together, backing away a step, closing again. It was entirely unplanned yet completely natural. I'm sure that anyone watching us must have thought that we did this together all the time.