But then, they were a recognizable presence in the food court, and she wasn’t. If the Galadriel costume was weirdinsidethe Christmas Village, it made even less sense anywhere else. She wouldn’t have looked like a mall employee on break, she would have looked like someone who treated every day like Comic Con.
And Wade would have looked like Santa Claus. Adults would have understood he was on his break, but children wouldn’t have. Taking off the suit was the only way to get around having to work straight through lunch.
It was nice to leave the intensity of the holiday season behind them for an hour and be two ordinary people in the midst of all the hustle and bustle. Just a man and a woman doing what men and women had been doing for time immemorial: trying to choose between mediocre pizza and equally mediocre Chinese food.
“I’m going to go with Chinese,” Mira announced. “At least then I get a fortune cookie out of it.”
“Good call,” Wade said, joining her in line. “It’ll be nice to know how the rest of the day is going to go.”
“Nice or terrifying?”
He laughed. It was a pleasant rumble of a laugh that made her own stomach muscles tighten up, like she wanted to feel what he was feeling.
“Probably both.”
They got their steaming piles of brownish, overly sweetened Chinese food—with fortune cookies as consolation—and headed to an out-of-the-way table. Mira hoped the huge plastic fern next to it would provide a little soundproofing. It was amazing how busy the mall could get even on a weekday, but the Christmas season had a way of bringing shoppers out of the woodwork. Even people who spent the whole year doing all their shopping online would often turn up as December 25 crept closer.
She settled in, separating her chopsticks and taking the wrapper off her straw, but all of that was just busy-work to give her more of a chance to properly check out Wade.
She had come so close, back at the Outpost, to saying that she recognized him out-of-costume because of his eyes, which would have been so embarrassing that she might not have survived it. She was pretty sure the sizzle of attraction between them was mutual, since he’d stammered a little bit around her too, but her fascination with his warm gray eyes still felt like way too much for the first day of an innocent little workplace flirtation.
Now that he had abandoned the floofy white beard and the red hat, she could say for certain that his eyes weren’t his only good feature. He had a strong jawline and gorgeous dark hair with the tiniest bit of natural wave to it. It was hair thatanyonewould want to touch—or so Mira was going to tell herself.
Maybe weeks of stress had driven her around the bend. Maybe she was succumbing to a frenzy of lust.
Maybe her fortune cookie, when she got to it, would clarify everything, but she had a whole heap of B- Chinese food to get through first.
She took the first gluey bite, made a face at it, and then said, “So what do you do normally? What did Petey pull you away from?”
“I’m a woodworker.”
Mira almost dropped her chopsticks. “You’rethatWade? Wade’s Workshop Wade?”
His smile made his eyes crinkle in a way Mira found intensely cute.Cutewas one of the words she was thinking of, anyway.
“I know,” he said, “I shouldn’t have named the shop after myself. I liked the alliteration, but now it seems kind of cheesy.”
“I wasn’t thinking it sounded cheesy,” Mira said honestly. “I’ve been in there a couple times—”
Never whenhewas there, she already knew, because she would have remembered him.
“—and everything’s so beautiful. Did you really hand-carve that chess set?”
Wade abandoned his lukewarm Chinese food. The chess set was clearly one of his favorite pieces, and he looked like she’d made his day by bringing it up.
Mira didn’t know anything about woodworking, but the way Wade talked about it made it sound not only interesting butpossible, like it wasn’t as much an art as a hobby anyone could take up. He described the wood grain so vividly that it felt like she could trace one finger along the block of wood he was talking about, following the line like it was a drizzle of spilled honey.
“But I’m getting carried away,” Wade said sheepishly, like she wouldn’t have been happy for him to carryheraway too. “What about you? What do you do when you’re not Galadriel?”
She felt her face heat up. Even though she was proud of her podcast and how far it had come, she hardly ever talked about it people in her day-to-day life. It was like she kept a thick wall between her online self and her “real” life. But wasn’t her online life just as real? It was how she made her living, after all.
Maybe she tended to downplay the podcast because the first few times she’d ever tried telling people, it had been obvious that they’d thought it was a little bit silly.
Is there really that much to say about those kinds of movies? They always end the same way.
People pay for that? That’s a pretty good racket!
But she was letting a couple bad blind dates—and a couple distant and probably envious cousins—get the best of her. Nothing about Wade said that he would be dismissive. He’d let his carefree younger brother force him into a Santa suit, and he wasn’t complaining about it nearly as much as Mira would have been. He’d been good with the kids.
