Page 32 of Scary & Bright

Perhaps it was my brain having not fully recovered from nearly freezing to death, or maybe it was an instinctual response to witnessing such sadness. As he stood before me, knee-deep in snow, showing me the memorial of every kill he’d made, I could only think to comfort him.

I punched both my hands forward and grabbed his coat, pulling him into me. Time felt like it was moving in fast-forward and slow motion all at once. All my fear, all my sadness, all my anxiety, all my endless curiosity and deep confusion swirled into a force that sent me into him, that craved to be near him. Was it just a trauma bond, or was this something more?

At that moment, I didn’t care.

Before he could stop me, and before I could stop myself, I rose up on my toes, reached up toward him, pulled his head down, and pressed my lips to his. The frigid air around me seemed to disappear. His hands migrated up and over my neck to cup my face, and they were so large he could have likely palmed my head like a basketball. I let my own hands drop from his neck to his chest. I could feel his heart pounding even through his layers.

I needed to feel wanted, and I knew he did, too. All of our pain and loneliness, our grief, anger, and desire… it saw the other’s as kin, or as long-lost friends, or lovers. We were kindred spirits, he and I, and as we admitted that in the form of a vicious kiss, our bodies hungry for one another, I swear the snow began to melt around us.

15

KRAMPUS

Heaven.

Everything I had ever imagined paradise felt like was in that moment. If it weren’t for the sting of the cold on my cheeks, I would have thought it all to be a dream. It was entirely unexpected, her choice to pull herself into me, but that was part of what made it so remarkably magical.

She was an anomaly, this petite, blond-haired girl who, by some strange twist of fate, had made it onto the Naughty List and ended up in my basement. Anybody else would have run screaming through the castle if I’d asked to share my tale, but she sat, listened, and found something in me worthy of kissing. My brain turned to mush as I swooned under her spell and allowed my mittened hands to touch her face.

Then, just as quickly as she kissed me, she pulled away with a gasp.

“Oh, my. Wow. I am… I am so sorry,” she said, taking a step back and nearly falling backward over her snow boots. “I don’t know what came over me.”

Of course, I thought. She thinks of it as a mistake. Why wouldn’t it be?

“It’s really okay,” I said, awkwardly adjusting my coat as I tried my very best to salvage whatever was left of the moment. “I didn’t mind in the least. Please don’t apologize.”

She crossed her arms and bit her lower lip, the sight of which made me weak in the knees. It had been such an unimaginable length of time since I last had to read another person, and Holly was especially hard to read. Her big green eyes looked up at me with tiny snowflakes stuck in her eyelashes before leaning into me once more.

“Is it just me,” she began, her voice partially muffled in my coat, “or does it feel like this whole thing got a hell of a lot more complicated?”

“Definitely not just you,” I said as I carefully wrapped my arms around her.

* * *

Each moment with Holly made me feel like I was basking in the sun. She had been in the South Pole now for nine days but had only been awake after her near-freezing experience for four. We spent every moment of those four days near one another, learning about each other, and ignoring the rest of the world. The calendar be damned. Christmas be damned. Being with her was natural, like it was something we were meant to be doing our entire lives.

“You know, forgive me for asking, but I’ve been wondering,” I said one morning as we laid side by side in my bed.

“What’s that?” Holly responded, flipping over onto her side to face me. The two of us shared a bed every night but had yet to cross the invisible barrier in the center of the mattress. Each of us clung to our individual sides like they were lifeboats adrift in the ocean. Sure, we had kissed and held hands, but anything that would be frowned upon in a PG-13 movie, we hadn’t quite gotten to. As badly as I wanted to truly touch her and taste her, I didn’t want to spoil what we already had. The possibility of her rejecting my advances and withdrawing from me was too much to bear. Hesitation became the main theme of our newfound relationship.

“Usually, the people that the Christmas Spirit sends here are more, um…” I struggled to find the words, trying my best not to sound absolutely horrible. “I guess they just look more like they fit on the Naughty List, if that makes sense. But you don’t. Not at all.”

“Are you suggesting that I don’t look naughty enough to be on the Naughty List, Krampus?” she asked, the corners of her mouth lifting into a sly, challenging smile. Her hair tumbled over her shoulder like a waterfall of sunshine and dandelions. That, combined with the semi-revealing nature of her tank-top was enough to send a rush of blood between my legs that I did my best to ignore.

“Actually, yes,” I said with a smile. One of my fangs, the slightly crooked one, poked gently at my lower lip—an annoyance I had entirely forgotten about in the years I spent in isolated misery. I wasn’t exactly smiling a lot then. “That’s exactly what I’m suggesting. But if you’re willing to tell me how the hell you ended up there, I’m willing to listen.”

She chuckled before she scooted up on the bed to sit up and tossed her hair behind her back.

“If I’m being entirely honest, I’m not proud of how I ended up here,” she began, pulling her knees into her chest. “I mean, who would be? But for me, it’s just… it’s embarrassing, and it’s not exactly interesting, either.”

“You don’t have to say if you don’t want to,” I suggested. While I was curious about what her life was like before I met her, I was also clinging to every moment with her. Just like I wasn’t willing to cross the invisible line down the center of my bed separating our sides like countries at war, I was not going to force anything. Being with her felt like I was feeding wild songbirds out of the palm of my hand—I feared one harsh movement in any direction would send her flying away in panic. “I guess I’m just shamelessly intrigued by you.”

“Well, you wouldn’t have been very intrigued by the person I was,” she scoffed.

I knew that to be entirely false, but I also wasn’t going to interrupt just to say that.

“Actually, you probably wouldn’t have even had the chance to be intrigued because of how fast I’d shut you out,” she continued, “or I’d be a total bitch until you decided to leave me alone.”