finger checklist. "He took you to a Christmas market. He walked around with you while you went shopping." She pauses here to wave a hand at the pile of gingerbread items scattered across her kitchen table and give me a pointed look. Then she holds up a third finger. "Then he walked you up the steps of an old church to show you the view and kissed you." Ginger drops her hand to her heart and makes a dramatic swooning motion in her chair, slumping over until I'm afraid she'll hit the floor.
"Okay, enough," I grumble. She sits up immediately, waving four fingers in my face.
"Then instead of saying ‘thank you for the kiss, sir,’ you asked him why he kissed you."
"‘Thank you for the kiss, sir?’ Are you serious?" I laugh. "Who talks like that? Does your oven have a gas leak or something? Are you okay in the head?"
Ginger ignores me. "And then he said because he wanted to. Because he wanted to kiss you, Holly Mistletoe Winter."
It's true. My middle name is Mistletoe. Even I have to admit my mom may have taken her Christmas fetish a bit far with that one.
"Five." The fingers are aggressively wiggling now. "You had sex. And it was good."
"Thank you for not belaboring that point."
"Six, the next day you reminded him he's your boss."
"He is my boss!"
"You made him feel like a creepy douchebag."
Hmm. Maybe she has a point?
"Was he? Did he step over the line? Make you uncomfortable?"
"No. Not at all."
"Seven." Ginger is starting to look far too smug for my big-sister liking. "You told him to forget the entire thing. You told him it never even happened. Eight, you cock-blocked him at dinner because you supposedly don't want him but you don't want anyone else to have him either."
Well. That's horribly accurate.
"Ten."
"Wait, what about nine?"
"Whatever." Ginger shrugs. "I'm sure you messed up another dozen ways you're not even telling me about."
I sigh loudly and roll my eyes.
"Ten." She opens and closes her hands in little bursts as if she needs to further emphasize my failures. "You accused him of being a slut."
"I did not!"
Except. Except I did, didn't I?
"Fine. But technically I apologized for that," I offer.
Ginger is not impressed. "Why are you like this? We were raised by nice people. You do not have a tragic backstory, Holly. Nick is not a villain. So he's your boss. So what? You have similar goals. You both love the Flying Reindeer Toy Company more than any two adults should. You're making this more difficult than it needs to be."
"I'm not like anything! I'm not being difficult! Falling in love is confusing, dagnabbit!"
Ginger gasps.
I gasp.
"You said it." She points at me, victory clear on her face.
"Dagnabbit? Yeah. Your weird way of swearing is rubbing off on me."
Ginger grunts and hits her forehead with an open palm. "No, not that. You said ‘love.’ You said you were falling in love with Nick. No takebacks!"
I want to laugh at her use of ‘no takebacks,’ but my heart is beating too fast to make fun of her. "Yeah, I guess I did."
"So. What are you going to do about it?" Ginger relaxes into her chair, unwrapping another of the gingerbread treats I brought her from Nuremberg. Clearly she feels her intervention with me is nearly over.
"I have no idea." Then another memory comes back to me, slapping me upside the head. Actually no, it's more of a punch to the gut. "He wanted me to admit I liked him. During… you know. While we were…"
Ginger stares at me as if I'm some special kind of idiot.
"You're kind of an idiot," she confirms.
"Yeah."
"Fix it, Holly. Fix it now, before it's too late. Don't make this the memory that haunts you for the rest of your life. Because it will. If you leave it like it is now the question of what could have been will haunt you like the Ghost of Christmas Past until the day you die. Not only that, but I bet an angel dies every day you're not together. Nice glass ones. Vintage. Falling from the tops of Christmas trees in heartbroken despair."
"That wasn't dramatic at all."
She shrugs. "I'm just trying to speak to you in a language you understand."
I nod. She's not wrong. I've heard her loud and clear and I think I know what I need to do.
"What about you?" I ask with a pointed stare.
"What about me?” Ginger asks with her mouthful of gingerbread, her nose scrunched up in