Merry Random Christmas (2 page)

“
Flavored
sleeping bags?”

“Yes, ma’am. You suck on the piping, which is filled with candy canes.”

She frowned. “Wouldn’t that just attract every insect imaginable?”

I nodded. “Yep.”

“
What marketing genius came up with that hot mess?”
 

At least she and I agreed on
something
. “
I’m guessing that’s why the camping equipment manufacturer was giving away twelve thousand of them in a contest, and why my mama won a hundred and forty-four of them.”

“You gave away more than a hundred candy-filled sleeping bags on the streets of Cambridge tonight?”
Her eyebrow couldn’t arch more if it was made from a pipe cleaner.
 

“No. Joe and Trevor gave some away, too.
We had a contest to see who could find the most people dressed as Santa on the streets of Somerville and Cambridge and hand them out. It kinda unraveled from there.”
 

Joanne took in my attire. Dirty Santa pants. Flip flops. Stained silk shirt.

“Speaking of which, where are they?”
I asked.
 

Her palm was my only greeting. “Wait. I am asking the questions here.”

Oh, God. She sounded exactly like Joe when he was going into cross-examination mode. And not the good kind, where we dressed up as a lawyer and his bad, bad client, or the doctor who needed to examine—

“You were booked on prostitution charges, Darla. How do you plan to plead?”

“Not guilty!
For the record, I would never blow a homeless dude who licks his chicken’s outer feathers clean each night.
”

“
Everyone
says they’re not guilty.”
 

“And I don’t even own a car, so why would I need a gas card?”

Her eyes didn’t so much as narrow as they telescoped. Joe took after her quite a bit. I could see where he got that granite face that imparted no emotion during times of stress. “You do have a good point about the gas card,” she said with a sniff.

“I do not randomly
suck off
men on the street for
gas cards I don’t need.
”

“
That’s not what the cops allege.” Her eyes glittered like blow pops in the hands of college students on Molly. She was enjoying every minute of this.
 

S
o why’d she spring me from jail?

“Look, I’ll tell you the whole story, including the part about the Vietnam war vet with no legs and the guy riding the capybara, saddle and all. But first, you gotta tell me—where in the hell are Joe and Trevor?”

She frowned.

“
I thought you were joking. You really don’t know where he is?
”
Notice how she singularized that?
He
. She only cared about Joe. I was worried about
both
my men.
 

“
Last time I saw Joe, he was carrying a bag of candy cane thong underwear and handing them out to the Salvation Army bell ringers for the pure joy of watching their faces when they realized what he
gave them,” I said. “And throwing glowing nipple clamps in the red pots.”
 

M
y eyes felt like wet blow pops, too, as her face morphed, responding to my words to the extent that the Botox let her express emotion.
Which meant she twitched.
 

E
xactly once.

“He
what
? My Joey wouldn’t...” Her voice faded out as she went from instinctive outrage to logical contemplation. “Actually, he
would
do something like that.”

“Right.”

“And Trevor?”

Oh, finally she cared enough about him? The woman was evolving.

“He was carrying
a chicken
around, dressed as Santa.”

“Which one was dressed as Santa?”

“What do you mean, which one?”

“Trevor, or the chicken?”

“Who in the fuck would dress a chicken up as Santa Claus, Joanne?”

“Don’t look at me like that! It’s a perfectly reasonable question to ask. You’re the one talking about Santa Chickens!”
She stopped walking and now faced me, hands on her hips, looking up at me like I was the fucking Green Giant and she was Tinkerbell. Joanne Ross was as tiny as I was big. You would think my size would intimidate her.
 

I
t d
id
n’t.

“Trevor.
Trevor
was dressed as Santa.”

“Thank you for clarifying.”
She breathed a sigh of relief, then looked at me in horror.
“Please tell me there are no gerbils involved in this situation. Joey’s arms have finally healed.”

