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“When were you going to tell me you—” I gestured to Dr. Stephen Florris.
“We are trying to keep it secret. We don’t want gossip. So don’t go blab your big mouth, okay?”
“Of course I’m not going to blab.”
She glanced at Dr. Florris. “He is definitely going to blab.”
Dr. Stephen Florris frowned and took the bag from me, peering inside as if to make sure Peachblossom and all her parts were there. “So you…you’ve had this? Since…?”
“Since you left it at Elfwood. I was going to return it to you right away, but I kept forgetting, and then an awkward amount of time had gone by, and…well. I’m sorry.”
“You are terrible liar and terrible person.” Katya rolled her eyes. “But you are terrible like cheese with holes in it. Not terrible like egg that is bad all the way through.”
“I have non-terrible parts,” I agreed.
“Like cheese holes,” she said. “Full of air. Stephen, please check Fran is not broken.”
In all my fantasies of taking my shirt off and lowering my pants in Dr. Stephen Florris’s house, I can’t say that Katya had been there, glaring. Also, in those fantasies Dr. Stephen Florris had gently caressed my hips and my ass, not jabbed them rather gleefully while asking, “What about that? Doesthathurt?”
“I am so sorry,” I said again. “I really am. I’m trying to be a better person. Also, I eat a lot more sugar than I told you about, and drink too much wine, and sometimes my mom gives me her Xanax.”
“Mr. Cuthbert.” Dr. Stephen Florris sighed. “Fran. Pull your pants up. You’re going to have a hell of a bruise in the morning, but it looks fine. As for everything else, make an appointment to come and see me, and we’ll go through it all again. And don’t take your mom’s Xanax. Jesus.”
“Go hide Peach pony upstairs,” Katya said. “We will wrap him tonight when Allison is asleep. Fran is lucky she is at caroling with her cousins and did not see that, or else he would be dead man.”
Dr. Stephen Florris headed up the stairs with the yellow bag tucked firmly under his arm.
“God,” I said. “His ass is...”
Katya raised a brow.
“Lovely, I’m sure,” I said. “But I had a sort of major revelation when I landed on the porch out there, so any comments about Dr. Stephen Florris’s ass are made purely out of aesthetic appreciation, you know?”
“It is very good ass,” Katya agreed. “I have seen it naked many times, and you never will.”
“I don’t even want to anymore,” I said. “I had a revelation, I told you.”
“Is revelation that you have only ever loved Cass and nobody else and you try to win him back even though you are no good liar and idiot?”
I gasped. “How could you know that?”
“Is obvious, Fran.” She rolled her eyes. “Is so obvious. I see your brain tick over now, trying to come up with big plan to win his heart, like holding boombox outside window and playing song he likes while you wear pathetic face. Now, come to Main Street with me and Stephen so I look like woman with two friends, not woman secretly dating the town’s most eligible bachelor. Is least you can do.”
She was right.
“I’ll meet you there. I just need to go home and grab one thing first,” I said.
And it wasn’t a boombox.
* * *
The town square off Main Street was already lit up like Christmas, so it was hard to imagine why they needed me. Well, hard for someone who hadn’t already been to the first December Christmas lights ceremony. Because while the display was definitely at Burn Your Retinas levels of ocular trauma, it wasn’t quite at the Leave the Shadows of the Dead Painted on the Walls in a Nuclear Blast Scenario, which was obviously what they were aiming for. A hundred years from now, people wearing protective suits and carrying clicking Geiger counters would pick their way through the desolate remains of Main Street.
“What happened here?” one of them would ask, voice wavering, and the old, cynical one would say, shaking his head in disgust: “Christmas. Those goddamned fools.”
“What is sour face for?” Katya jabbed a sharp elbow in my side.
“Like you can talk,” I said, tugging my coat more firmly around myself.
