Unholy Nights: A Twisted Christmas Anthology (2 page)

But I wasn't going to do it. I was such an idiot. What was I doing here? Why had I allowed some jerk to make me feel so insecure and crappy about myself?

I started running again, and I couldn't believe it when I heard myself yell out, "Hey, Will!"

He stopped, turned his head and looked at me. I kept going. He was only about a few feet away as I came up alongside him. I gave him a grin and a jaunty wave. No idea where that came from. Seriously.

"Holly?" he said, his deep baritone sending warmth rushing through me. I couldn't read his expression—he's not easy to read—but he didn't look unhappy to see me. I thought, in fact, that he might be starting to smile. Or maybe his facial muscles were just twitching in the cold.

I didn't stop. I swept by, a few feet away, calling out as I did, "Merry Christmas!" and then I sped up, sprinting downhill, away from his dorm.

"Holly!" he called after me.

I thought about giving him the finger, but that, I decided, would be crass.

I could hardly believe it, but I was feeling okay about myself. I'd seen him. I'd spoken to him. I'd survived.

2. The Sexy Professor

I was feeling good that night, sitting at my desk in my room, reading over the paper I'd just finished for my Ottoman history seminar. It was okay. Not my best paper ever, but not awful. My overall GPA might take a hit, but I could make that up second semester. I'd be free of my Will obsession by spring, wouldn't I? It wasn't going to last forever.

I thought I might already be shaking the madness off. Running past Will with my head held high had cheered me immensely. Maybe I was finally done with my creepy obsession. Maybe I wouldn't be boiling bunnies anytime soon.

The dorm was unusually quiet. The mass holiday exodus had been underway for several days. I was staying. There were always a few people who did. My parents were in Singapore on embassy duty. Although they'd offered to fly me over for the holidays, I'd decided to skip the world travel this year. I'd flown to Singapore last Christmas, and it had been a long boring flight. Singapore was a fascinating place, but Dad had been there for three years and I'd seen everything I wanted to see.

My aunt had a B&B on Nantucket, and she'd invited me for Christmas dinner. I was going to drive down on the 24th and take the ferry over from the Cape, then return to campus a few days later. I had an intersession seminar lined up with Professor Slayton from the history department during my three-week semester break in January.

I was wondering how that intersession thing would go—since I'd never done one before—when my phone chimed. Turned out it wasn't my phone, but Julie's. She'd run her battery down texting and left her phone plugged in before stepping out with some friends. I answered because she'd asked me to.

"Julie?" said a male voice. "This is Jeff Slayton."

Whoa.
Professor
Jeff Slayton? I restrained myself from saying, "Hey, I was just thinking about you." That would be weird.

Julie had a wicked crush on Professor Slayton, whom she called "Jeff." I can't call professors by their first names, even when they ask me to. It seems disrespectful. But Julie doesn't have hang-ups like that. She's friendly enough to get on a first name basis with people without even trying. It's one of the things I envy about her. She has the inborn social ease that comes naturally to extroverts. Despite having a mom who's warm and funny and a dad in the diplomatic corps, I wasn't blessed with the outgoing gene. I got the lurk in a corner and tug on my hair gene.

Okay—it's not that bad. I'm good with my friends. I just freeze up when I have to deal with strangers. This makes parties and bars torture for me, unless I lubricate my brain with plenty of alcohol. But since I'm usually the designated driver, said lubrication rarely occurs.

It's worse with guys, of course. If they're hot and I'm feeling it, my tongue turns thick in my mouth, so the words get stuck in there with no hope of ever squeezing themselves out. With guys who are already my friends, it's not a problem. Friends lose that otherness that makes me feel so awkward. I guess I need more friends.

"This isn't Julie," I said. "I'm just answering her phone. This is her roommate, Holly."

"Hey, Holly. Could you give Julie a message for me?"

"Sure."

"Actually, are you the same Holly from the history program? What's your last name?"

"It's Mathers. Holly Mathers."

"Holly Mathers, of course. You're doing a course with me over semester break, aren't you? Forgive me; I must be getting early Alzheimer's."

