How My Brother's Best Friend Stole Christmas - Molly O'Keefe Page 0,36
didn’t want him to see them.
“What’s…”
He had a paper in his hand and I grabbed it.
“Sophie?”
“What.”
“You okay?”
“Fine. You leaving?”
“I thought…” He paused and blinked at me. Which, in Sam Porter language, was a whole thing. A whole conversation, and because I was fluent in Sam Porter language I knew that he was thinking, I thought we were both going up. Did you forget? Did I forget? Do you not want me to be there? That’s it. Okay. I won’t go.
“Good night,” he said and started to walk toward the door, and the crazy thing was the guy broke my heart but I was never able to hurt him. I was never able to see him hurt. It hurt too much.
So stupid. So much stupid.
“I’ll be upstairs in a little bit,” I said. “You know where Wes’s office is?”
“Sure,” he said, glancing down at the papers in my hand. “I can wait for you.”
“I don’t want you to,” I said, and it was snappy and mean because I didn’t know how to talk to him without using that voice. Everything that had been easy between us was broken now. “I’m just…working on something.”
“You’ve been working on this something for a while.”
He’d noticed. Of course he’d noticed.
“A few months.”
“The last few days quite a bit,” he said, and I felt like a rabbit in a field with something hunting me. “What is it?”
I was really nervous. I was nervous about talking to my brother. I was nervous about being wrong. About being told that I was stupid. That maybe I was stupid.
“Nothing,” I said and put the papers in a stack.
“Sophie—”
“It’s a cost thing. We lose money to breakage, and I think if we upgrade our packaging we’ll save money. But the packaging costs more than what we usually spend. I want to pitch it to my brother.”
“Well, you sold me.”
“I think you’re an easy sale.”
There was a joke there about how he was just easy. Or maybe I was the easy one and I wanted to make it, but swallowed it back.
“I’ll see you up there,” he said and he left.
Sam
“Hey!” Wes cried as I came in the door. He had his feet up on his father’s old desk. The whole office was a bit of a throwback to some kind of Mad Men situation. There was the big desk and a leather couch. But his father had never allowed any Christmas decorations in the office, so in true Wes style, Wes had put up lights and an obnoxious light-up Santa on the wall. When he pressed a button, Santa would dance, sing “Jingle Bells,” and say “Ho ho holidays!” in a way that would give anyone nightmares. Wes got a satisfied smile on his face every time he pressed that button.
“You know,” Sam said as he went in. “I know you hate your dad and all, but you can take that Santa down anytime.”
“Now you’ve hurt Santa’s feelings,” Wes said. “He’s going to haunt you for that. Where’s Soph?”
“On her way.” I thought about maybe saying something about how nervous she was but she would not appreciate me getting in the middle of her and her job.
“How… how is she doing?” Wes asked.
“You can ask her in ten minutes.”
“Yeah, but has she been weird? With you or anything?”
Weird? That was one way to put it. But Wes didn’t really want to know everything going on between me and Soph. “She’s been good. Busy. She runs a tight ship down there.”
Wes pursed his lips and nodded. “She’s been giving me the cold shoulder.”
Oh, I thought, Wes had no idea what kind of cold shoulder Sophie could give. We were stumbling over snowbanks down there in the warehouse, me and Soph. Ignoring each other in a way that made the ice climb the walls. And then we’d catch each other’s eyes and the heat that flared turned it all to steam. It was so obvious I’d caught Denise staring at me a few times.
We were a mess down there, and I’d made it that way. The only thing that would make it better was leaving and it was the one thing I could not do.
“So, what are you drinking?” Wes asked as I sat down in one of the swanky leather club chairs in front of the desk. Wes opened up the liquor cabinet and it was like a cave of wonders in there. Booze covered in dust. Booze that looked like it had been bottled by monks a hundred years ago.