Some Christmas gifts don’t come neatly wrapped with a big red bow. If you had the chance to reconnect with your first, secret love, would you do it? Or is it better to preserve the sweet distant memory?
Lovelorn Ezra is firmly entrenched in his holiday funk when Brant, a knight in shining swimming trunks who, as a camp counselor, rescued him from loneliness at summer camp two decades earlier, unexpectedly walks back into his life. Brant was his first major crush and has been his fantasy lover ever since.
Now that they’re both consenting adults and unattached, is it time to make his move? Should he?
She smiled sympathetically and turned away. “He’s like the Pied Piper, that Brant,” she said. And then she slammed the door in my face; that is, on my dream.
So I wasn’t the only one who thought of Brant as a might-have-been. I was just another rat who had been led into the sea of obsession, by the Pied Piper. What should I do? Next? Maybe if I just stood there on the porch, I would turn to stone, or the woman would open the door and shoo me away with a broom.
I took a deep breath, and decided to forge ahead; bravely? Not so much.
Driving to the store, I tried to dismiss this new discovery, or at least find a way to square it with my own version of my relationship with Brant.
Where did I stand? I didn’t know, all the more reason to forge ahead and find out.
* * * *
When I pulled into the parking lot, I could see by the lights inside that Leah was already there. “I didn’t know you were coming in early,” I said. “You didn’t need to.”
“Thanks, but I wanted to deliver your Christmas present in person,” she said.
“Thank you,” I said. “Tickets to a show, I bet.”
“Kind of,” she said.
“Hi, Ezra,” Brant called from across the room.
I couldn’t believe it. I grabbed Leah’s arm and pulled her as far away as possible, to the “Employee Picks” shelves. “I thought you didn’t approve,” I whispered, just in case he could hear us.
“I was ... skeptical,” she said. “But you’re right about one thing. It’s better to know the truth than to have never tried to learn it.”
“You’re right.”
“I read that once on a pillow,” she said.
“Must have been a big pillow.”
“Yes,” she said. “I smothered my ex with it.”
“Thank you.”
“And there is definitely something especially sexy about a guy who’s great with kids,” she said.
“Isn’t there, though?” I said. “This is the best Christmas present ever.”
“I’m going to make you change your mind about Christmas,” she said.
“This just might do it,” I said.
“You have exactly thirty minutes,” she said. “Then I have to get home or Cookie will kill me.” She took her place behind the counter and tapped her watch. I took a deep breath before I went to the opposite side of the store to face my destiny.
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