Daydream: A Novel (The Maple Hills Series Book 3)

IF I EVER UNEXPECTEDLY FIND myself in a position of any sort of power, there are a few rules I’ll immediately put into place:

• 1. You cannot answer the question, “What do you want for Christmas?” with, “Nothing. I don’t need anything.”
• 2. When someone says that they’re taking you away for the night and you ask, “What do I need to pack?” they cannot answer with, “Whatever you feel comfortable in.”
• 3. Christmas traffic is illegal.

When Henry told me that he wanted to take me away for the night because I’m now working double shifts from Christmas Eve until the day before New Year’s Eve, I didn’t expect it to result in this level of stress. I don’t even want to do double shifts, but when my manager asked me to because someone quit unexpectedly, I didn’t want to let him down when he said everyone else had said no.

As grateful as I am for the extra money, especially because nobody told me how expensive having a social life is, it’s really thrown a grenade at all the things I hoped to catch up on during winter break. I’d fully intended to get ahead, and now I guess I’ll have to work harder and stay up later to do it.

Something I wish I’d worked a little harder on is packing a bag for this trip. Joy is on vacation at Mrs. Astor’s house, living her best life getting all the attention from the visiting grandchildren. And here I am, on my bedroom floor surrounded by clothes.

After I spend five minutes staring at them, hoping they’ll compile themselves into some kind of outfit, Henry walks into my bedroom. “Wow, you’re messy,” he says, sitting on my bed behind me.

“I love it when you compliment me,” I drawl, rummaging through my clothes. Why is everything the same color?

“Your tits look great today, and I like your hair like that.”

It’s enough to get me to break the staring contest with my floor-drobe and look at him. “Huh?”

“You said you love it when I compliment you. I can keep going; I have a long list of things about you that I like.”

“That’s not… That’s… Thank you?” I say, unsure what there is to say.

He leans toward me from the bed, and I think he’s trying to kiss me until he starts to squint. “Why do you only have stuff on one eyelid?”

“That’s a really great question.” I cross my legs and try to sit back to look at him comfortably, but I can’t find a place to put my hands because of all the clothes, so I opt to climb onto the bed beside him instead. “Because my mom called when I was putting makeup on to beg me to book a flight home and call out sick. I couldn’t get her off the phone, and then I realized you were on your way and I hadn’t packed anything.”

Not that I’d admit it to Henry, but there was more than one time where I almost agreed to let my mom book me on a flight. She’s upset I’m not there, and as much as I’ve tried to make my peace with it, I’m upset I’m not there, too. “Was your mom okay? Are you okay?”

I nod, although it lacks conviction. “I knew she was really sad when she gave up on trying to make me come to Phoenix and started trying to convince me to go to my dad’s. She just doesn’t want me to be so far from people who love me on Christmas. I said no and stuck to my guns.”

Henry holds out his arm and I slide under it, breathing him in deeply when he kisses the crown of my head. “You won’t be. Do you think if you weren’t people-pleasing your manager you would have given in to people-pleasing your mom?”

“Can you let me have this moment? Tell me you’re proud of me for not being a people pleaser to the person who made me a people pleaser!”

“I’m proud of you. I’ll be so proud when you finish getting ready so we’re not late. That will really please me.”

“You’re annoying,” I grumble, turning to my messy floor.

He laughs. “That’s not very festive.”

WHEN THE HIGHWAY SIGNS SAY Malibu, I realize I have no idea what he has in store for us.

Henry ignores all my questions as we pull up to the valet at a fancy hotel. He walks around the car to open my door, helping me as our overnight bags are collected from the trunk.

“This is a really nice place,” I whisper to him as we climb the carpeted staircase to the lobby entrance. With only a couple of days until Christmas, there’s an expensive-looking red bow and various festive ornaments decorating the entrance. “I don’t think I’ve ever been anywhere this fancy before.”

Thankfully, when Henry arrived at my house wearing dress pants and a shirt, I realized I needed to wear and pack something besides sweatpants.

“You work at The Huntington,” he says, like I’m ridiculous.

“That isn’t the same thing! I think I’m underdressed.”

“I don’t gamble, but if I did, I would bet you that Aurora calls you a goddess or tells you she wants to bow at your feet in the first ninety seconds. You look incredible, Halle. Like you always do.”

“Thank you, I’m ju— Wait! Is Aurora here?”

Henry groans, stopping on the last step before the doors. “Oh fuck. I wasn’t supposed to tell you that. I mean, she’s never on time, so if I tell you she isn’t here, I’m unlikely to be lying. C’mon.”

