Page 201 of A Merry Mountain Christmas

I still haven’t answered Glenn’s text from the other night, the one he sent a suspiciously short time after Ruth and Tom would have arrived back in Charlotte.

Nor have I responded to the follow-up message he sent last night, asking to speak with me.We can even make an appointment. I know you love making appointments.

The thing is, even though I don’t want Aidan to feel abandoned, hewasabandoned. Until I’m positive that Glenn is sincere, I’m not going to let him slip in and pretend he didn’t wake up one day and decide he didn’t want to be a father. Because, frankly, Aidan is not going to stop being autistic. He is smart, and beautiful, and utterly himself, and he will always be different. I love him for him. Can Glenn?

I’m pretty sure I know the answer, but do I really want to stand in the way of Aidan having any kind of relationship with his father?

I have no answer.

All I know is that Glenn would have walked away from decorating the tree, or maybe paid someone to do it. But Jace…

Jace could have so easily put on that star himself. It would have taken him ten seconds, maybe less. But instead, he saw another opportunity to give joy to my son, and he lifted him up. Then he looked at me, smirking a little, and straightened the star. Now, lying in bed, feeling a strange thrumming in my chest, that’s all I can think of. Jace giving me that look.

He gave me plenty of other looks tonight, ones that filled my body with heat and remembered pleasure, but that’s the one that stuck.

The strange ache it left in me is the reason why I finally sneak into the kitchen and pull the pink vibrator out from under the Woody towel, jumping and tossing the thing in the air when the HVAC system rumbles behind me. The vibrator falls onto the cutting board, as if it were a cucumber waiting to be diced for a salad. Face burning, I stuff it back into the towel and then tuck the towel under my arm. As I head down the hall, I listen for sounds of Aidan stirring, but there’s nothing.

After washing the vibrator three times, I bring it back into my room, feeling a little less sure about the whole thing. My pajamas. That has to be it. I feel ridiculous using this thing in myold panties and plaid Christmas pajamas, so I put on the black bra and panties that Aidan waved in front of Jace.

When I finally turn the vibrator on, jolting a little from the sound and thesensation—good grief, why don’t women use them all the time? Why don’t underwear companies build them into panties?—I imagine Jace’s hands on me, the warmth and weight of them, the confidence with which he wields his beautiful body. And I imagine straddling him the way he insinuated last weekend, one leg on either side, his hands cupping my breasts and touching me just above the place where our bodies meet as I ride him.

It feels good—no, it feels great—but afterward, there’s still a sense of emptiness. Of loss. Because I only imagined him. Because he wasn’t actually here. Because logic and sense aside, I wanted him to be.

“Was I unclear?”Nicole asks with a deep, beleaguered sigh, as if she’s a disappointed parent. “Did I stutter in my delivery?”

“What do you mean? You wanted me to use the…” I look around, even though Aidan went to sleep an hour and a half ago, and it’s unlikely a burglar has broken into the house and hidden behind the Christmas tree without making a sound. “…vibrator,” I whisper, “and I did! I’ve been using it all week.” My face heats. I didn’t mean to admit to that. That first time was all I’d planned to tell her about. She’s been busy for the last week and a half, doing things undisclosed, so this is our first in-person get-together since the night of the margaritas.

Since your night with Jace.

She’s texted a lot, of course, and dispensed two additional challenges. The first was to order something I didn’t need justbecause I wanted it. (I argued that I hadn’t needed the vibrator, and she kept sending the eggplant emoji until I agreed to do the new challenge. So I bought a tube of expensive red lipstick to replace mine, which I realized was at least five years old.) The second challenge was to refuse the next time someone asked me to do something I didn’t want to do. (This turned out to be Hilde, who asked me to take a look at the raised rash on her leg. I was quite happy to say no and refer her to a dermatologist recommended by Maisie.)

And then there’s Jace. We’ve been spending quite a bit of time together, he and Aidan and me. Last week, the day after our tree-decorating extravaganza, Aidan and I came home to find a package waiting on our doorstep—not a vibrator this time, but an ankylosaurus model ordered by Jace. Aidan insisted on FaceTiming him (really, it didn’t take much persuading), and he answered at a job site. A suspiciously familiar voice in the background suggested it was Cal’s job site, and it was a house, which told me (a) Molly’s totally getting a house for Christmas, and (b) shit, I can’t tell her. I asked Jace for confirmation, but he refused to destroy the surprise.

