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“No!” I denied, though my stomach fluttered, and not in an unpleasant way, at the thought that I had that power over Cass.
“He is in back,” she said, nodding toward the entrance to Santa’s Grotto. “Don’t sit on his lap with children present.”
“I wouldn’t!”
Katya snorted. “You are terrible liar, Frances.”
I ducked through the archway that led to Santa’s Grotto, and followed a tiny, curving path through a forest-themed corridor lit with splashes of colored Christmas lights until I reached the entrance to the grotto where, for some unaccountable reason, the forest theme ended and the toyshop one began. A train whistled jauntily as it rattled past on its tracks.
“Holly jolly Christmas,” an elf said, and then hesitated before showing me an iPad. The screen displayed an order form for exorbitantly priced photo packages. “Are you here for Santa photos?”
“No,” I said. There was a woman with three children lined up in front of me. She looked at me suspiciously. The kids took the opportunity to beat each other with inflatable candy canes. “I’m here to see C—Santa,” I corrected myself before I ruined Christmas for the brats in front of me. “It’s a personal matter.”
The woman looked even more suspicious. So did the elf.
I lowered my voice. “I’m a friend of Cass’s.”
“Oh!” the elf exclaimed. His voice lost at least half an octave of elfishness. “Yeah, dude, no problem. He’ll be about fifteen.”
Up at the front of the grotto, Cass sat on a glittery gold throne, a wobbly-lipped toddler on his knee. He bounced his leg a little to distract the kid, and yeah...no way should my gaze have been drawn to Santa’s thigh like that. But whatever his suit pants were made of, the fabric looked silky and thin, and I couldn’t help it if it clung to his thigh muscles when he flexed them. Hell, even the padding in his tunic wasn’t putting me off. I had enough of a dad bod these days that I was in no position to judge Santa for overindulging in gingerbread. I wasn’t a fan of the fake white beard, but it did make me wonder how he’d look if he let his stubble grow into a real one. I was not opposed.
“Adam! Adam! Adam!” the mom of the toddler trilled, trying to prevent the kid from diving over the edge of toddler uncertainty into the full-blown screaming fit we all knew was right around the corner. Life is fraught when you’re a toddler. It’s fraught when you’re thirty-six too.
Cass bounced his knee again, and the toddler reached up and caught his beard and tugged it. Crisis averted.
The elf moved in to take photos while Cass asked the kid, who was really way too small to answer a weird stranger, what he wanted for Christmas. The kid stared up at him warily, his fist still wrapped in the Santa beard, and didn’t answer. But he didn’t start screaming either, so that was a win.
Cass smiled at Adam from behind his now lopsided beard, and my heart did a dangerous loop-the-loop. Then the toddler and his mom left and were replaced by the three kids with the inflatable candy canes. The boys yelled their lists over each other to get heard, while the little girl waited her turn. When Cass finally got the boys to simmer down and asked the girl what she wanted, she took her thumb out of her mouth and said in a whisper-sweet Shirley Temple voice that I didn’t believe for a second—I’d seen her wielding her candy cane with unrestrained fury—“I want a Pony Pals sleeping bag and a Sugarpie parasol, please.”
“I will try my very hardest,” Cass promised, and the little girl beamed.
The kids and Cass posed for their photos, and then, as Cass was helping the girl off his lap, he looked over at the line and saw me waiting.
The girl made an ‘eep’ sound as he swung her a little too wide, and Cass made an ‘oops’ one as he brought her back down for a safe landing. The kids and their mom left.
“Sparkles, I’m going to take five,” Cass said.
“There’s no kids here, you don’t have to call me that,” the elf said.
“There could be kids just around the corner.”
“Whatever,Santa.”
Cass rolled his eyes at the elf and nodded toward a red door behind his throne. “Fran?”
I followed him through the red door into a small dressing room that was blessedly free of tinsel, glitter, and sparkling lights. It held an old couch, a mini fridge, a TV propped up on an old plastic storage bin, and not much else. One of Cass’s familiar flannel shirts was slung over the arm of the couch.
“Wow, Santa lives like a college student,” I said. “Or a newly divorced dad.”
Cass snorted. He tugged his beard down and opened the mini fridge to take out a bottle of water. He held it out to me, and I shook my head. He cracked the seal, twisted the top off, and took a long swig. “What’s up, Fran?”
“I wanted to apologize,” I said. “For the other night.”
Cass flushed and picked at the label of his water bottle. “There’s nothing to apologize for.”
“Okay. Good.” Was this the part where I was supposed to turn around and leave? I had no idea. “Okay, so I also wanted to clarify.”
“To clarify,” he repeated.
