maps we’d made of buried treasure, artwork that my mom had hung on the walls and toys we’d slept with were placed on my bedroom floor. I had to choose what to keep and what to donate. How do you give away a part of your childhood?
Saying goodbye to the home where I’d lived from birth until I went to college was heartbreaking. The last thing we did was dig up the time capsules. We had one each. Mom and Dad buried theirs the day they moved in, while my bro and sis and I put together our keepsakes when we started elementary school.
Our parents wanted us to do the same at their new home—a sprawling bungalow on a farm where they were raising goats. Goats! They were trying their hand at cheesemaking! Parents, not the goats, though technically they were in partnership with the animals. But it being winter, there’d be no digging in the ground. Not this holiday.
What did two retired academics know about making cheese? They called it a sea change. A new direction, and they’d hired a guy to work for them who lived in a small cottage on a far corner of their land.
Where is this house? Snow was billowing over the bare landscape, with nothing recognizable, just blobs of unidentified shapes. They’d said it was a mile past the T-junction but I’d gone… Shit! The engine groaned and seized up. The car was a rental, and I’d only picked it up thirty minutes earlier at the airport! The car guy had been ready to close up saying there was so much snow, no more flights would be arriving tonight. Tonight being Christmas Eve.
Red lights on the dashboard meant nothing to me—Mac was the one interested in cars—and I wished I’d come on the earlier flight and driven to our parents with him. Or had Mom and Dad pick me up. They’d warned me a storm was coming but I said I’d make it even if I had to crawl there. I’d stayed at the office even though we only worked a half day. The boss wanted everyone to finish their Christmas shopping and be with their families.
My mission was to corner the cute alpha who’d been working at our company less than a month. I’d heard him telling a colleague he’d be staying after everyone had left to finish a report.
But after checking myself out in the bathroom mirror and rinsing my mouth with mouthwash, I’d come out to find the guy in the arms of some other omega. “Oh, sorry,” I mumbled, backing away.
“It’s David, right?” the alpha, whose name was Samuel, asked.
“Yeah.” Some big romance I’d pictured with an alpha who wasn’t sure of my name.
“This is Fergus, my other half.”
“Hi. Nice to meet you. Merry Christmas.”
“Same to you,” Fergus replied, but he only had eyes for Samuel
Just as well I hadn’t invested much time lusting after the guy. My heart wasn’t broken, a little bruised perhaps. Another half-assed dream bites the dust!
But as I sat in the car going nowhere with a blizzard raging around me, my mind wandered back to Samuel and I blamed him for my situation. If he hadn’t had a Fergus, I might have been in his warm bed and not marooned in the middle of nowhere. “But you would have missed Christmas Eve with the family,” my inner voice whispered. Pfft! Why did my conscience have to remind me of that? Damn it.
I grabbed the phone, thinking my folks would rescue me. No signal. What? How could that be? I wasn’t that far out of town. But the phone had been giving me trouble, freezing and going off lately and I should have gotten it fixed. My fault.
Unable to contact my family, and with no way to get in touch with the rental company, I couldn’t sit where I was and freeze. But trudging through a snow storm was no picnic either. They might find me in the morning, stiff and frozen having breathed my last breath.
Wrapping my scarf around me, I grabbed the messenger bag with my laptop, wallet and phone, figuring if I locked the car, the suitcase would be safe until morning. There was nothing of monetary value in there. Clothes and four Christmas presents.
The presents for our extended family had been sent to my mom and dad’s but tonight was supposed to be just the five of us, and I hadn’t wanted my sneaky parents and siblings to peek if I had