Seeing him like that, working on a gift for my sister, even if he wasn’t the one giving it, his white shirt dotted with sweat that made it cling to his muscles and show the curving lines of his tattoos…it stirred something in me.

I took the vibrator out again that night.

Then he came over on Thursday to build the model, and he insisted that we order pizza so I could spend time with them instead of being stuck in the kitchen. Once again, Aidan ate every bite on his plate. Afterward, we made hot chocolate, and Aidan serenaded us with a song he’d written about an ankylosaurus’s first Christmas. Then he insisted that he wanted Jace to read him a bedtime story, and to my shock, Jace did just that. Afterward, when Aidan was asleep, Jace and I sat talking in theliving room, with the tree lit up like a beacon and a fire roaring in the fireplace. And suddenly, it was midnight. Saying goodbye to him that night, I had the urge to lift onto my tiptoes and kiss him, to ask him to stay. From the way he was looking at me, he would have.

But I let him leave and then returned to my room with the pink vibrator.

On Saturday, I helped Anette at the dance studio, and the experience filled me with such giddiness, such gratitude, I went out and bought two small Christmas trees. Aidan and I brought them over to Jace’s apartment building, one for him and one for Roger, along with an assortment of colored bulbs. After helping Jace decorate his tree, we went over to Roger’s and strung popcorn for his tree, because that’s how he and his wife had always done it, and Mrs. Rosa came by with enough cake to feed an army. Aidan didn’t have a single meltdown, until I tried to get him into the car to go home.

We saw Jace on Sunday too, because Dottie texted me that a local clay shop was having a special dinosaur night. I told Jace that Aidan had asked me to invite him, but in truth, I was the one who wanted him there. Midway through the activity, Aidan got upset because he got paint on his nose, so Jace immediately dotted his own nose with blue paint. Using the wipes I carry everywhere, I wiped off both of their noses, and a weird feeling came over me as I touched Jace’s face, a stirring of something that was more than the desire I feel every single second he’s around.

And then he came over yesterday, because it was Tuesday, and it was beginning to feel a lot likeournight. He and Aidan and I watchedThe Muppet Christmas Carol, which Jace said was his favorite Christmas movie, and made gingerbread cookies shaped like dinosaurs. I put some together for Roger and Mrs. Rosa, even though, let’s be honest, (a) she’s a better baker thanI am, and (b) she probably doesn’t need two dozen misshapen dinosaur cookies.

Needless to say, I used the vibrator then too, after Jace left at eleven thirty-two. (Yes, I looked at the clock. I’d wanted him to stay longer, but he’d gotten up early for work and was yawning, and I had court in the morning.)

It’s Wednesday now, which means tomorrow is another ofournights. The plan is to help Aidan make gifts for Molly and Cal, Maisie and Jack, Tom and Ruth, and even Dottie. (He still talks about the day she babysat him. Possibly because she told him she thought he might have been an ankylosaurus in a different life.) Inspired by clay night, he’s decided he’s making everyone dinosaur ornaments for their trees. Baby Mabel gets a dinosaur stuffed animal he picked out at a toy shop the other day. Jace said he’s going to make ornaments for Roger and Mrs. Rosa too.

I’m hoping he’ll stay late again. I found a recipe online for thumbprint cookies. There’s a good chance he’ll like them, because he mentioned they were always his favorite Christmas treat.

I feel Nicole staring lasers into the side of my face. She’s been here for about a half hour, and I’ve filled her in on everything from the last week and a half, most of which she seemed to find boring (a) due to its lack of sex and (b) because she seems to find most things boring.

“You should be proud of me.”

“Yeah, you deserve a real pat on the back fordowngradingto a vibrator,” she says, rolling her eyes. “I only wanted you to use the vibrator because I figured it would take usat leasta few months to work up to a man. But a sexy-ass man was delivered into your lap—gift wrapped! Hell, there was probably a bow around his cock—and you’re using a vibrator? I told you not to apologize for what you want, yet here you are making excuses forwhy you can’t have the best sex of your life with a man you’ve apparently been seeingalmost every night. God, I hope Tina isn’t this stupid.”

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