Page 26 of Neat
“She just wants to apologize,” I said, ripping my arm away from his grasp. “Besides, we work together. We need to get along.”
Both of my older brothers watched me like I was a kid walking into a snake pit I didn’t even realize was there. What they didn’t know was that Isawthe pit, I just didn’t care.
Maybe the snakes weren’t the venomous type.
Maybe they were garter snakes, like the ones Dad used to find in our yard all the time.
Neither of them offered another word, and neither did I. I slapped some cash down on the bar for Buck for the tab I’d run up before Mallory paid for my last drink, nodding a goodbye to him before I made my way toward the door. Mallory was just outside, and when I pushed through the door, she turned, smiling as a puff of white left her mouth with her first breath.
She was wrapped up in a black leather jacket and thick, burnt orange scarf. Her hands were in her pockets, eyes somehow different than they’d ever been before as she offered me a smile.
“Should I lead the way, or am I following you?”
Mallory
Stratford was quiet, as it always was this late on a Monday night. Logan and I walked side by side, our steps in line, the only sound between us being the soft thumps of his boots on the sidewalk and the click-clacking from the heels of mine. Christmas lights were strung all along Main Street — curling up the light posts, adorning the limbs of each little naked tree, highlighting the storefront windows. Gold and garnet garland accompanied the lights on the posts, along with little signs that said things likeMerry Christmasand’Tis the Season.
Even from where we walked at the north end of Main, you could see the lights from the big tree set up in our small town square at the south end of the main drag. That tree was erected every year on the Friday after Thanksgiving, Stratford residents always being more excited about seeing the ornaments and lights hung on that evergreen than they ever were about catching a Black Friday deal.
The holidays in this small town weren’t just celebrated — they were honored like a sacred tradition.
I smiled, eyes trailing over the enthusiastic display the little boutique in town had put together in their storefront. It was like looking into a snow globe at the North Pole — complete with elves, Santa and Mrs. Claus, and all the reindeer.
“Do you like Christmas, Logan Becker?” I asked, pulling my gaze from the window back to the quiet man walking next to me. The same Scooter Whiskey Carhartt jacket he wore every day at work was warming him now, the hem of his blue and green flannel peeking out at the bottom. He wore an old baseball cap that I swore I’d seen him wear in high school, and his chestnut hair curled around the edges of it, giving him a young, boyish look.
A soft smile touched his lips, but he kept his gaze on the sidewalk. “Are you insinuating that I’m the Grinch?”
“No.” I chuckled. “Although, now that you say it, I could see you painted green and slipping down chimneys to steal presents.”
Logan glanced at me with a smirk before he let his gaze wander up and over my head, trailing the lights around us. “I used to love it,” he said. “When I was younger. I always had this… I don’t know, this indescribable feeling of excitement that would come over me around Thanksgiving. I remember putting up the tree with Dad, making cookies with Mom, wearing matching pajamas with all three of my brothers and watching all the classic Christmas cartoons on Christmas Eve.” His eyes glistened under the lights, twinkling like stars. “I guess it’s that Christmas Spirit everyone talks about. But… I haven’t felt that in a long time.” He frowned. “Honestly, Christmas just kind of floats by for me now. I see the decorations everywhere, I hear the songs, I see the movies on TV, but… it’s just not the same. I don’t feel it anymore.”
“Since your Dad passed?”
His frown deepened on a nod.
We fell silent again, and I did the math in my head, trying to remember the details of an event the entire town was always trying to forget — my family, especially. There had only been one death at the Scooter Whiskey distillery — and it was John Becker. I was eighteen, and we had just graduated high school. Mr. Becker was at the ceremony, and died weeks later.
Logan was seventeen, I realized. I remembered he was always one of the young ones, and one of the only ones who couldn’t join the senior ditch day when we went to Nashville to bar hop all the places that let you in at eighteen.
My heart lurched in my chest. I wasn’t close with my parents — not my weak, spineless mother and certainly not my greedy, pretentious father — but even so, I couldn’t imagine losing either one of them.
“What about you?” Logan asked when the silence had stretched into awkwardness. “Are you a Christmas fanatic, Mallory Scooter?”
I smiled a sour smile at the mention of my full name, a name I’d tried to escape my entire life, a name I realized I’d never be rid of.
“I’m not a fanatic about anything,” I admitted. “Save for art. All those feelings you had around Christmas? I never experienced any of that. For me, Christmas meant Mom hosting lots of grown-up parties with the town’s richest assholes, and Dad handing us gift cards of outrageous amounts on Christmas morning. Mom would decorate the house, but more for the town than for us kids. And I don’t believe in the ‘reason for the season’, as they say.” I shrugged. “But, I do love how magical it all can be, and I love to illustrate it, photograph it. Honestly, I was just thinking how this is the first time I’ve walked this town’s streets and seen anything close to beauty. I kind of wish I had my camera with me.”
“You’re talking about me, aren’t you?”
I scoffed. “I mean thelightsare pretty.” I paused. “I just never thought that before — not here, anyway.”
We were quiet again, but I felt Logan watching me, his eyes dancing over my profile as I kept my gaze on the glowing Main Street tree in the distance.
“You seemed close with your family,” he commented. “Until high school. It was like something switched over the summer between eighth and ninth grade, and you were a completely different person when you came back to school.”
A chill rolled over me at the thought of that summer, but I smirked to hide it. “Everyone changes before high school,” I commented. “I mean, you came back with muscles the size of my head.”
“First you call me beautiful, now you’re commenting on my muscles?” He tsked. “Feels like some real not-safe-for-work territory we’re crossing into here, Minx.”
