Missing Christmas - Kate Clayborn Page 0,4
get through this day, and that’ll be easy. A quick, more prepared apology to Jasper. Follow-ups and final details on last night’s deal. It’ll be over before I know it.
My computer pings with a new message alert.
Jasper, efficient as always.
Conference room, he’s written. 9 a. m. We’ve got a problem.
Christmas feels so far away.
Chapter Three
JASPER
“Jasper. You are going to love this.”
Carol bursts into the conference room at 8:56, where I’ve been sitting for a half hour, staring out the long wall of windows and trying to shake the sense memory of what I was doing the last time I was in here. I’ve got to get my head on straight in the four minutes before Kristen shows up and I break the news. If nothing else it’s bad enough that she’ll probably forget about the mess I made of last night, kissing her like that.
Kissing her at all.
“I mean, just you wait,” Carol says, reliably immune to my brooding even on regular days. On the day before a holiday break? She seems to take it as an invitation. “This one is going to knock your socks off.”
I blink up at her from where I’m sitting, and she’s standing there, her ash blond hair Texas big, her brown eyes wide behind red-framed glasses with tiny rhinestones at the edges, a set of massive earrings that look like Christmas ornaments dancing at her ears. We hired—or rather, Kris hired—Carol six months ago, and since day one she has proudly displayed her dogged devotion to holiday attire of all sorts—Independence Day, Labor Day, International Beer Day, whatever. She has also proudly displayed her devotion to showing each sweater or T-shirt or entire tracksuit to me, in spite of the fact that I can never think of anything to say in response except, “Very nice, Carol,” before going to my office and shutting the door.
She reaches a hand into the opposite sleeve of a bright red cardigan sweater with half a Christmas tree on either side of the front buttons, and after a few seconds of fumbling, the whole entire front of it lights up in multicolored twinkling. I wince.
“This is a great sweater, Jasper,” she says, ignoring me. “I have a backup battery. I’m going to let it run all day.”
“Terrific,” I say blandly, but in spite of myself—in spite of the fact that I’ve had maybe thirteen minutes of sleep since I left here last night and in spite of the fact that I’m about to have an awful meeting with the very person whose face kept me awake all night—I feel a smile tug at my mouth. Most days, the soundtrack in this office is Carol’s loud laugh or her humming; she treats every admin task like it’s the newest and most interesting experience of her life, and sometimes when she prepares travel packets for me she puts a glittery smiley-face sticker on my agenda.
I hate it, but I also don’t.
“Now what’s all this about an emergency meeting?” she says, her sweater still flashing as she settles into a seat beside me. “Are you rethinking my idea to have a holiday party for us? I could whip something up by this afternoon. One of those nut-covered cheese ball things, and—”
“No.” I hear Kristen’s door open down the hall and my whole body clenches with nerves at the thought of seeing her again. That furrow in her brow and that look in her eyes when she’d pulled away from our kiss—shock, confusion, and, my worst fear, regret. I felt like my whole body and brain had shut down at that look.
When she comes in she blinks in surprise at Carol, and that’s when I realize I doubled down on my screwup by sending that e-mail, since clearly Kristen was expecting this meeting to be me and her alone, and she probably also thinks the problem I referred to is what happened between us. I can almost hear Ben scolding me. You are terrible with women, he’d say, in that friendly, warm tone he has, the one that comes so easy to him. What he’d really mean is: You are terrible with people in general, and he’d be right.
“Good morning,” she says, more to Carol than to me, and for a couple minutes it’s a lot of oohing and aahing over the sweater, cheerful exchanges about holiday plans.
I clear my throat in that way I have. Carol rolls her eyes but Kristen’s snap to mine immediately, and I don’t have a chance to