How My Brother's Best Friend Stole Christmas

We went two days without seeing much of each other. I didn’t show up to run anymore, but the afternoon meditation was a hit, though I think people were just closing their eyes for a half hour.

But I saw Sam going in there every day and I wanted to call his mom and tell him he was trying. Or at least pretending to.

“So?” Joe asked, leaning up against my desk where I was putting the finishing touches on what I was going to pitch to my brother during our Thursday night drinks.

“So what?” I asked, trying to figure out the equation for a spreadsheet cell.

“You gonna come with me?” he asked.

“Where?”

The entire row of numbers vanished on my spreadsheet. “Crap!”

“Sophie.”

“No. I told you,” I said, quickly trying to undo everything I’d done and then I’d undone too much and I had an extra row.

“You said you were thinking about it.”

I sighed and looked up at him. “Joe. You are…sweet but I gotta tell you, it’s never going to happen.”

“You’re not going to come to a New Year’s Eve party with me?”

I shook my head.

“Your loss,” he said.

New Year’s Eve was the next night, staff had that afternoon off, and then it was the weekend. And I was going to pitch my idea to my brother tonight, come in tomorrow for the potluck, and then I was going to hide in my apartment for a while and talk myself out of my feelings for Sam.

I had a whole plan. Count all the terrible things about him. Remember in excruciating detail everything he’d ever said or done that hurt me. If I focused hard enough, I was pretty sure I could pull these feelings out by the roots.

He’d been ignoring me. No, that wasn’t totally true. He’d been treating me like I was a boss. Listening at meetings. Working hard. Saying thank-you and asking questions. Respectful and decent. He’d been treating me like nothing had happened between us.

In fact, he was so good at it, there were seconds after he came in, in the morning, after giving me his blank smile and cool eyes, that I actually wondered if I’d made it up somehow. Like it was a fever dream.

At night, when I got home and ate my burrito, took my hair out of my ponytail, and fired up my PlayStation…there he’d be. Not in real life, obviously. But his stupid wizard wannabe character, with his dumb face and his map.

Castle is waiting, he’d message me. I’d look at his name on my screen and I’d feel the loss of him in the pit of my stomach. And he was right there.

I didn’t know how he could turn it off like that. And staring up at my ceiling at night, the only thing I could think was that it just didn’t mean anything to him. That I didn’t mean anything. And I tried, I really did, to pretend that he didn’t mean anything either.

But every time he looked right through me, it hurt. And every time he walked into the room, it hurt.

So I had New Year’s Eve and the weekend to burn him out of my head.

I couldn’t even fire him. He was a hard worker and people liked him and he was a vet with PTSD and I wasn’t an asshole.

But it hurt. Everything hurt when it came to Sam Porter.

Thursday night the warehouse emptied out quickly and I printed off the last of my stuff to take up to talk to my brother. A soft pitch before going to the board, W.B., and my mother. But I was still nervous. There hadn’t been a lot of ideas coming from me during this whole Kane Co. fiasco. Partly because I ran the warehouse and partly because my father didn’t like it when other people had ideas and partly because…my family never looked to me for ideas. Wes was the ideas man.

“Hey.”

I jumped, pulling the papers out of the printer with a jerk so they scattered across the floor. Of course it was Sam standing there in his hoodie and dark jeans.

I grabbed the papers before he could because I didn’t want him to see them.

“What’s…”

He had a paper in his hand and I grabbed it.

“Sophie?”

“What.”

“You okay?”

“Fine. You leaving?”

“I thought…” He paused and blinked at me. Which, in Sam Porter language, was a whole thing. A whole conversation, and because I was fluent in Sam Porter language I knew that he was thinking, I thought we were both going up. Did you forget? Did I forget? Do you not want me to be there? That’s it. Okay. I won’t go.

“Good night,” he said and started to walk toward the door, and the crazy thing was the guy broke my heart but I was never able to hurt him. I was never able to see him hurt. It hurt too much.