I'm Dreaming of an Undead Christmas (11 page)

“What the hell?” I cried over the wailing of the alarm, shaking my burned fingers.

Jolene had already disappeared to shut down the smoke alarm. Tess was sprinkling baking soda into the oven. Miranda grabbed a large plastic spatula from a drawer and wedged it under the sweet-potato disaster. But the spatula did nothing. The mass was stuck so firmly to the floor that she couldn’t pull it up. Tess knelt beside her and added her weight to the leverage. She looked up at me, eyes wide with alarm, even as she bit her lip.

I closed my eyes, shaking my head. “You can laugh now.”

Tess’s tight grip on her giggle let loose, and she practically collapsed on the non-potatoed section of the floor. “Oh, Mylanta, that was the funniest fricking thing I have ever seen. I haven’t seen a cooking eff-up like that since culinary school!”

“Yes, yes, I am hilarious,” I grumbled, kneeling next to the smoking black-and-orange mass.

“It was pretty funny.” Jolene snorted. “Jane would have been proud of that stunt.”

“Let’s just get this mess off the floor before Iris wakes up,” I said.

“How are she and Cal sleeping through all of this, anyway?” Tess asked.

“Disrupted sleep schedule,” I said, as Tess tugged on the spatula handle.

“I think I need help,” she said. “Jolene? Werewolf strength, please?”

Jolene took hold of the spatula and jerked it up. The plastic handle broke off in her hand.

“I think it’s fused to the floor or something!” Miranda exclaimed.

My jaw dropped as Tess’s loon-like laughter sent her to the floor again.

I swatted at her. “Pushing it, Tess.”

“OK, OK.” Tess sighed, grabbing a sturdier metal pancake-sized spatula from the drawer. She shoved it under the lump with all her might. The three of us gripped the spatula handle like it was a party game and pushed. The lump broke loose from the linoleum with a
pop
and flew across the kitchen, denting the front of the dishwasher.

OK, even I found that funny.

Jolene collapsed against my legs, knocking into Tess, who overcorrected and ended up sprawled over on Miranda’s side. I started giggling, which made Tess laugh. Miranda appeared to be in shock. Jolene was shamelessly cackling, because why protect my feelings? This completely inappropriate outburst of hilarity was interrupted by Tess gasping.

“Oh, crap, Iris is going to kill us,” she cried, covering her mouth with her hand.

Sitting up, I saw that the lump’s magma-like crust had burned some sort of impenetrable sweet-potato-cement ring-slash-stain-slash-burn pattern on the aquamarine tile, like a tiny nuclear explosion had gone off in the middle of the floor. Iris’s new kitchen had been magazine-perfect, and she was rabidly proud of it. And I had just burned a bomb pattern into the floor and dented an appliance.

“Gigi?”

My head jerked up so quickly I practically gave myself whiplash. Ben was standing there in the doorway, a poinsettia in his hand and a concerned expression on his face. He’d dressed up, wearing khakis and the shirt and tie he only wore when his mom made him go with her to church.

“Are you OK?” he asked. “What happened?”

“Nuclear potato explosion,” I said.

Miranda, Jolene, and Tess exchanged confused looks, or at least half as confused as the one Ben was giving me.

“Oh . . . OK,” Ben said, helping me to my feet.

“I thought you were going to your family’s Christmas thing tonight,” I said, brushing the bits of ceramic and orange goo from my jeans.

“Uh, yeah . . . Geeg, can we talk for a minute?” He had his serious face on. His serious, nervous face. This couldn’t be good.

“Oh, I should really stay and help clean up.”

Jolene waved me away. “Go on, hon. We’ll clean up Hurricane Gigi’s path of destruction.”

“I would say that’s harsh, but I just turned complex carbohydrates into an incendiary device,” I muttered. “I’ll come back and help in just a second.”

Ben and I walked out of the kitchen just as I heard Tess say, “Maybe we can throw an area rug over the burn mark. Iris wouldn’t notice that, right?”

Jolene scoffed, “Oh, no, I’m sure someone with super-vision won’t notice that we threw a random rug in the middle of the floor for no reason.”