I wondered if I was supposed to say something like "No, I'm sure you're not," about the early Alzheimer's thing. I felt awkward because I had no clue why he was calling Julie, and the guesses I had about it were kinda nasty.

Unlike me, Julie's not a history major. She knows "Jeff" because he's her faculty advisor. She liked him because he's tall, toned, and surprisingly hot for a guy who must be at least ten years older than us.

"Are you staying on campus for the holidays, too?" he asked. "Julie told me that she is."

I had to strangle a snort. What a lie. Julie was going home to Boston, which was only an hour away. She hadn't left yet because she didn't want to spend any more time with her big sister than she had to. Julie's sister Philippa had been
in loco parentis
for Julie ever since their parents had died in a plane crash when Julie was 12.

Had Julie lied about being on campus because she hoped "Jeff" would call her? Was that why she'd asked me to answer her phone?

"Um, I'll be here for a couple more days. Not sure about Julie. What's the message?"

"It's a message for you, too, now that I know you're around. It's last minute, but I've decided to throw a Winter Solstice party at my place on the evening of the 21st. I'm inviting my advisees and any students I hear about who are staying on campus. Can I persuade you and Julie to come? I'm expecting at least a dozen people, probably more."

Parties are not my thing, especially with a bunch of people I don't know. But Julie would strangle me if I declined the invitation. If I accepted on her behalf, she would probably drag me along anyway, since she doesn't have a car.

Besides, now that I was
so over
Will, maybe it was time to put myself out there and try to meet some new people. There was also the curiosity factor. I had never been invited to a party at a professor's house before. I'd be taking his course over intersession, and probably more of his courses in the future. It never hurt to make an effort to get to know your professors, especially since I was thinking about grad school in history.

So I said, "Sure, that sounds cool," and then, because my diplomat parents had always taught me to be polite, I added, "Can we bring something?"

"Not necessary. But if you really want to, bring something small. Maybe with holiday significance. We can talk about the items, and how various cultures have traditionally celebrated the Longest Night."

Uh-oh, I thought. Was this party just an excuse for some sort of professorial lecture? I hoped not. "Okay, like what items?"

"You know, stuff like candles, bells, holly, candy canes, whatever. Just a token. Christmas cookies will be all taken care of. Food, too, so bring your appetite." He laughed easily. He was friendly in a way I wasn't used to from professors. "I already have my tree up, my Yule log burning, and my Chanukah candles lit. So bring something small to symbolize the season."

"We can do that, no problem."

"Sweet. Let me give you directions to my house. Do you have a car?"

"I do, yeah." My car was old, but it started, even in the winter. But as he said the word "car" I had a flashback to Will parking in front of his dorm and getting out of his car, all rough and rumpled and gorgeous. And I remembered something else: Slayton was Will's advisor, too. I didn't know that from him, but from Julie, who had lived in the same dorm with Will freshman year, when faculty advisors had been assigned.

"Is Will MacIvey coming to your party?" I blurted out before I could stop myself.

"Will? Actually, he's next on my list to call. Is he a friend of yours?"

No, we just got naked one night?
"Yeah, kinda. That is, I know him. He's been in a couple of my classes."

He had been, too, although not this year. This year we had no classes together. He was a chemistry major.

"Well, that's perfect. I'm pretty sure he's still on campus. If he can come, we'll have both a Holly and an ivy, or at least, a MacIvey."

Lame, I thought. But Professor Slayton was chuckling. He sounded as if everything in life were merry and festive, fitting with the season. "So I'll look forward to seeing you and Julie on the Solstice."

"Okay. Thanks."

When the call ended, I stared resentfully at the phone in the palm of my hand. The thought of seeing Will at this stupid holiday party had unleashed all the fantasies I thought I'd banished forever with that "fuck you, Will" wave. But no. They were back, juicing up my body and clouding my brain.

Getting over my obsession was not going to be as easy as I'd hoped.

3. Will Power

So this is how it all began.

I'd seen Will around. We were both in the same anatomy class sophomore year. That had been when I was still thinking about majoring in biology, which would have been more practical career-wise than history. I'd noticed Will in class because how could I not—he's taller than most guys and broad across the shoulders. He's not rock star handsome, not at all. His features are a little too sharp and angular, but I love that honed cheekbone look.

