Missing Christmas - Kate Clayborn Page 0,6

don’t give a damn about the job, the firm. I’ll pay Carol out of my savings, find her a new job. GreenCorp can get fucked, so long as Kristen has what she wants.

“But I guess I’ll push it,” she says, just as I’m about to open my mouth. “Carol, can we do some travel rearranging?”

She turns the sweater back on. “My favorite! How long do y’all need?”

“A day,” I say firmly, even though I don’t know if a day will do it. Ben once spent six days in rural Oregon to get someone to sign off on some 3-D printing tech our old boss was pissing his pants over. “I don’t care what you do with my tickets, but Kristen needs to be on her way to Michigan Friday night.”

“Jasper,” Kristen says. “I can—”

“No,” I say, and my voice sounds so flat. “We’ll do it quickly. Treat it like a hiccup, and it will be one. A minor inconvenience.”

I see the flash of hurt in her eyes. Carol looks back and forth between us, twinkle lights glinting off her glasses. I am terrible with people. It’s only by some strange, inexplicable miracle that it’s taken me this long to be terrible with Kris.

She stands from her chair, clutching her laptop to her chest. On instinct, I stand too, and now the sense memory of last night is even fresher. My hands clench in my pockets.

“Absolutely,” she says, her voice curt, her eyes not meeting mine. “A minor inconvenience.”

This time, she leaves the conference room first.

Chapter Four

KRISTEN

December 22

The first fight—the only real fight—Jasper and I ever had was about a kiss.

But not one between us.

It was over two years ago, not long after he’d first come to me about leaving our old company to join him and Ben in the venture that would eventually become our current firm. Ben had been away for an extended leave, but was working a metallurgist recruit our boss wanted badly enough to let Ben and Jasper out of the non-compete that was keeping them from starting their own firm. If Ben could close the deal, Jasper could do what he’d been working toward since the day I’d first met him—go out on his own.

But then, Ben kissed the recruit.

“She’s a distraction,” Jasper had said to me that summer day in my office, pacing in front of my desk, his jaw tight.

“He did the right thing,” I’d told him calmly. “He’s got feelings for her, and he told you he can’t work with her. He’s following the rules.”

“He’s forgetting about the job,” he’d said, a little angrily, and I’d felt a jarring sense of discontinuity, a sinking, embarrassing sense of disappointment in myself. The night before, Jasper and I had ordered tacos from our favorite place and stayed at the office until ten, going over a contract while an Astros game streamed on my computer screen. It had been the most fun I’d had in months, and when I’d gone home, flushed with the pleasure of being around him—the tie-loosened, talkative Jasper it seemed no one else ever got to see but me—I’d thought, Maybe I could ask him out sometime. Maybe me and Jasper, we could make it work.

But seeing him like that—not even acknowledging that Ben, his best friend since their college days, had found someone he liked enough to jeopardize such a big job—had felt like a glass of cold water to the face, a reminder of how ridiculous it would be to break my professional boundaries for a man who so clearly didn’t care about relationships. When I’d found out, not long after, that Jasper had nearly sabotaged things between Ben and Kit to get the deal, I’d told him to forget about the new firm, that I’d be staying put. I’d stood in his office with my hands on my hips and told him I’d never been so disappointed with someone in my life, and I hadn’t even been exaggerating.

Of course we patched it up, eventually. He’d apologized to Ben, had apologized to me, and he’d done it sincerely, with genuine remorse in his voice and in his eyes. But for a while, it had strained things between us. Or at least, it had for me. It was my feelings for him—my feelings outside of friendship or collegiality—that had made me so completely disappointed, and I’d known it was unfair to him, unfair to our work together. I’d tried, after that, to keep a better distance. To keep work at work,