Dylan scratched his jaw. “I don’t know about that,” he said. “I’m glad she’s not too badly hurt. What about the guy and his friends?”
“His friends?” Alice drew her eyebrows together in confusion. “The ones from his bachelor party? What do they have to do with it?”
Five minutes ago, Dylan had been starving. Now, the burger that was left turned his stomach. He pushed it away.
“If I tell you,” he said, “you have to let me finish. Even if I sound crazy.”
Alice put her hands into her armpits and pulled her heavy mittens off. She set them down next to Dylan’s empty cup.
“Dylan, you’re scaring me,” she said. “What happened?”
“No interruptions?” Dylan said,
Alice looked dubious. Then she shrugged and mimed locking her pursed lips shut. She tossed the imaginary key over her shoulder and waited.
“It started with my grandad’s watch,” Dylan said. He paused and corrected himself. “Or maybe…it all started with my grandfather.”
He laid out everything that had happened. To her credit, Alice held her tongue and listened. Not that she needed to actually talk, her expression said everything for her. When Dylan finished, she waited a moment to make sure there was nothing else.
“OK,” she said. “So do… you… think you’re Santa now?”
“No!” Dylan said. He hadn’t actually thought of that, but now that he did… God, he hoped not. “I couldn’t pull off that much red.”
Alice tilted the corner of her mouth up in acknowledgment of the joke and reached for her coffee. She kept doing that. Every time she took a drink, she made a face at the taste and pushed the cup a little further away. Her phone was at her elbow, and she took a quick look at it before she said anything.
“But Somerset is an elf,” Alice poked gently. “And he has the hots for you?”
“OK. I know I said you wouldn’t believe me,” Dylan said. “But ‘Santa is real’ and ‘Somerset kissed me’ aren’t on the same level of unbelievable.”
That got him a brief, actual smile. Alice braced her elbow on the counter and her chin on her fist. “They’re both things you wanted, though, aren’t they?”
She kept her voice gentle, patient. It was a conversation, not a dispute. Dylan supposed he couldn’t blame her.
“OK, I’ve imagined Somerset doing lots of things to me,” Dylan admitted. “But I’ve not spent a whole lot of fantasy hours on Santa.”
“Notnow,”Alice said. “But when you were a kid, bounced from foster home to foster home, you never daydreamed about Santa coming to take you away from it all.”
“No,” Dylan said. “I knew he wouldn’t.”
It was a glib, off-the-cuff answer. Dylan hadn’t really thought about it. Now that he did… It was true. He’d never thought about Santa coming down the chimney to save him, but that had been long before he’d become a Christmas atheist.
He’d just known that Santawouldn’t
That was an odd thing for a kid to be so sure of, he supposed.
“So, how would you explain it?” Dylan asked. “If Santa isn’t real.”
Alice held up a hand. “As a parent,” she said. “I’m not saying that out loud. But, I mean, maybe what happened at the hospital—and the head trauma from last night—caused a psychotic break, and you wandered. But even in a fugue state, you realized something was wrong, so you called me? What do you think? Does that fit the symptoms?”
It could.
Dylan scratched at his wrist and peeled off the skin of meaty grease. “Why do I smell so bad?”
“Because you walked through the woods from the hospital to here.” Alice put her hand over Dylan’s and squeezed gently. “You know I’m right. What other explanation is there?”
Therightanswer, the one that would make her relax and smile at him, was ‘none.’ Everything Alice had said made sense. Even when Dylan was in the middle of it all, he’d hung on to the ‘escape button’ of it all being some coma coping mechanism.
Alice glanced down at her phone again and then back up at him.
