Page 45 of Don't Shoot Me Santa
Inside was warmer. Louder. Dogs barked from their pens. Desperate, hopeful. The usual racket. Someone had gone full Christmas gremlin again with tinsel strangling the information boards, paper snowflakes flutteringfrom the ceiling as if they’d survived a blizzard. Someone had even stuck a reindeer nose on the busted vacuum cleaner sulking in the hallway, complete with googly eyes and a tinsel bow. It had more personality than half the staff.
“Aaron!” Tessa called from behind the front desk. “Welcome back, Sleeping Beauty. Thought you’d ghosted us for good.”
He didn’t have to look. Her voice carried like laughter in a crowded pub. She was the main outreach coordinator and fundraiser. Warm, loud, impossible to ignore. Her robin-covered cardigan stretched across generous curves with jingle bell earrings already clashing with the tinny Mariah Carey playing overhead. She also had a pale pink birthmark splashed across her right cheek and over her temple, wine-stained, and in photos, the camera always caught it wrong, made it starker than it was.
Aaron dumped the collected cash on her desk. “Forty-eight pounds and seventy-three pence.” He unzipped his coat. “Bloody care home management couldn’t even round it up to fifty quid. So I did.”
“You are a sweetie.” She leaned over the reception counter, grinning with her usual unfiltered delight, mug in hand and steam rising. “Jonathon made coffee if you need something to warm up your cockles.”
Jonathon, volunteer dog handler, unofficial fixture, and part-time Christmas mascot, lifted his mug in a mock toast from the kitchen doorway
“My special blend’s a gift.”
Already deep in festive mode, Jonathon was the sort of person who put their tree up in October, having been wearing festive clothing every day since then. Normally, Aaron wouldn’t have noticed. Or cared. But today’s jumper was impossible to ignore—a hideous lime-green monstrosity withMerry Grinchmasstitched across the front in looping red thread.
Grinch. Christ. What a ridiculous choice for a safeword.
What was I thinking?
Still, Jonathon’s knitwear wasn’t the worst thing in the room. That honour went to Lionel. Another long-time volunteer whose job seemed to be equal parts sweeping up after the dogs, and after the people, and restocking whatever the cupboards had mysteriously run out of. Lionel wore shorts. In December. Paired with a thick fisherman’s jumper and battered wellies. Aaron had decided it must be a coastal thing. Everyone around here seemed to wear shorts year-round, swapping T-shirts for wool and sandals for rubber boots when the weather turned. As if covering their legs was pointless when they spent most of their life on sand and shingle.
Aaron gagged theatrically. “That stuff smells like melted bin bags and despair. I’ll pass.”
The only coffee worth tasting was whatever clung to Kenny’s mouth. Funny how something he’d detested his whole life could taste like heaven filtered through a coarse beard and a slow, searching tongue.
“We’ve got peppermint tea,” Lionel offered helpfully.
“I’m not ninety, Lionel!” Aaron snapped back, biting off theunlike youbefore it slipped out.
Because, honestly, Lionel looked bloody good for his age. And Aaron didn’t want to picture himself at ninety anyway. Not when it meant Kenny would be… what, a hundred and ten? Christ. That was not the thought to have when he’d just agreed on a fucking safeword with the man.
Would he have to shout it into his hearing aid?
He chose not to think about that.
The open-plan office beyond reception was alive with motion. Phones ringing. Dogs yapping. Printers jamming.Tinsel twinkling from corkboards and windowsills. Someone had jammed candy canes into every plant pot, and a half-eaten tin of Celebrations sat beside the copier under a sticky note that readNO BOUNTIES, YOU ANIMALS.
Aaron unclipped Chaos’s lead and hung it by his desk. The retriever circled once, then curled into the basket beneath the desk. He dropped two liver treats into the basket, then woke up his PC. The monitor flickered on with a groan. The shelter’s email client opened with its usual sigh.
Nothing personal. Nothing urgent. Never was.
He wasn’t anyone’s poster boy. Barely even counted as staff some days. He dealt with the dogs no one else wanted to deal with. The biters. Bolters. Ones with teeth and trauma. Yeah, yeah, before anyone says it, all a little like him. And here,hewas their Kenny. But even those who spent more time with teeth than people got inboxes. Team memos, passive-aggressive training links, a twelve-email thread about how someone stole the good scissors again.
One subject line stood out:Reminder: Submit updated DBS forms.
Shit. Right.That.
If he wanted the better-paying job of doing outreach along with Tessa, taking dogs to schools or community centres without being chaperoned like a delinquent, he needed that clearance. But his file always got flagged. Not for what was in it, but for what wasn’t. A blank space set off alarms. It was a digital scar where a life used to be.
He stared at the screen. Undecided. Why did he even want the job?
“Aaron!” Tessa called again from the front. “Don’t forget, Secret Santa draw’s at lunch!”
“Someone better get me a personality, then,” he called back in jest.
Lionel called out, “Or deodorant. More useful.”
Aaron lifted a middle finger over the partition without looking up.