He takes my hand and leads me into the hotel lobby, where to my surprise and confusion, Aurora and Russ are standing. “Oh my God.”

“Merry Friendsmas! Or Christmas Eve eve!” Aurora says as she approaches me, immediately pulling me into a hug. “I love that color on you. You look incredible! I sort of want to bow at your feet. Why do you look so powerful and goddessy?”

“Told you. Why do you ever doubt me?” Henry mutters beside me. I nudge him with my shoulder playfully, and he keeps me close by wrapping his arm around my waist. He looks at our friends. “I didn’t think you’d be on time.”

“You’re one to talk,” Aurora says. “You’re constantly showing up late!”

“I’m late because I don’t want to go, not because I can’t be ready on time. It’s different, Aurora,” Henry counters. Which, to be fair to him, is true.

“We’re early because Ror wanted to get away from the sibling rivalry,” Russ explains, trying his hardest not to laugh.

Aurora rolls her eyes, and I can’t help but ask because Aurora’s family life is already a little strained. “Elsa?”

“God, no. My sister doesn’t do family; she’s in the Maldives. It’s that goddamn cat my mom stole.” Aurora holds up her arm to show us multiple angry-looking scratches covering the area between her wrist and elbow. “There isn’t even any rivalry; he’s already won, and he knows it. He left a dead mouse in one of my shoes last night. Mom keeps trying to tell me it’s good luck and to stop being so negative all the time.”

“Have you considered that you’ve done something to offend the cat?” Henry asks her, looking at her phone screen as she holds up—yep, that’s a dead mouse in a shoe.

“Why are you victim blaming me? On Friendsmas?” Aurora says.

“Okay, I sense a debate brewing, and I would like to eat before the year ends, so maybe we should let them know we’re here,” Russ says, quickly interjecting between his girlfriend and best friend.

It’s funny, because Henry and Aurora seem to really like arguing with each other. I’ve watched them turn the smallest of things into a debate where their sole aim was to annoy each other as much as possible. As the peacekeeper in my family, I can confirm with absolute certainty that they act like siblings. Henry always says he’s glad he’s an only child without realizing he has a younger sister in Aurora and an older sister in Anastasia.

The amount of food we order is excessive, but somehow, we manage to eat it all. Henry has booked us a night at the hotel, so knowing my bags are upstairs makes Aurora try to convince me to get changed into pajamas with her to accommodate her food baby. It takes longer than it should to make her accept that the restaurant wouldn’t like that. By the time Henry and I are heading upstairs to our room, any of the negative feelings about not spending this time with my family are long gone.

Our bags are sitting by the door, and when we enter our room, I see several identically wrapped presents under a beautifully decorated Christmas tree in the corner.

“It feels illegal to be thinking about opening presents before Christmas,” I say, watching Henry pick them up from the floor and put them on the bed. “What are you doing?”

“Breaking the law. Come sit.” He pats the bed beside the pile and it’s a conscious effort not to moan when my butt sinks into the mattress. Gently taking my ankle, Henry unstraps my shoe and drops it onto the floor behind him, repeating with my other foot.

I watch him shrug off his blazer and kick off his own shoes, followed by undoing another button of his shirt and rolling up the sleeves. He climbs onto the bed beside me, looking more like he’s going to be modeling for a magazine than hanging out with me. “It might be the wine talking, but you are so beautiful,” I say. “Like you should be on magazine covers.”

He smiles as he reaches for one of the presents. “It isn’t the wine talking. Here, I want to watch you open this one first.”

I recognize the brown paper wrapping immediately. Henry turned up at my house asking to steal my paper because he hadn’t bought any and didn’t want to fight for parking at the mall with the people he said “were too unorganized for Christmas.” I pointed out that he is too unorganized for Christmas, but I can’t remember what was said after that because he kissed me.

To his credit, there are tiny pencil drawings of various Christmas-themed items all over the top, so he did try to customize it as well as adding a beautiful bow that also looks very familiar.

Henry promised me he wouldn’t buy me more than one present, but there are three in front of me. I count from one to three out loud, tapping my finger on each ribbon. “One. Two,” he says, tapping on his own gifts because I also ignored the promise.

“Okay, I broke it, but you broke it more.”

“We said buy and I didn’t buy one of them. We’re even.”

“If I knew stealing was allowed, I’d have gone all out.”

He laughs, leaning toward me to kiss me slowly. His hand holds my neck, keeping me in place, but there’s nowhere I’d rather be anyway. He eventually stops and rests his forehead on mine. “Start with the slim one.”

