Good Elf Gone Wrong: A Holiday Romantic Comedy

“Stop panicking,” I ordered. “You need a plan.”

“I had a plan,” she said pulling out an overstuffed white notebook covered in feathers from her large bag.

“That’s not a plan. That’s an abomination.”

What I needed to do was not get involved in her family’s wedding drama, but everything in me was screaming out for something, anything to distract me from the fact that Gracie was a goddamn virgin. She was almost thirty, for fuck’s sake.

“What are your goals?” I asked, taking the glitter pen from her and opening a blank page in the overstuffed notebook.

“I need to make that eggnog.”

“Wrong. Eggnog simply needs to be at the venue to taste test. We’re going to stop at the store and buy some. Next.”

“But Kelly said—”

“I don’t care what she said. You lie,” I ordered, enunciating the words, “and tell her what she wants to hear.”

“They’re going to know,” Grace said nervously.

“People are never as perceptive as they think they are,” I told her. “Trust me.”

Or actually, don’t.

“Next goal.”

Gracie reached over for another bite of the cheesecake. I finally just pushed it over to her.

“Kelly wants a winter wonderland theme for the welcome party. Everything has a specific place. I have a diagram. Oh gosh, it’s going to take me all night to decorate.”

“I supposed it’s too much to ask if your family is going to help,” I said dryly.

“I mean maybe?”

“Yeah, and maybe I’ll win the lottery,” I said. “Kelly just needs a nicely decorated party. Turn the lights down low, serve lots of booze, and no one will know the difference.”

“But if it’s not exactly like she wants—”

I sat back in my chair. “Who planned the wedding?”

“Me,” she admitted.

“Just you or you and Kelly together?”

“Kelly told me what she wanted, and I showed her sketches. She was so nitpicky.”

“Were her requests random and contradictory?” I pressed.

“My sister can be flighty.”

“Kelly didn’t actually have an opinion,” I said confidently. “She was just trying to fuck with you. She’s not going to know that the inflatable Frosty the Snowman was supposed to go in the corner with the Christmas trees or by the front door.”

“This party will not feature an inflatable Frosty.”

“I feel like you sold me a bill of goods on your love of Christmas, Sugarplum.”

We were on the back side of the Canning Factory venue, and I was emptying jugs of almond milk eggnog into the drink dispenser. I wasn’t a chef, but the mixture seemed a little gritty.

“This doesn’t look anything like eggnog.”

I dumped in cinnamon, nutmeg, and, of course, half a bottle of rum.

“Now it does.”

“I can’t handle this,” Gracie fretted. “You know I’m terrible at lying.”

“Oh, I know,” I said, picking up the beverage dispenser off the bed of the forest-green pickup, then headed through the service entry into the venue where Kelly’s party was being held.

You would think with thirty people already at the venue that more would have gotten done on the decorating front, I thought when I carried in the tureen. There were tangled strings of lights lying near the stairs up to the mezzanine, a tipped-over glass of eggnog was drying on the floor, and I was no decorator, but the way the tinsel had been dumped all over one of the trees was not—I was pretty confident—what Gracie had imagined for a winter wonderland.

The whole place smelled like boozy eggnog, and the wedding party was lounging on several overstuffed red velvet couches.

“Where’s the rest of it? The tasting is supposed to happen after decorating,” Gracie cried as she saw the empty jugs of eggnog on a nearby table.

“You weren’t here,” Kelly snapped at her. “You abandoned me, and Miranda didn’t get any eggnog.”

I set the heavy drink dispenser on the table.

“Vegan eggnog for her pleasure.”

The drunk bridesmaids let out wolf whistles.

“There rum in that nut sludge, sonny?” Granny Murray slurred.

“I’m sorry, Kelly,” Gracie apologized. “I lost track of time.”

“If I had a man like that at my beck and call,” Granny Murray hooted, “I’d lose track of time too. Shit. I wouldn’t have even shown up, and let him come down my chimney all night long.”

“Funny,” Dakota said, loud enough for all of us to hear. “I’m pretty sure that’s how Kelly got engaged.” As apparently the only person who could actually do anything, Dakota was stringing up a garland on the balcony up above.

“Aunt Babs,” Kelly raged.

