A Snowy Little Christmas

Carol bursts into the conference room at 8:56, where I’ve been sitting for a half hour, staring out the long wall of windows and trying to shake the sense memory of what I was doing the last time I was in here. I’ve got to get my head on straight in the four minutes before Kristen shows up and I break the news. If nothing else it’s bad enough that she’ll probably forget about the mess I made of last night, kissing her like that.

Kissing her at all.

“I mean, just you wait,” Carol says, reliably immune to my brooding even on regular days. On the day before a holiday break? She seems to take it as an invitation. “This one is going to knock your socks off.”

I blink up at her from where I’m sitting, and she’s standing there, her ash blond hair Texas big, her brown eyes wide behind red-framed glasses with tiny rhinestones at the edges, a set of massive earrings that look like Christmas ornaments dancing at her ears. We hired—or rather, Kris hired—Carol six months ago, and since day one she has proudly displayed her dogged devotion to holiday attire of all sorts—Independence Day, Labor Day, International Beer Day, whatever. She has also proudly displayed her devotion to showing each sweater or T-shirt or entire tracksuit to me, in spite of the fact that I can never think of anything to say in response except, “Very nice, Carol,” before going to my office and shutting the door.

She reaches a hand into the opposite sleeve of a bright red cardigan sweater with half a Christmas tree on either side of the front buttons, and after a few seconds of fumbling, the whole entire front of it lights up in multicolored twinkling. I wince.

“This is a great sweater, Jasper,” she says, ignoring me. “I have a backup battery. I’m going to let it run all day.”

“Terrific,” I say blandly, but in spite of myself—in spite of the fact that I’ve had maybe thirteen minutes of sleep since I left here last night and in spite of the fact that I’m about to have an awful meeting with the very person whose face kept me awake all night—I feel a smile tug at my mouth. Most days, the soundtrack in this office is Carol’s loud laugh or her humming; she treats every admin task like it’s the newest and most interesting experience of her life, and sometimes when she prepares travel packets for me she puts a glittery smiley-face sticker on my agenda.

I hate it, but I also don’t.

“Now what’s all this about an emergency meeting?” she says, her sweater still flashing as she settles into a seat beside me. “Are you rethinking my idea to have a holiday party for us? I could whip something up by this afternoon. One of those nut-covered cheese ball things, and—”

“No.” I hear Kristen’s door open down the hall and my whole body clenches with nerves at the thought of seeing her again. That furrow in her brow and that look in her eyes when she’d pulled away from our kiss—shock, confusion, and, my worst fear, regret. I felt like my whole body and brain had shut down at that look.

When she comes in she blinks in surprise at Carol, and that’s when I realize I doubled down on my screwup by sending that e-mail, since clearly Kristen was expecting this meeting to be me and her alone, and she probably also thinks the problem I referred to is what happened between us. I can almost hear Ben scolding me. You are terrible with women, he’d say, in that friendly, warm tone he has, the one that comes so easy to him. What he’d really mean is: You are terrible with people in general, and he’d be right.

“Good morning,” she says, more to Carol than to me, and for a couple minutes it’s a lot of oohing and aahing over the sweater, cheerful exchanges about holiday plans.

I clear my throat in that way I have. Carol rolls her eyes but Kristen’s snap to mine immediately, and I don’t have a chance to arrange my insides against what happens when our gazes lock. I held her last night. Given the news I have to deliver, it should be the last thing on my mind.

“You remember the Dreyer job we closed three weeks ago?” I say, proud of myself for getting it out, getting back on firmer ground.

“Sure,” Kristen says. “He’s going to Dubai. Two years, and turning over his desalination patent.”

“He’s not.”

She blinks, startled. “He’s—he has to. He signed the contract.”

I shake my head. “He says he’ll pay the penalty. He doesn’t want to uproot his wife. They’ve got a grandkid coming.”

Her eyes soften briefly before she looks down at her clasped hands. It only takes a couple of seconds, but I can feel it, when she registers what this means. We did the Dreyer job on behalf of GreenCorp, an environmental solutions firm. Getting Dreyer was a condition of them signing us for an exclusive recruiting contract. We lose Dreyer, we lose GreenCorp.

And GreenCorp is a huge part of our operating budget for next year.

