Under the Mistletoe

Prologue

Denue

Don’t text her anything inappropriate, I lecture myself. Sure, she’s hot as hell. With curves for days. But she’s much younger than you. And she works for you.

This is a conversation I have with myself often, and more and more, I don’t listen. If I continue down this course, though, it’ll be too late to turn back. I’m already in deeper than I had meant to become.

I turn my attention to nature to try to get my wicked desires out of my head.

Feathery and spry, the thin green leaf floats and dances through the drops and tears from the sky, ambling about softly in circles, and lands squalidly by the curb. The colored water carries it away, drowns it, down one of the drains in the street.

The asphalt is clear now, just as it was moments ago, as clear as the agile, living curtain of rain trickling down the study room window, where I sit and design the rest of my afternoon. I run my hands through my hair, feel the dry wetness of morning hairspray and chuckle at the scraggly itch of it.

I drum my fingers along my cheek and drop them down my bare knee. Just as the rain washes away the dust and dirt of seasons past, the still steaming cup of coffee in my free hand does my soul.

It has been three weeks since the messages came in, on all screens and via the paper, informing everyone about a new virus and instructing us to stay indoors and confine our movement to our own homes only. Since then, like probably everyone else during this pandemic, I have been spending a lot of time stuck to my couch or staring wistfully out the window.

I do love it when the rain falls in the middle of a hot afternoon. Unexpected, the pregnant clouds roll in, daunting and dark, to turn the sun’s smile upside down. The soft breeze calms the ankles, soothes the calves and blows away the sweaty thighs as the first sheet glazes the earth floor.

I was outside when it started, on my phone, trying to think of a better way to punctuate my superbly flat text. A text that, in fact, had been at the tips of my fingers, at the fray of my proverbial tongue, for the better part of the morning.

It had been three hours since I wished her a good morning and asked if everything on the timeshare software was gelled. She had responded in, well, what I think was a cheeky, haughty sense of humor, and I, in all modesty, had tried to think of a better, sexier, much less stale, much raunchier, yet unflinchingly professional response.

And then it poured.

And it keeps pouring.

I sip the drink slowly, savoring the faraway tastes of foreign soil. It burns my tongue, just as I want it to.

It's better than trying to process the one line of thought that means anything through this mess we're all in. A line of thought, which if tampered with, or seen through the tiny puffy clouds above my head, would make HR swiftly consider my proposal a violation of their terms against inter-office relationships and swiftly terminate me, with no severance.

Nellie Amador has been a pesky yet brilliantly pedestalized thought on my mind for the duration of five weeks, six days, twelve hours and thirteen minutes, and counting. My assistant from Puerto Rico, the gold country, has no particular outstanding accomplishments in her life. She makes me tea, which I had always thought I detested with a sincere passion, until she made it.

She outlines my itinerary and schedule. She makes sure my suits are pressed and fine. She keeps a gentle reminder once a week for me to call Ma. She does her job.

So, in light of such a conventional human being's very normal and extraordinary life, how is it suddenly so dire for me to make a proper, formal response to her saucy text in the middle of light, unexpected December rain?

Nellie

It all started, I think, three weeks ago, under the sink.

There was a rancid smell running through my apartment. It was old and fresh at the same time. Stunning, I thought, that something like that could possibly exist.

I investigated for a random number of hours late one night after an excruciatingly long morning of Skype calls and a dull and heavy afternoon of Zoom meetings and one narcissistic evening of PowerPoint.

The tools were in the drawer where my father had left them the last time he had come around visiting, and I tightened the belt, folded my sleeves and was nothing short of wearing war paint and a bandana tightly wrapped around my head when I got down on my knees and worked the penlight.

It took me less than an hour.

The sink floor was quite comfortable in contrast to the water smell running down the plastic pipes. I soon fixed it and was carefully wrapping the tape when my phone buzzed. I took a glance and dropped the penlight to my chest, the awe more surprising than what I was reading.