Page 6 of Naughtying Up St. Nick

Again, I envy his confidence. The smooth way he talks. It makes the whole situation feel less awkward. Makes me feel less pathetic for bringing it up in the first place.

“Okay.” Harlow hands me my phone back. “I’ll text you my address later tonight, and you can come by in the morning.”

I nod. “Got it. And…thank you.”

He flashes me a quick grin. “Don’t thank me yet. You’re going to earn my review, and I’m not going to make it easy on you.”

Four

Harlow

I’m still a little in shock about Calvin’s request the next morning. He was always shy when we were kids, and we were definitely never close enough to have the kind of conversation we had last night in my truck. Though, maybe that made it easier on him.

I feel a little unsettled as I make breakfast, but I don’t even know why. It’s not like I’ve never slept with anyone before. And the chance of having sex with Calvin Simms is something sixteen-year-old me only ever fantasized about. Even though I saw him a lot around since the town and school are small, I never let myself get close to him. He was like Jacklyn; he had his sights set on getting out of this place. I did, too, but it didn’t work out for me. When I was eighteen, I blamed it on what happened with Jackie keeping me back, but I knew most colleges wouldn’t get to see the fact that I’d been disciplined for cheating in the past.

It was because I didn’t want to start my life after high school still shackled to my parents. No one was willing to sign a loan with me without one of my parents co-signing. I knew if I did that, my parents would hold it over me for the rest of my life. So I got a full-time job instead and moved out. I took two years of community college and just got accepted in UCLA for the spring semester. Even though I’m going to miss everyone—especially the kids and families I’ve gotten to know through Santa’s village—I’m so excited to get the hell out of here.

A knock sounds outside my door, and I move to open it and find Calvin fidgeting nervously on the other side.

“Come in,” I say, stepping back to let him into my apartment.

“It smells great in here,” he says, his voice soft.

“I don’t have table, so take a seat at the bar.” I move around him and grab the plates I set off to the side. When I place them on the bar, I go back and grab two mugs of coffee.

Calvin looks grateful to have something to do besides talk about what he came here to discuss, so I don’t bring it up yet. Instead, I make small talk with him, find out what he’s been doing the last four years and where he’s been.

He relaxes the more we talk, and I wait until then to bring up the subject.

But to my surprise, when I start, he interrupts me with a hand on my arm.

“I thought a lot about this last night,” he says, his voice taking on that shyness it had when he showed up this morning. “And before we get into anything, I wanted to say I’m sorry if it came across like I was…insinuating something about your sex life.”

The innocence of his apology makes me smile, but I hide it because I don’t want him to think I’m laughing at him. “I didn’t think that. I heard what you said last night. You’re comfortable around me.” Even as I repeat his own words back to him, I have trouble believing them. I guess I know a lot of people who are comfortable around me, but I never pictured Calvin Simms being one of those people. We’ve just been at odds for so long.

“Okay.” Calvin pulls his hand back from my arm. “Then we can keep going.”

“Great. Okay, so first, we need to have safe words.”

His eyebrows lift. “Um…I just want to have…regular sex. Not, like, the kind that maybe needs a safe word.”

“Okay, bullet point under the first topic: all consensual sex is normal, Cal. But I hear what you’re saying. I’m not planning on doing anything wild, but we’re also not in a relationship. We knew each other in high school, but we don’t really know each other now. I want to make sure you’re comfortable with whatever we do. I don’t want you worrying about doing something you don’t want to do because you’re looking at this as a lesson or practice or whatever.”

“Oh.” He nibbles on his lower lip. “Of course. Sorry.”

“You don’t need to apologize.” Contrary to what most people in town probably believe, my sex life isn’t exactly BDSM, but Cal had said Jesse was his first. And from what Cal told me about him, Jesse probably isn’t much of a prize. I want Cal to learn what he likes in bed, including the ability to stop something he doesn’t want to do.

I take a sip of coffee before continuing. “Second ground rule: I want this to stay between us. You know how people in this town can be about couples. And I don’t want it to affect work at the village. I did that once.”

“Turned out bad?”

“The worst. He was constantly pressuring me to have sex in the sugar palace—you know, the place in the village for toddlers? He said it was the only place he could get turned on.”

Cal’s nose wrinkles. “Ew.”

“Yeah. To no one’s surprise, he’s currently serving out a ten-year sentence for indecent exposure and stalking.” I know that’s pretty out of the norm for workplace romances, but it was definitely scarring. And on top of that, I don’t want anything I do with Cal to get back to Jackie. Maybe if we had a normal relationship, I wouldn’t care if she knew who I was seeing. But we haven’t been normal in a really long time, and her showing up out of the blue after four years of dodging her phone calls really threw me.

“Jeez,” Cal says. “So you lost all good taste after high school?”

---