I had the decency to blush as the top
ic
of me, Trevor, Joe, sex, and the gerbil came up. It’s not what you think.

Okay, maybe it is. No one actually had sex with the gerbil. Or with the chicken that clung to Joe’s back like it was a finger-lickin’-good cape.

I swear. No cross-species nooky.

“The orthopedist cleared him for our family holiday
ski
trip.
We’ve spent a fortune on cleaning up his Internet reputation. All those videos of your...
escapade
with the chicken and the gerbil are finally on page two when you Google his name. And then there was the settlement we made to the pastor with the name Joseph Herbert Ross, and...
”

Family holiday
ski
trip?

First I heard of it. I opened my mouth to ask where they were going, then shut it. Fast.

’
Cause I wasn’t part of their family.
I blinked hard to fight back the sudden assault of tears against the rims of my eyes. Words hurt. Names feel like little rocks thrown at your heart. But Joanne Ross had wounded me with a simple, tossed-off phrase that hadn’t been wielded against me with any intention.
 

Family holiday ski trip.

I
really
wasn’t part of their family.

I was just the alleged prostitute Joanne Ross came and
had
dug out of jail because she was monitoring her twenty-five-year-old son’s texts.

Speaking of whom: where in the fuck
was
Joe?

My chest started humming. I reached into my shirt and—

“No! Darla, please!
I don’t need to see anything red and glowing.
”

I slid my phone out from between my beast
ly
breasts. I waggled it in front of her. “Phone. Don’t worry.
And besides, I haven’t been wearing the nipple clamps that long. I’m sure my nips are still just
pink.”
 

“I meant the red-nosed—oh, God,” she muttered as I checked my texts and ignored her.

No text. Hmm. Notifications said I had a new
Instagram
picture from Joe. I opened it.
 

“What the fuckity fucking fuck fuck is
that
?” I screamed.

It was a picture of Joe, wearing a candy-cane patterned g-string. His fine skin glistened in dim light, and he was surrounded by women about Joanne’s age, all touching my man. Mine.

Mine.

“Why are you growling?” Joanne
ask
ed, grabbing my phone out of my hand before I could stop her. Her eyes darted to the picture and if I coulda recorded her face in that moment, I woulda, because her eyes bugged out like someone squeezed her so hard they shot out on rubber bands.

“Is that E
die
Chadron touching my
son
?” she screeched. “And why is Joey wearing a g-string and covered in money?”

“Money?” I snatched the phone back. Joe’s wrists had finally healed and he was playing
bass
again, but our next gig wasn’t scheduled until after the turn of the year, in Las Vegas. Tyler, aka Frown, had been filling in for Joe
as our substitute bass player
, but he and his girlfriend, Maggie, had their own side gigs going. At this precise moment, I didn’t
g
ive a shit about them, but the bottom line was that money was a little tight until the next gig, and if this is what made Joe resort to turning his cock into a joystick for old, rich women to ride on Christmas Eve, then I was about to start crying.

“I cannot believe that
Edie Chadron,
the chairwoman of the second-wave feminist organiz
ation
she co-founded with my
mother
, is sticking her fingers all over my son’s buttocks!” Joanne fumed. “
What in the hell is Edie thinking?”
 

“I don’t know what half of that meant,” I said, scrutinizing the picture. By my eyeballing, Joe was wearing at least five hundred bucks in glossy money stuck all over his hips, g-string, ass and back.

Then I read the caption
on the Instagram photo:
 

Here Comes Santa Claus

“Ho ho fucking ho,” I hissed, texting Joe. The effort was silly. He hadn’t answered anyone else’s texts.

Texting Trevor was a worthless practice, too.

I tried Liam, using tact and grace with a text that read: WHY IS JOE WEARING A G-STRING AND COVERED IN MONEY?

I texted the same thing to Sam, because the germ of an idea began to grow in my mind.

And once you plant a seed in the fertile soil of my imagination, step back.

