Page 40 of Merry Little Hate Notes

Holly threw a hand over her mouth. “I say too much around you,” she mumbled through her fingers.

Instinctively, I removed the hand from her mouth, resisting the urge to keep her delicate hand in mine. “Don’t stop talking. Please.”

“Brandon,” she breathed out.

“Yes,” I said anxiously, waiting for her to open the door to me.

“I still hate you.” She smiled.

I shook my head. I should have known she wouldn’t make this easy on me. “Hate is how we started, Holly-Pops. I can work with hate.”

HOLLY

“TOUGH BREAK YESTERDAY.” KRISTA LEANED over the bathroom sink to get a better look in the mirror while she finished applying her pink lip stain.

I curled my lips, still unhappy about getting disqualified from the cookie-decorating contest yesterday because I had theaudacityto use my own sugar crystals. No one said beforehand we couldn’t bring our own cookie decorations. And dang it if our cookies didn’t look the prettiest. Like, so, so pretty. Everyone said so except for that sore loser, Jason, who blabbed about my sugar crystals. Why did he even have eyes on our table? I thought I’d been sneaky about the contraband I’d used on my perfectly frosted snowflake. Now I wished I had nailed his cologne habits in our “Twelve Days of Christmas” song.

“Jason is going down today in the gift-wrapping contest. I have some mad wrapping paper skills,” I boasted. Not sure this was the kind ofholly jolly attitudeBrandon’s wingman was hoping I’d catch during these team-building exercises, but I wanted vindication.

Krista popped her lip stain into her purse and laughed. “Well, at least you have a sexy partner, who, I might add, seems to have a thing for you,” she sang.

I immediately felt my cheeks burn to a crisp. “Uh ...why would you say that?” To my ever-loving surprise, it appeared Brandon really did have a thing for me. Either that or he was a big fat liar who talked to sleeping women for the fun of it.

“Oh, please.” Jane walked out of a stall with her pants still undone. That was attractive. “It’s so obvious by the way he was behaving yesterday. The touching, the gazing. You should probably report him to HR.”

“I don’t think that’s necessary.” Especially since I kind of liked it—or maybe I liked it a lot. It was all so confusing. I hadn’t been lying yesterday when I’d said I still hated him. He stole himself from me and made me believe a terrible lie for almost half my life. On the other hand, there was just something about being with him again. For the first time in a long time, I could feel the parts of myself I’d been missing. Parts that scared me.

“Ooh, do you like him?” Krista wagged her brows.

That was a good question. The simple answer was yes. I’d always liked the boy I loved to hate. I’d even loved him. That made this even more complicated. He’d lied and crushed my tender soul. I kept thinking about how much I could have really used his shoulder to lean on and cry on over the last decade or so. Despite our weird relationship, he had a gift for making me feel like everything would be okay.

“He’s a good account executive to work with,” I offered instead of answering her real question. “Besides, he likes Katherine Heigl.”

Jane started washing her hands with her pants still unbuttoned. Apparently, we were getting too cozy with each other. “That’s a definite nonstarter.”

Krista tossed her head from side to side. “Still not sure that’s a deal-breaker. The man does look like a tasty snack. But since I let his odd crush slip, he’s been dropping in the Mistletoe Manness rankings.”

I had to hide my smile. My evil plan was working. Nobody better be thinking about taking a taste of that snack until I decided what to do with him. They probably shouldn’t think of him like a snack, period. But that was neither here nor there at the moment. Admittedly, I was kind of enjoying torturing him. The man was normally a smooth operator, so watching him fumble with his words and say ridiculous things was entertaining.

“Forget Mistletoe Manness,” Jane barked while finally buttoning her pants. “Did you hear what happened during team two’s cookie-decorating contest?”

“What?” Krista and I eagerly said in unison. Team two was a hotbed of gossip and my primary source of work entertainment. You know, besides Brandon.

“Let’s just say that Amy and Rita used their cookies to send each other a message. Not the ones they submitted for the competition, but according to my source, they each delivered a cookie to the other person’s desk with a nasty message written in frosting.”

“What did they say?” Krista asked.

Jane grinned impishly, revealing lipstick on her teeth. “Some choice four-letter words. Words I’m going to be using until the holiday cheer around here comes to an end.”

Krista and I laughed. Jane had mixed frostings together yesterday to make an awful, putrid-looking color and then proceeded to frost as many cookies as she could with it. Needless to say, she and her partner, Gerald, didn’t win.

“Only fifteen more days until we’re off for Christmas,” Krista tried to console her.

“Ugh. I’m going to take some PTO days,” Jane grumbled.

“You have fun with that. I need to get to work. Bye, ladies.” I waved and walked out, wondering if Brandon was done with his early-morning meeting and if he’d seen my hate note yet. I decided to keep to his holiday theme but still add in some Shakespeare vibes to liven it up. This morning’s note said,May you crèche and burn, you stuffed cloakbag of guts.If Shakespeare were alive today, he would do quite well on social media. Probably not in a good way because, man, could he wreck people.

I arrived at my desk to find Brandon still in his meeting, but he’d left me a bright-blue sticky note tucked carefully under my laptop. The sight of it had me feeling like I was sixteen again, anxious to see what he had to say, even though I knew it would be “hateful.” Hate was our language. I wondered if we’d be able to transition. As much as I’d loved the hate-note game growing up, it wasn’t exactly conducive to creating or sustaining a mature relationship. Don’t get mewrong: If Brandon and I ended up together, I would buy sticky notes for the rest of my life. But I needed more than hate—I’m sure he did too. How did we get there, though? Should we even try?

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