How My Brother's Best Friend Stole Christmas

Yeah, I couldn’t quite pull myself back from the urge to brush my fingers across the back of her hand where it sat on the arm of the chair. I did it and she glanced back at me in that painfully Sophie way, and that was what her mother saw.

“Lucky for you,” Gloria said to her daughter. “He’s why you suddenly have cost-saving ideas. Why you’re writing reports. Wearing dresses and doing something with your hair. This boy always went right to your head and—”

“Stop,” I said. My voice boomed in the office. I stood up from where I’d been leaning against the windowsill. The room went still and W.B. slowly closed his file. I could see him trying to shrink back into the shadows. “When you talk to Sophie like that all you do is prove how little you know her.”

I felt the attention of everyone in the room. Except Sophie. Sophie, who was decidedly not looking at me.

“Thanks for the drink,” Sophie said, draining the last of her beer and getting out of that office as fast as she could. While I stood there, paralyzed. Hating that I’d said that, but also knowing I would have hated it had I kept my mouth shut. I’d done it my whole life with Gloria Kane and if I was here now, well, I couldn’t keep doing it.

Sophie deserved better.

W.B. quietly left the room.

“You think you know my daughter better than me?” Gloria asked. She got to her feet. “You came to our house with nothing and my kids took care of you, and I know you all think that I’ve been cruel or mean towards you but it is because you have been rude in every single exchange we’ve ever had. You—”

“Mom!” Wes snapped getting to his feet.

Gloria, to my shock, got right in my face. “They loved you. My children. Sophie, especially. You’d have to be dumb or blind not to see that. And you joined the Marines like their love meant nothing. You could have died and she….” Gloria took a deep breath and stopped.

“That’s why you don’t like me?” I asked, stunned.

“No. I don’t like you because I don’t like you.”

For some reason the honesty of it all made me laugh. Which, predictably, made her sniff and set down her vodka on the edge of the desk. She turned to Wes. “You got married without even telling me.”

“Mom.” Wes sighed. “There were reasons. We didn’t tell anyone—”

“I’m not anyone. I’m your mother.”

Wes nodded, taking that little jab on his chin, and she turned her mean eyes back my way. “Don’t you hurt her,” she said, and then she, too, was gone.

“What are you doing with my sister?” Wes asked into the long silence after his mother left, and I thought about saying something. I thought…about telling him. Not that something had happened but that something might.

Could.

Will.

“Nothing,” I said.

“Oh my God, what bullshit.” Wes laughed and I looked up at him. “Man, there has been something between you forever. I try to ignore it because I don’t like to think about it, but I’m not stupid. The first year you came back and you couldn’t tell us where you’d been, remember? That spring?”

“No.”

“Sure, buddy. You keep saying that. I’ll remember for you. Sophie had turned twenty and I saw your face when she got out of the truck.”

I looked away, out the dark window with snow melting against it.

“I saw your face,” Wes said. “And for once, and I mean once, I knew exactly what you were thinking.”

I remembered that moment, her getting out of the truck in a pair of cutoffs and a smile. The rest of it…

“I don’t remember,” I said.

“Sophie? That day? What—”

“Knowing what I was thinking.” I said it and cringed. I wasn’t making sense and I shook my head. “Ignore me.”

Wes got up and walked around the desk, and I braced myself in case he was going to put a hand on my shoulder. But he didn’t. My oldest, dearest friend in the world understood my boundaries and leaned back against his desk.

“I like you two together,” he said, surprising me. “I always have. I mean, who doesn’t want his best friend at every family function? Christmas parties, backyard barbecues, raising our kids together—”

“Stop.”

“Sam. I’m telling you, you have my permission. My blessing. Whatever. But…”

“But?”

He stood up from the desk, pushed through that boundary. I tensed. “Right now, you’re hurting her. I don’t know what you did. Or what you’re doing. But you’re hurting her and you keep doing that and…you and me?”

I saw that kid on the basketball court, arguing with me about the free throw line. The one who told me not to steal from his family again. That he would help—anything I needed—but I had to ask.

“You and me will be over, Sam. I love you like a brother, but she’s my sister and you keep hurting her and you’re out in the cold.”