“Girls, why don’t we all go eat dinner at the country club tonight,” Gracie’s mother said. “They have cilantro soup, Kelly, for your wedding diet. Also, Mitsy said that the chef created a new caviar dish that we absolutely must try. Gracie can finish up the decorating. The party is tomorrow, and we’re under the gun.”

I tried hard to resist the urge to yell, What the fuck at her family, but Dakota beat me to it.

“You all suck,” she said, pointing at the bridesmaids, who were knocking back shots of vegan eggnog.

“We’ve been here all afternoon. We need a break,” her cousins complained as Bethany herded Kelly and the bridesmaids to the door.

“They only decorated half a tree, for chrissake!” Dakota hollered.

“It’s fine,” Gracie pleaded. “They’re too drunk to be useful anyway.”

“I’m going down with the ship,” Granny Murray called after them then saluted Gracie, almost falling over.

“How much eggnog have you had?” Gracie wrinkled her nose.

Granny Murray elbowed me.

“The question is how much rum did I have with my eggnog.” She poured herself some vegan eggnog, took a swig, and smacked her lips. “That hippie nut sludge shit is pretty good.”

She offered me the cup.

“What the hell.” I took a sip. “It just tastes like rum.”

“Damn right.”

There was beeping outside and a crunching noise. It sounded expensive.

I’d invested a fair amount of my military reenlistment bonus into fixing up this former canning factory, and at the rate this mission was going, I wasn’t going to have extra money to devote to fixing whatever the hell had just been broken.

Gracie hurried after me as I jogged outside. She skidded to a halt beside me as a dump truck was emptying out a dumpster’s worth of round logs in front of the venue, all over the dormant flowerbeds.

“Hey, man, what the hell? You can’t dump this here,” I shouted at the driver. “You need to take all this back to whatever construction site you hauled it off of.”

The driver sighed and made a big show of pulling out the shipping manifest.

“This is a delivery, man.”

“Who orders unsplit cut-up tree trunks?” I growled.

“This is Ms. Gracie O’Brien’s order.”

He tipped his hat to Gracie, standing behind me.

“Would that be you, miss?”

“I didn’t want all of this,” she cried. “We just needed a cord of firewood. It’s supposed to be for atmosphere.”

She waved the overstuffed white notebook at him.

“I have the order here,” she said and flipped through the notebook.

“Ma’am, we ran out of seasoned firewood. This is all we got. We understand that it’s for a wedding and didn’t want to let the bride down.” He pressed a button on the truck, and the dump-truck bed swung back into place.

“No, you can’t leave,” Gracie begged, pushing her way around me. “Take this wood back. This is not my order. What am I going to do with it?”

“Well,” the driver said, pulling out an axe with a bow on it. “Since it’s Christmas and you’ve been a wonderful customer, here’s your Christmas present.” He handed it to her. “Maybe you can convince the groomsmen to show off some muscles.”

He put the truck into gear and rumbled off, turning onto the industrial road that led to the interstate.

Gracie picked up the axe and dragged it over to the nearest log.

“Gracie,” I said as she swung the axe down on a log. It hit it unevenly and bounced off, flying back up.

She raised her arms to strike the log again.

“Gracie, stop. You’re going to cut your foot off. Put the axe down.”

Her eyes were watering, and her chin was trembling.

“This party is going to be a disaster.”

“Hey,” I said, taking the axe away from her, “remember what I said? It doesn’t have to be perfect. It just has to be done.”

“But all this wood …”

It was a lot of wood.

I shrugged off my jacket and dumped it on a nearby log.

“I’ll take care of it,” I promised her.

What are you doing? You are way too enmeshed with her.

With practiced ease, I swung the axe, bringing it down parallel with the wood grain. The log split easily in two.

I turned it and split it again, tossed the firewood into a pile, and moved to the next log.

“Where do you want all of this?” I asked, hefting the axe again.

“We can just artfully pile it around the venue,” she said. “I’ll have to figure out where. Gosh, this is such a disaster. Maybe Dakota is right and I should just buy a plane ticket and spend Christmas in Aspen.”

And have all the work I’d done, the bus ride, the shopping trip, the dealing with her overbearing family, go to waste? No fucking way.