“Sam and Liam were strippers,” I muttered to myself, starting to pace
on the sidewalk
. “Now Joe’s in a g-string with a bunch of old women in that picture he sent from his account.”

“Hey!” Joanne barked. “They’re not old!” The skin under her eyes shot up in outrage, but her forehead stayed in place.

“Any of those women got a Snapchat account?”

“What’s Snapchat?”

I shook my head. “They’re old.”

“Is Snapchat like that
T
witter thing?” she asked, frowning. Or, at least, I think she frowned. “Are you implying that because we’re not all up to date on the latest social media craze, we’re old?”

“You use your phone to talk to people, Joanne?”

“Yes.”

“Yer old.”

She opened her mouth to protest. I covered it with my palm. She shrank back.

“Anyhow, quit interrupting me. I’m thinking.”

“You’re quite the multi-tasker, aren’t you?” she said with a derisive snort.

I gave her the stink eye. “You ask a woman in a threesome relationship that question, Joanne, you might need to brace yourself for the answer.”

She paled.

“
Look, you can stand here and gawk at your own son’s mighty fine hindquarters covered in money and—” I squinted at my screen. Then I shoved it in her face. “Is that a lipstick imprint on his ass?”
 

Joanne
push
ed the phone out of her face and made a sound like a frustrated moose.

“But,” I continued, looking up into the night sky,
the rest of my thought buried by an increasingly disturbing sense that something was very wrong
.

Cambridge lights crowded out the stars. I didn’t care. If the North Star was good enough to guide
The Three Wise Men
on Christmas Eve to find
Jesus
, and
Mary, Joseph and baby Jesus had
animals to huddle around them and keep them warm, then it was good enough to guide me to find my str
i
pping, naked-ass boyfriends who were currently being kept warm by the overly enthusiastic huddling of an entirely different kind of mammal.

Genus:
cougarious fornicatious
.

“
But,” I said again, staring at Joe’s ass on my phone and realizing I wasn’t stuttering, I was just naming what I saw. “I, for one, am going to find my goddamned boyfriends and make them explain what in the hell they’re up to.”
 

Joe

“Oh, baby, you got one hell of a nice candy cane for me to lick,” the woman said, rubbing up against my oiled thighs, her hand
searching for my sweet stick. She slipped a twenty in with the other bills that hung from that tiny piece of ropy fabric like palm leaf fronds. My g-string was an X-rated wallet. I was wearing more cash than I made from a single band performance most nights, and I’d only been stripping for fifteen minutes.
 

T
hat’s right.

Stripping.

Trevor caught my eye and gave me a look like
a character in a
Saw
movie right before he was about to be eviscerated by set of electric hedge trimmers. Three women rubbed their hands over him like they were buffing a car hood.
 

Fives and tens hung off his g-string, one twenty dollar bill plastered flat against his right buttock, curving to the concavity of his glutes as he moved and bent, legs muscles following the gyration of his hips as he danced.

Or, at least,
tried
to dance.

He really sucked.

None of the women cared.
At the end of the night, we’d count up our tips and if he made more money than me, I’d be ripshit pissed. I’m way hotter.
 

W
hat the fuck? Why was I even thinking about that?
I was a Penn law student on sabbatical between my second and third year of law school as my band made its big national tour breakthrough, and here I was worrying about whether I made more money as a stripper than my best friend?
 

Y
eah. That pretty much summed up my Christmas Eve.

“I’m going to kill Sam and Liam,” he called out to me. I gave him a th
u
mbs’ up. A woman’s well-lipsticked mouth covered my thumb instantly, her teeth grazing the pad, her tongue sucking like
she was twirling a candy cane.
 

The sensation went straight to the root of my shaft, making it twitch.

No.

Cardinal rule of stripping, groaned at me and Trevor by
a very sick
Sam and Liam right before we agreed to this stupid, obscene, fucked-up job: never get a hard on.
T
he women think it’s an engraved invitation.

I had to think to shrink.