He has a smoldering thing going for him, too. An aura that can get a girl thinking about doing dark things in smoky places. The look goes away when he breaks a grin, but he's not one of those hearty, always-smiling types. He projects more of a solemn, solitary vibe, so when he does smile, it feels like a gift.

Even though I found him sexy, I can't say I fantasized about doing anything to attract him. Not then. Like many girls, I have a yen for the bad boy type, and not even his occasional smoldering could slide Will into that category. No tats or piercings, no leather, no motorbike, not even a hint of a rebel gleam in his eye. He was too serious, too neatly put together, too quiet. In fact, he was a lot like me.

We were in the same group for anatomy lab, probably because both our last names begin with M. When I first saw him standing next to a lab table staring morosely at the dead cat lying there waiting to be cut up, I sensed that he felt bad for the cat, as I did. But he didn't say anything about it. He went about the task with care and a deft touch with the scalpel; in fact, I was often distracted from my own dissection attempts because I enjoying watching the precision of his long, well-shaped fingers.

Over the course of the semester, sharing a cat with two other students, we got to know each other a bit. Will, I learned, was pre-med; his mother was a physician and he was thinking about becoming a surgeon. But he didn't have the coldness and detachment of a surgeon. On the session where we cut open the abdominal cavity and examined the stomachs of the cats, ours was filled with what I realized was undigested cat food from a can. You could still recognize the stuff—it hadn't moved through the digestive tract at all yet. The cat had obviously been fed a big Last Supper right before being killed. A young and healthy animal had been murdered so it could lie here on our lab table and be sliced and diced by a bunch of clueless anatomy students.

That bothered me. Examining the blood vessels, muscles, and bones hadn't upset me, but something about that tummy brim full of a juicy final meal made me imagine the kitty alive and hungry, maybe even frisky and purring. And that was enough to make me seriously question majoring in biology.

I'm not a crazy Animal Rights person. I get why animal models are important for many types of medical research. I've done plenty of stuff in various labs with dead creatures that were killed so I could learn, and it hadn't affected me much before. But this cat–she was fat and pretty, a tri-colored calico—she really got me. Part of the reason I liked Will was that she upset him, too.

I said something to Will that day over the cat guts as our team was working on her belly. Actually, I said it to all of the other three, but he was the only one who responded. "It sucks that they killed this cat right after she'd eaten a big meal. Like, 'here, kitty, kitty, want some yummy food? Then, whammo, they gas her or something and she ends up here."

"It does suck," said Will, who managed to make the word "suck" sound formal, almost professorial. He was dissecting the cat's uterus at the time. His hands were always steady with the scalpel, but today they were shaking. "What's even worse is that the poor thing was pregnant." Sure enough, he found three tiny kitten fetuses, well developed, when he opened the womb. The other two students were all, "Whoa, cool, awesome!" but Will and I exchanged a dry look, not smiling or making any jokes about the cat's unhappy fate as we continued dissecting and making note of our discoveries in our lab books.

I knew I liked him right then. Not that I did anything about it. Other than talking about dead cats, I couldn't think of much to say to him.

Nothing happened between us that year. I was seeing another guy for a while, and the anatomy class was over in the middle of the year. Will and I had no classes together in the spring term, and I forgot about that tall unsmiling boy in dead cat lab until the fall of this year, when I met him again. That's when everything turned crazy.

Julie and I were hanging out together on a warm Friday afternoon early in October. It was one of those perfect fall days, with Indian summer temperatures and a glorious prospect of red, orange and yellow leaves dancing in the light breeze. I was feeling proud that I lived in Massachusetts, where tourists came every year to gawk at the foliage that I got every autumn for free.

We had a lot of trees on campus, so there was color blazing in all directions. Whittacre, our college, is beautiful—grassy and pastoral, with gentle hills, thick old trees, and (mostly) tasteful architecture. Its sister college, Penshurst, is located in a neighboring town in southeastern Massachusetts. They had originally been founded as a men's college (Penshurst) and a women's college (Whittacre) nearly two hundred years ago, but both had been co-ed for several decades.