Super Secret Santa

I got into costume and started playing the role. The kids were actually cute and I was having a good time.

I had been playing Santa for about an hour when I looked at the line of people waiting and had to do a double take.

What the fuck?

I saw Becca Bell towards the back of the line, with a couple of boys running around her, both looking to be about seven or eight years old.

Could this really be Becca?

I would know her plump ass, juicy curves and pretty face from anywhere. But I still couldn’t believe it.

She didn’t appear to be accompanied by a guy, but rather was facing my direction while she was in deep conversation with another woman who had her back to me. My heart beat out of my chest for a minute, and I lost my train of thought as I was talking to the little girl currently on my lap.

Is she married?

Are those her sons?

“Santa? Are you listening?” the little girl asked me, as she pulled on my fake beard.

I really didn’t want to mess up my chance here due to a woman—even though Becca was certainly not just any woman, not by a longshot—so I forced myself to pay better attention to what I was doing. As the line kept moving, I occasionally looked up to watch Becca, both excited to be close to her again, but also hoping that she would get tired of waiting in line and leave.

I was scared of what to say to her after all this time, and I definitely didn’t need another drama playing out in front of cameras. Surely, she couldn’t still be mad at me like she was back when we were in high school together.

I knew Becca most of my life growing up, even though we never had the same friends or ran in the same circles. By sophomore year, I had started forming a crush on her. She returned that fall, having developed in all the right ways.

Physically, she had become a knockout, although most boys in our class may not have known since she wore glasses and kept her hair up in school, seeming to like to play the role of a shy nerd. I had seen her at the beginning and end of on game nights, though, and I knew differently.

She played the clarinet in the marching band. She must have worn contacts on game nights because she never had glasses on then, and she always had her chestnut locks down. No one would have known that her hair was past her shoulders when she kept it up in a messy bun at school. But when she had her marching band hat off, her hair cascaded down her back.

I could never tell what her body looked like, since she was always in a hoodie or some oversized sweatshirt at school, or in the band uniform on the field, but I had never cared. What I liked most about her was how confident and bold she had become. She had come into herself and didn’t seem to care about what the rest of the world thought.

I had heard girls be mean to her on occasion, mocking her baggy clothes, but she couldn’t care less. She would always just laugh and walk away.

My own girlfriend, Cindy, was particularly mean to Becca and seemed to search her out. Girls who behaved this way were always so unattractive to me, and Cindy was no exception, so I started distancing myself from her.

Truth be told, I had never really wanted to go out with Cindy, anyway, but once I was on the football team, it had seemed natural. My buddy, DJ, was the quarterback and dating Cindy’s friend, Jill, who was also a cheerleader. So that was how I got set up with Cindy, and we all just fell into a rhythm of Saturday night double dates and nightly homework sessions.

Every night, the four of us left practice together, DJ and I chatting about how it had gone and the problems we would face on the field in the next game against whatever team we were playing that week, and the girls lagging, gossiping and talking clothes, when not people. It hardly seemed worth rocking the boat to change things, and then, the next thing I knew, it was senior year and I’d been with Cindy almost two years.

All of us were talking about our futures, though, and I knew there was no place for Cindy in mine. I began playing the inevitable break up in my head, trying to figure out a way to make it as painless as possible.

I knew there was no way it would be pleasant, though. I had seen Cindy in action plenty of times, and she could be very mean. But I was determined to enjoy my final months of my last year.