Ben handed me my coat and opened the front door, making my heart sink a bit. It had to be a
really
serious discussion if he didn’t want the others to overhear. He was going to break up with me. Considering the whole “making out with strange vampires on a public sidewalk” issue, I didn’t have much room to be upset. But still, this wasn’t the way I wanted to end things between us.

Oh. No.

What if someone
saw
me making out with said stranger? Half-Moon Hollow was a small town. You never knew who was going to drive by to witness acts of reckless hussyness, and the more embarrassing the behavior, the more likely it was that you’d be seen by someone who knew you. Or knew someone who knew you. It didn’t matter how shaky the connection was, word of your hussyness would eventually make its way back to your loved ones. What if some friend of Ben’s cousin’s parents decided to take a detour through the seedier parts of the Hollow and saw me attached at the face with Tall, Blond, and Fangy?

I was wrong before.
This
was proof that I was the worst girlfriend in the world.

OK, Scanlon,
I told myself sternly
, you danced to the skanky tune, time to pay the piper. Ben has every right to break up with you. You’re not the right girl for him. It’s over and has been for a long time. Just try to get through it with some dignity.

I squared my shoulders and took a deep breath as Ben gestured to the front step, the same front step where we had sat together after countless dates, the same step where we had posed for prom pictures. I hissed as my butt met the cold cement, sending a shiver up my spine.

Dignity was just a little too much to ask.

The sun was fading into the horizon, leaving hazy orange cloud trails in the sky. I blinked against the light, trying to concentrate on the long black shadows cast by the trees, the iron fawn, the silly inflatable Santa Claus, as my eyes adjusted. I heard a burst of laughter from inside the house and wished desperately that I was in there with the other ladies. Anywhere but here, in this awkward, awful girlfriend limbo.

Ben dropped to the spot next to me while I rubbed my slightly sweaty palms together. He deserved to yell at me. I’d kissed another boy—scratch that,
man
. It didn’t matter that the kiss was done sneak-attack-style and the perpetrator had disappeared. I’d enjoyed it, a lot. Too much for it not to count against me in the great
Book of Really Stupid Girlfriend Tricks
. Ben deserved to yell at me and dump me in some humiliating fashion that would probably end up on Abadcaseofthedates.com.

Ben rubbed his hands on his khakis and hopped up from his spot. He paced a bit on the brick walkway before sitting next to me again. He didn’t want to dump me, I realized. He was a nice guy, even now, with our relationship falling down around our ears. Maybe I should talk, I supposed, since he couldn’t seem to get this started.

But before I could produce the “Buh” in “Ben,” he was saying, “Gigi, we need to talk about us.”

“I know,” I practically whispered.

“We’ve been dating for a long time. We’re about to graduate, and I think we need to start thinking about the long term, about our future together.”

My head whipped up again, making my sore neck muscles twinge. “I’m sorry, what?”

He cleared his throat and knelt in front of me. “Now, I love you a lot. And I think this is the next step for us.”

He pulled a black velvet box from his pocket and opened it. A teeny-tiny diamond winked out at me from the depths of the box. I recoiled so hard you’d think the little square container was filled with spiders.

What in the name of all that was good and holy was that? My eyes flickered toward Ben’s pale, nervous face and then back at the ring box. Clearly, I had completely misread Ben’s serious expression.

“Is that an engagement ring?” I wheezed.

“No, no!” he exclaimed, pulling the little ring out of the box. “It’s a promise ring. I can’t afford a real engagement ring now. So this is a promise from both of us. From you, it’s that we will eventually get married, and from me, it’s that I will replace this ring with a nicer one.” He took my left hand and slipped my ring-finger tip just inside the gold band. “So what do you say, Geeg? Want to be my almost-fiancée?”

Despite the fact that this was possibly the worst-phrased almost-proposal I had ever heard, it would be so easy to say yes. Ben was so sweet, and he tried so hard to make me happy. He would be a good husband one day. My family loved him. He accepted all of their supernatural quirks without batting an eyelash. Where was I going to find someone who loved me enough to put up with my somewhat insane life?

But when I opened up my mouth, instead of a yes, I said, “Ben, no.”

I pulled my hand away and tucked it under my arm, just in case my no wasn’t a clear indication that I was rejecting Ben and his perfectly lovely commitment-based jewelry.