It always amazes me how Henry just functions like a normal person when I need five to ten minutes to recover after every kiss. He sends my entire body into chaos every time he touches me, and I’m unsure I’ll ever get used to it.

The “slim one” is more envelope than box, but he managed to wrap it anyway. There are small doodles of animals in Santa hats, and when I spend time admiring each individual drawing, he grows impatient and pokes me in the waist playfully, making me squirm.

“I’m doing it!” Carefully pulling apart the paper, I find it is in fact a wrapped envelope. Unsealing it, I skim the contents then read out loud. “ ‘Ms. Jacobs, thank you for supporting our conservation efforts, and those of our partners at our research and breeding facilities in Sichuan, China. Please find enclosed your welcome pack, including recent pictures of the adventures of Bao. Bao is a five-year-old giant pan—’ You got me a panda!”

“I don’t think you get the panda, but you get updates on the panda, yes. They’re sending a stuffed toy, which is great, because I don’t think the ten I already won you are enough.”

“The adventures of Bao sounds like a children’s book I’d want to read. You could illustrate it. This is so great, thank you so much.”

“Open the next one.”

It’s super light when I pick it up, almost like there’s nothing in it. There are Christmas cookies drawn all over this one. I’m confused when I carefully remove the wrapping and it’s a shoebox, given there are clearly no shoes in it. When I finally lift the lid I’m even more confused to find a QR code printed on a piece of paper in the center of the box. “I don’t know where my cell phone is,” I say, patting the bed around me for it.

“Use mine.” Henry hands me his phone, and the first thing I spot is me. Literally. The picture of me at the gallery is his lock screen. When I type four zeros, the easiest password in existence, a different picture of me, one where I’m asleep with Joy, is peeking through his collection of apps.

Pulling up the camera, I finally scan the code, and my nana’s handwriting fills the screen.

“What is this?”

He leans over, pinching the screen to zoom out, and it immediately becomes clear. It looks exactly like the recipe book that lives in my kitchen, but the digitalization has made it darker and more visible. The cursive is perfect. I’ve looked at these pages more times than I can count, and it’s identical. The only difference is, where there was previously a picture of the dish cut out from a magazine, there’s now a drawing.

Henry swipes his finger across to go to the next page, and the next, and the next.

“The drawings are placeholders. I photographed each page with my camera, but because the magazine cutouts are so old, they need to be scanned in. They were losing too much quality, but I couldn’t take the book to scan it without you noticing.”

I’m speechless, but I manage to force out a word. “How?”

“Mrs. Astor helped me break in while you were distracted by Cami.”

“I love the drawings. I love everything,” I say, suppressing the urge to sob. “This is the most thoughtful thing anyone has ever done for me.”

“I have nightmares that I’m going to accidentally ruin those recipes. Burn down your house, spill my drink, put it in the oven by mistake. I know how important they are to you, which has made my imagination go wild. I’m going to continue not to ruin your prized possession, but I figured if I was anxious about losing them you would be, too. Now you have a backup.”

“I’m struggling to find the words to explain how much this means to me.”

“Please don’t cry. Anastasia said you would cry; I hate it when she’s right.”

“My presents for you aren’t thoughtful,” I say, stressing aren’t like my life depends on it. “I didn’t realize you were coming here with a game plan to win best Christmas present.”

I sniff, and the fear in his eyes is evident. “I always come to win. Last one, open.”

Handing him back his cell phone, I reach for my final gift. This one, although small, definitely has something in it. The wrapping paper is decorated in candy canes, so I assume it’s food related again.

The small green box doesn’t have a brand name that I recognize, so when I open the lid I’m not expecting to find a necklace. The letter H is small and delicate, hanging from the chain in the middle of the box. Definitely not food related. “I love it. Wait, that’s your monogram. Henry, this is your handwriting!”

“It is. I had it made for you.”

“Is the H for Halle?” I ask carefully. “Or Henry?”

“You get to decide,” he says. “What do you want it to be for?”

My finger brushes against the felt cushion. “Henry.”

“That’s what I hoped you’d say. Want me to put it on you?”

I nod and we both climb off the bed. He takes the box from my hand and stands close to my back. As I pick up my hair, his arms thread through mine to put the necklace around me, his fingers skimming the nape of my neck lightly, making me shiver.

When he’s done, he takes my wrists to move my hands away, letting my hair drop. Using his finger to move some of my hair away, he presses his lips against my shoulder, moving slowly until they reach my neck.

I can feel him everywhere, though only his mouth is touching me. My skin vibrates when he talks. “Merry Christmas, Halle.”