I dropped the axe and stepped up to her.

“What did I say?” I told her. “Man the fuck up. No prisoners. You want to get back at your sister? Or do you want to be here two years from now when she’s cheated on James and everyone is simultaneously telling you to plan her second wedding, take care of her kid for free, and go back to being James’s little hand-job robot, while you stand there and take it? Stop being weak.”

Grace swallowed.

“Are you going to collapse on me?” I asked her.

“No.”

“Good girl. Now get decorating. We want done, not perfect.”

Gracie hurried back to the venue then paused and glanced back at me over her shoulder.

“You’re pretty good at motivational speeches.”

“Your tax dollars at work,” I said dryly.

Through the large factory windows, I watched Gracie determinedly decorate for her sister’s holiday wedding.

The sky was quickly darkening—the sun went down early this far north—and I moved the logs into the cone of light from a nearby light pole. I could chop wood in my sleep. When I was a teenager, I basically had. It got cold in New England. The wood-burning fireplace in the ancient mansion was our only source of warmth. We’d had to sleep like puppies to keep from freezing, and I’d always had to set alarms to make sure to feed the fire.

“That’s not you anymore,” I reminded myself.

Yeah, because one Christmas Eve the fucking house had burned down.

I brought the axe down hard on the log, splitting the cold air with a sharp crack.

I shouldn’t be thinking about it. I should just get over it.

That day had been the last time I’d seen my mother. She had been screaming, throwing things at me as the firemen had milled around, spraying the giant hose on the flames.

I hadn’t known what to do. She kept telling the police I’d burned the house down on purpose, that I was a murderer.

“You are a bad person,” I reminded myself as the axe fell on the half-moon of log, covered by a light dusting of snow.

“You’re going to take some innocent girl’s virginity.”

You don’t have to.

But I did.

The thing with blending in was maintaining expected patterns. If walking into an office, pretend like you belong, wear an orange vest, a button-down shirt with a name patch, and carry a clipboard and a ladder.

People expected maintenance men to be around and were trained to ignore them, even if they seemed slightly confused, because, well, that’s normal. If, by contrast, you showed up in a suit at a banking office and started wandering around then, people were going to notice and home their attention on you, ask you who you were, if you’re there for a meeting. Scrutiny ruined missions.

If Gracie’s family thought we weren’t sleeping together, if they never saw me kiss her or saw us with our hands all over each other, then we would be going against the expected pattern of a bad boy and good girl gone wrong.

It was clear I wasn’t going to get in her laptop anytime soon. I had to escalate in order to not blow my cover.

“Gracie is not a girl. She’s a grown woman,” I reminded myself.

Yeah, a full-grown woman with huge tits and soft thighs.

If she doesn’t lose it with you, I tried to rationalize, she might with James. She’s so desperate for a husband and family, she’s got blinders on.

Snow crunched behind me, and I jumped out of my skin.

I strangled a curse and whirled around, furious that I’d allowed myself to be so consumed with thoughts of Gracie that I hadn’t noticed someone sneaking up on me.

“I don’t have the fucking patience,” I snarled.

Gracie skittered backward, almost falling down.

I grabbed her before she could trip over a nearby piece of firewood.

“I just wanted to see if you were hungry. I can see if Uber Eats delivers out here.”

“They won’t.” I stated, swinging the axe and splitting another log. “There’s a great Philly cheesesteak place near here,” I told her, trying to keep my tone even. “They serve the few factory workers left in the area, plus they stay open late after servers get off the restaurant shifts. It’s likely the only place open. It’s not a fancy new caviar dish, but they have pretty good fries. They’re not going to deliver for just anyone, but Gio and I go way back.”

Gracie reached up on her toes and wrapped her arms around my neck.

“Thank you. That sounds wonderful.”

I had a sudden awful desire to kiss her right there in the swirls of snow.

I pushed her off.

She seemed slightly hurt.

“There’s no audience,” I said, my tone harsh to my ears. “So don’t pretend to be my girlfriend.”

“Right,” she said. “Well, thanks for the food.”

“I’ll bill you your half.” I turned back to the wood.

“Oh, of course.”

You are such an asshole.