I just couldn’t do it. I loved Ben but not enough to agree to spend the rest of my life with him. I loved him but not enough to make a marriage work. I loved him but not in the way he deserved to be loved. He deserved someone who would love him without “buts.”

Ben’s face, already poised in a happy “She’s accepting” smile, fell into a confused frown.

“What?”

I put the ring back into the box, gently closed the lid, and wrapped my fingers around his. “No, I can’t take that ring. I can’t marry you. Definitely not now, and not later, either.”

Ben’s brow furrowed. “What?”

“We’re not right for each other, Ben.”

“What do you mean? We’re great together. You make me laugh, and I keep you calm, and we like the same movies and music, and—and hell, Geeg, you even changed your major when you realized you’re just as good with computers as I am, if not better. We work together.”

“And all of that means that we make great
friends,
but I don’t think it’s enough to build a lifetime commitment. We’re so young, Ben. And there’s so much left for us to do. I don’t think it makes sense for us to dive into this so quickly.”

“Quickly? We’ve been together for three years,” he protested.

“And for the last six months, there’s been something off about us, Ben. I don’t know if it’s you or me. But we’re not the same. It’s not bad, but it’s not good for us, not like it used to be.”

“You don’t just throw away three years because you don’t know what’s wrong!” He seemed to realize he was yelling and stopped himself, clearing his throat. In a much softer tone, he said, “Three years, Gigi. Why did we stay together all that time if we’re just going to break up? For no real reason?”

“We grew up, Ben, that’s all. It’s nobody’s fault. It happens to a lot of people. Only about fourteen percent of people who marry met their spouses while they were in school.”

“What, like you took time to Google ‘college students who outgrow their high school sweethearts’?”

I pressed my lips together and cringed. “Maybe . . . I found it on Snopes.com.”

Ben pressed his face into his hands. “Of course you did.”

“I’m so sorry, Ben. But I couldn’t help but notice that in all of those reasons you listed, the reasons we work together, you never mentioned being head-over-heels in love with me. Or even a little bit in love with me. Don’t you think that should be at the top of the list?”

“Of course I’m in love with you,” he protested. “I just thought that was one of those things that goes without saying.”

“No, trust me, if you’re going to marry someone, that’s the sort of thing that should go
with
saying.”

“Well, you haven’t said whether you love me, either.”

“I do love you, but I don’t think I love you in that way,” I said, knowing exactly how cliché that sounded.

“Not in
that
way? The boyfriend-girlfriend way?” Ben’s jaw dropped. “So I’m in the friend zone? Can you friend-zone someone after you’ve already dated them?”

“It would seem so,” I said with a shrug.

His face was more pouty than hurt. “Well, that sucks.”

“I agree.”

I wrapped my arms around my legs as Ben tucked the ring box into his shirt pocket. I’d expected him to be angry, to yell or cry or maybe some combination of both. But he seemed . . . resigned, even relieved that I’d said no. And now that things were more clear, if sort of painful, between us, I felt better. I felt like an enormous weight I’d been carrying around on my chest had been lifted, and I could breathe deeply again.

Ben sidled up close, leaning his forehead against my hair. He kissed my forehead and sighed.

“I knew,” he murmured. “I knew there was something off between us. There’s this weird space between us, awkward pauses in conversation and . . . ugh, I’m sorry. For the last few weeks, I’ve been finding reasons not to see you, like if I had a choice between hanging out with you or going out with my friends, I used to say, ‘Sorry, guys, I’ve got a date.’ But now I’m jumping at the chance to eat frozen pizza and play
Call of Duty
.”

“I knew it!” I exclaimed. “Nobody spends that much time studying for a mythology final!”

“I know, I know. I suck,” he grumbled. “I just didn’t want to admit that we were over, or close to being over. I don’t know what happened. I was crazy about you when we first started dating, and now I just like you. All of the things that I loved about you are still there, but they don’t make me feel the same way.”

“And so you thought a pseudo-proposal would fix that?”

He waggled his hand back and forth. “Sort of?”

“Your logic is as flawed as the plot of
Ghost Shark
,” I told him, making him laugh.

“Nothing is as flawed as a movie about a poltergeist Great White that can attack in any form of water, including a glassful that someone just drank, resulting in said shark bursting out of the drinker
Alien
-style.”