Carol’s sweater blinks obnoxiously in my periphery. We lose GreenCorp, we’ll probably lose Carol, too. I think she knows, because she reaches into her sleeve and turns off the sweater.

“Okay,” Kristen says. “Okay. It’s only the fifteenth. You can get there Monday, spend the day. Change his mind.”

“Can’t. He’s off the grid until Thursday afternoon.” A hunting trip with his brother, he’d said, and I don’t think he’s lying, but I do think he’s relieved he won’t have to deal with me.

She nods, looks down at her tablet. “Friday, then. That’s still three days before Christmas. You’ll have time to get home to your—”

“I’m not going home.”

It’s so annoying that she’s said it. I don’t even really have a home back in west Texas. My family situation is a shambles, and maybe she doesn’t know why, but she knows that it is. Last year she’d FaceTimed me on Christmas Eve with a flimsy excuse about needing a software code for her phone, her face flushed with the pleasure of being with her family, and maybe with an eggnog buzz. We both knew she’d been checking up on me, alone in my condo. See you next week? I remember her saying, her eyes on me steady and a little sad. I miss you, I’d wanted to say, but of course I hadn’t.

She clears her throat. “Right, yes. I’m sorry.”

“Kris.” At the sound of my voice, she raises her eyes to me. “You know I can’t do this on my own.”

For a long second, we look at each other. In all the years we’ve worked together, we’ve come to know each other’s weaknesses, and mine has always been the human stuff. I can talk all day about where a recruit’s tech will land, give them stats about equipment they’ll have, but I’m garbage at selling places, experiences, people, and obviously this is where the Dreyer job has fallen apart. When Ben and I worked as a team, he’d always handle that side of things, and he was unstoppable. Now it’s Kristen who works these angles, and she’s even better than Ben was. Thorough and detail-oriented, but never robotic or distant. Approachable but not overfamiliar, genuinely excited but not frenetic in her energy. And so, so warm.

I fist a hand against the table. Don’t think about how warm she is.

“What if we set up a call?” she asks weakly. I don’t even have to say anything. Carol turns her head toward Kristen and raises her hand slightly, like she’s about to check her temperature. She thinks better of it and looks back at me with a question in her eyes. As many times as the three of us have sat together in this room, I’m sure Carol is thrown—not just at Kristen’s passivity, but at the cool awkwardness between us. Kristen does not want to go anywhere with me, and my stomach twists in dread.

It’s never been this way. Kris and I, we work as a team.

“A call isn’t going to do it,” I say grimly, and I realize that Carol might also be thrown by my somber delivery. I’m not a cheerful guy, but this problem—it’s exactly the kind of challenge that usually gets me focused, energized.

It’s doing neither for me right now.

“I’m supposed to go to Michigan on—” Kristen says. She raises a hand to her forehead, her full lips compressed and turned down at the corners, and my chest feels tight. Looking at her face like that, I don’t give a damn about the job, the firm. I’ll pay Carol out of my savings, find her a new job. GreenCorp can get fucked, so long as Kristen has what she wants.

“But I guess I’ll push it,” she says, just as I’m about to open my mouth. “Carol, can we do some travel rearranging?”

She turns the sweater back on. “My favorite! How long do y’all need?”

“A day,” I say firmly, even though I don’t know if a day will do it. Ben once spent six days in rural Oregon to get someone to sign off on some 3-D printing tech our old boss was pissing his pants over. “I don’t care what you do with my tickets, but Kristen needs to be on her way to Michigan Friday night.”

“Jasper,” Kristen says. “I can—”

“No,” I say, and my voice sounds so flat. “We’ll do it quickly. Treat it like a hiccup, and it will be one. A minor inconvenience.”

I see the flash of hurt in her eyes. Carol looks back and forth between us, twinkle lights glinting off her glasses. I am terrible with people. It’s only by some strange, inexplicable miracle that it’s taken me this long to be terrible with Kris.

She stands from her chair, clutching her laptop to her chest. On instinct, I stand too, and now the sense memory of last night is even fresher. My hands clench in my pockets.

“Absolutely,” she says, her voice curt, her eyes not meeting mine. “A minor inconvenience.”

This time, she leaves the conference room first.