Page 35 of Stranded for Christmas with my Boss

“No, my sister Holly and I aren’t in contact with them,” I tell her before pausing and taking a drink of my beer. Do I really want to delve into this part of my past with her?

I don’t talk about it with anyone but Holly and Austin.

Alyssa frowns and sits on the floor closer to me. “Something bad happened?”

Her voice is tender, more like a polite nudge than a firm push for me to open up. Honestly, it’s tempting to tell her. We’ve already been so up close and personal with each other in other ways that adding one more layer of depth to our already complicated relationship doesn’t seem as big of a deal as it should be.

I still busy myself with checking the position of the strike plate, not meeting her eyes as I speak. “My parents had a pretty bad divorce when Holly and I were young. They were terrible to each other. Yelling all day and night. Throwing things. Breaking things. Holly was too scared to sleep in her own room and started staying in mine.”

Alyssa’s eyes grow wide. “That’s awful.”

“A lot of kids have to deal with their parents’ divorce, but I hope it’s quicker than ours was. All the hatred they had for each other dragged on for years. They accused each other of cheating.Lying. Stealing each other’s things and money. But they refused to leave for years because they had nowhere else to go,” I mutter, bitterness seeping into my voice.

How can I not get swept up in the emotions of my past when my mind travels back there?

Alyssa sips on her beer before speaking. “Did they ever…hurt you guys?”

“Physically? No, not really,” I reply. A ghostly memory of my father’s tight grip on my arm wraps goes through my mine, and I’d been slapped in the back of the head a few times by my mother. It was nothing compared to what they could’ve done, though. The important thing is that they didn’t hurt Holly.

“I’m really sorry, Jensen. No one should ever have to go through something like that.”

I pause after shifting the strike plate and look over at her. “It’s…in the past, but I will say my sister and I definitely aren’t the best when it comes to matters of the heart.”

A look of sympathy forms on her face. “If that’s all you knew about love, that’s a tough hurdle to get over.”

She has no idea, and my inner conflict with the thought of being with someone has grown far more complicated since meeting her. I don’t make it a point to get attached to people, but I’m in her apartment fixing her door and telling her my deepest, darkest secrets.

That sounds like an attachment. That sounds dangerous.

“I think I figured out the problem,” I tell her as I turn my attention back to fixing my repair. Before I can shut the door and test it, I hear footsteps down the hallway, making me poke my head out. “It’s the pizza guy.”

Alyssa slips past me and retrieves the large pizza she ordered. She steps back into her apartment and nods to me. “All right, the moment of truth.”

Well, now there is pressure on me. I’mpretty sureI found the cause of the issue, but it’s not like I’m a handyman for a living. I always just got bossed around and yelled at by my dad for not fixing something correctly.

I push the door shut, hearing it click. I draw my hand away and grin when the door doesn’t budge and stays closed.

“You did it!” Alyssa says with an excited smile. She leans closer to me and gives me a half-hug.

My arm winds around her shoulders, drawing her body against mine. I would be lying if I said I didn’t feel pretty victorious right about now. It looks like something from my awful childhood paid off in the long run.

I fixed a beautiful girl’s door. Not a euphemism.

“Do you want to stay for a little? You promised you would split the pizza with me,” Alyssa says as we break apart. She gives me a pointed look that tells me not to test her.

“I worked up an appetite,” I assure her as I follow her into the kitchen, watching her place the large pizza box on her wooden kitchen counter.

Alyssa grabs two plates and hands me one with a large slice of pepperoni pizza on it. She turns to me, resting her back against the counter. “You really came through for me.”

In a way, she did too. She heard out the moody story of my past and didn’t push me to make things right with my parents or anything like that. That’s the last thing that I’ll ever do.

“I wasn’t going to leave you hanging,” I tell her before biting into my pizza. It’s New York pizza. It’s as good as ever.

“What if you didn’t know how to fix it?”

“I would’ve called my emergency maintenance guy and had him fix it. For a generous price, of course.”

Alyssa smirks. “You’re going quite above and beyond, aren’t you? Just for little old me?”

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