Hashtag Holidate

by Lucy Lennox

An actual, old-school hardware store, not some hipster interpretation with $500 hammers and artisanal nails.

Har. Artisanal nails...

“The guy flaunts his pretty feathers for a living,” I said instead. “He’s empty as a pocket.

What a strange comparison. Pockets, by definition, are designed to hold things, not be empty.

hard fucking, and I couldn’t resist the urge to make them even redder. So I slapped his ass, hard. “Shut the fuck up and get in the shower. You’re covered in jizz.”

Yes, gurl, yessss: an entire steamy sex scene unblemished by the misspelled version of come. Not a prude, just a grammar grump with a stick up her ass about spelling.

“Well, prepare to be equally impressed by my toast-making skills.” “This should be good,” Maddox said, not even trying to hide his amusement. “Do you remember what Chief Kincaid taught you last week about fire safety? Do you need me to pull up the footage?” Five minutes later, the smoke alarm was going off, and I was staring at two pieces of what could generously be called charcoal. “Nailed it,” I announced, waving a dish towel at the alarm until it stopped shrieking.

Seriously. For comedy's sake, okay, I guess, but really: was he making toast over the gas logs in the fireplace? Does Maddox not have a toaster? Not sure how you can turn bread into a charcoal briquette unless you are using open flame...

He got what Sullivan Hardware represented—four generations of serving the community, of being the place people came when they needed solutions rather than status symbols.

Nothing rocks like a really good hardware store...

It felt like the truest, realest, most authentic thing I’d ever experienced in my perfectly curated life.

Weird. It feels like the word "curated" pops up so many times in this story, but the truth is, only 18 times by actual count. Is it just because it's striking? I have, myself, used it more in the last year or so than in my previous fifty-plus decades of adult life, griping about reading challenges that require selecting from a curated list of titles, almost always by unfamiliar authors, or by those that I have either already read to death because I love them, or that I've read and disliked. I'd guess that out of a dozen tries of unfamiliar authors sampled, I've found one new author I enjoy---but not enough to buy the books not available on Kindle Unlimited. Hmm. Wow, that turned into quite the diatribe, (one that wandered well off topic), didn't it?