A Jingle Bell Mingle (Christmas Notch Book 3)

by Julie Murphy

No one could ever say the man didn’t know how to suffer in silence.

He had too much wasted cat dad potential.

If I couldn’t finish making cat slippers out of cat hair, then how could I be expected to even write a whole damn movie?

“Find any good inspo in the walls?” I asked. He didn’t turn around. “That’s part of the process. Staring at the wall.”

Thanks for feeding Mr. Tumnus the last couple of mornings.” “He wouldn’t let me know peace until I did,” he said.

This brooding artist thing is old.

I’m what the kids call spiraling.”

He wore cargo sweatpants and a silk bowling jacket that said country and western on the back.

Cargo sweatpants? Is that legal?

The man behind the counter looked like he could be Stanley Tucci’s cousin, with his bald head, sweater vest, and smart-looking bow tie.

Either she loves it or you give her the opportunity to do her favorite thing: negotiate a better deal.”

I didn’t really want to try on wedding rings in the same room as the guy who had just shut me down three days ago, but this was for Teddy and Steph, one of the few reasons I still believed in the possibility of love.

I could throw up right here in the middle of this little shop in front of Stanley Tucci’s long-lost cousin.

I couldn’t breathe. I was going to suffocate. Death by jewelry crisis.

“Open up! In the name of Elizabeth Taylor! Or I’m calling the police!”

New favorite phrase.

“I’ll buy every ring in this store if you just step away from the door and let me in there, okay?”

“You have thirty seconds left before I involve the authorities!” “Can I just crawl out the bathroom window?” Sunny mumbled. I patted her back. “Never show fear to a man in a bow tie. Kallum told me that once.”

I’d been the one with the case of unrequited longing, and now suddenly, I wasn’t the one . . . requiting.

It was a law of physics; it was molecular; I was broken at the quantum level.

Eye roll.

She was a melody of so many things, and goddammit, I wished I were a different man, someone better, someone less fucked up.

Be different.

But no, we’d locked it after we brought the tree in, and Mr. Tumnus had eaten a king’s dinner of salmon and a Kleenex he’d found somewhere.

I opened my eyes to see Mr. Tumnus making unnecessarily aggressive biscuits on my thigh, the morning sunlight showing off the barely there hint of chocolate brown in his black fur.

I’ll FaceTime you with a baby if you want cheering up! Grace can say her ABCs now! Well, some of them. The important ones.

And I’d forgotten it completely.

You are moving on! It's Normal!

And there it was. The thing I’d known since the beginning, the thing I’d been waiting for. The car crash.

I couldn’t be near him, couldn’t think about him, couldn’t stay here to be a walking bruise when I’d known—God, how I’d known—that this was exactly what would happen. That this was exactly how it would end. Me heartbroken, and him still so in love with his own heartbreak that an end was all he’d ever be.

I’ve forgotten about my parents’ death day a few times too, and I didn’t spin around and point fingers at the people I was with so that I could blame anyone but myself. Instead, I took those days as a fucking blessing. A sign that even though the ones I’ve lost are irreplaceable, at least I’ve found people and a life worth living for. Because that’s the greatest way I could possibly honor my parents.

But this time it was me who was slamming the door. It was me who had drawn the line.

The most interesting thing about you is that you like to make money and that you once bought a blacklight poster from Spencer’s when you were in tenth grade. I would be grumpy if I was that boring too.”

I just wanted to push my face against my century-old area rug and listen to my eyelashes scrape against the fibers,

Get over yourself!

and there was no question that telling your roommate-formerly-with-bennies that she made you forget your soul mate was maestro-level fuckboy energy.

She sounds either insane or jealous.

was the one who’d forgotten the whole point of coming here, which was to write a stupid album so that I could spend the rest of my life doing what I did best: being alone and remembering the one time that I hadn’t been.

Stop it!

My eyelashes scraping against the rug agreed, and eventually I could match the sound to my heartbeat, and it’s too bad no one wanted a song made up just of eyelash sounds from me, because it could have been my magnum opus.

“I’ve always wanted to do that,” said Kallum to someone wearing a beanie behind him. “Pretty sure it was unlocked,” said the beanie person. Nolan. And then, “Oh no. We’re at the floor stage.”

“I think he’s dead. Son, are you dead?”

“Beer me one of those Capri-Suns,” called Kallum to Nolan, who decided to kick a Capri-Sun like a hacky sack over to Kallum.

So they called Kallum and me to come check on you, and since you’re too busy with the whole Miss Havisham bit to lock your doors, apparently, we let ourselves in.”

“You made friends with internet detectives with a lot of extra time on their hands. They figured out who you were years ago.”

“We found you on the floor,” Nolan said. “It was consensual between me and the floor.” “You have the texture of the rug embossed onto half your face.

“Did you smash that subscribe button, bro?

“Kallum and I knew Brooklyn too, Isaac. You know that’s not what she would have wanted.”

I think it’s that you need to let go of this idea that you have to be someone who can’t love again in order to still love Brooklyn.”

Some sense!!!!

“You’re so pretty and you’re so good at the song words. So we let you get away with a lot.”

“Maybe it’s selfish not to ask things of people,” Nolan said. “Stop it,” I said. “That’s how you do things with people,” Kallum said. “You ask things of them. They ask things of you. That’s how you build trust, and love.”

I wanted Sunny and I wanted to love her and I wanted to feel like Doris had told us Bernice had felt, like I could grow a new heart alongside my old one, and give it to Sunny completely.

“And maybe let your face un-carpet a little,” Nolan said. “It’s not looking good.” “Zombie is a word that comes to mind,” Kallum contributed.

“My son-in-law has been introducing me to these romance novels that you read on your phone. They’re a blast.”

You know what’s great about vibrators? You can tell them you love them and they don’t get all weird about it.”

Oh, oh, did you role-play Edward and Bella’s honeymoon?”

Your khaki-pants-personified brother is here in Christmas Notch, Vermont?

I wanted to tell her everything, but I also wanted to sound like I was already halfway to over it, like it was just another wacky Sunny adventure for the history books.

“It’s not a human, Auntie Sunny,” Gretta corrected me as she traced the outline of the pink peony on my forearm with a purple marker she kept in her little purse along with a Hot Wheel and two mints she’d stolen from the hostess desk. “It’s Logan.”

Haha.