Page 137 of Stuck with my Mountain Daddies

Plates were overloaded. Napkins were ignored. Garrett carved meat like it offended him, while Beckett hovered nearby with his arms crossed, criticizing every side dish.

“You caramelized the cranberries?” he said, lifting a brow at Asher’s bowl as if it might bite him.

“It’s festive,” Asher replied.

“It’s desperate.”

“You’re desperate,” Asher shot back, shoving the bowl toward him.

Garrett shook his head. “Damn. Every year.”

“Garrett,” Lucy said brightly, holding out her fork with a bite of stuffing. “Try this. Tell me it’s not magic.”

He obligingly leaned in, took the bite, and chewed slowly, eyes darting briefly toward me.

“It’s good,” he said finally.

Asher scowled. “I’ve been working my ass off in this kitchen and she gets the royal treatment because she added sage?”

“She didn’t set anything on fire,” Garrett muttered.

“That was one time,” Asher groaned.

“One time?” Lucy repeated, wide-eyed. “You settwoovens on fire in college. In two different kitchens.”

Beckett, now seated and pouring himself his third glass of cider, didn’t even glance up. “And both times he blamed the ovens.”

“They were faulty!” Asher protested. “I was creating. Greatness has casualties.”

“I’m surprised the turkey made it out alive,” I said, half laughing, half in awe at the chaotic domesticity around me.

Was this what Christmas was always like for people?

Asher pointed his carving fork at me. “Don’t tempt fate. The bird and I made a pact, but she’s temperamental.”

I snorted into my tea, warmth blooming in my chest that had nothing to do with the drink.

This, the teasing, the ridiculous banter, the scent of cinnamon and roasted garlic in the air, the paper napkins with snowflakes on them—this was therealChristmas magic.

Not picture perfect. Not branded or broadcast.

Not the kind of Christmas I’d had last year.

I’d spent that one in a rented mansion in the Hollywood Hills, surrounded by crystal stemware and strangers with surgically identical smiles.

The “Influencer Holiday Bash” was sponsored by some vodka brand and an energy drink company, with LED snowflakes projected on the walls and fake snow pumped in through machines.

We all wore white, because that was theaesthetic.

We toasted to nothing. Posed for content we wouldn’t remember making.

I’d been dressed in a sequin dress loaned from a stylist I barely knew, lips glossed, laugh dialed to ten, every movement calculated, lit, captioned.

I hadn’t realized I was lonely.

Not then.

Not when the photographer told me to look “wistful, but grateful,” by the twelve-foot tree that didn’t smell of pine.

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