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5

Sugar

W ho was this reindeer shifter? Grant seemed too perfect to be real. For a second, I wondered if he was part of the spell to trick me. Would my father do that?

Grant was so nice, so giving. He actually cared that I might have died.

He was super handsome, too. Like right now as he was contemplating what card to discard from his hand, he scrunched up his forehead and stuck out his chin, and for some weird reason it made him even more handsome.

Tingly feelings ran all over my skin. Was I attracted to him? That couldn’t be right because he was such an adult, and I was so immature. It was all about me being a screw-up again. But something was there inside me. I had decided at sixteen I hated sex, but that didn’t mean I didn’t feel. Or imagine things.

Right now, I thought about his muscular form poised over me, coming closer and closer. In my vision, he was wearing that white tank top from this morning. Like alpha shifters usually were, his arms were solid and ripped on either side of me.

I could actually smell him, donut glaze and something deeper, spicier.

In the loose sweats he’d loaned me, my cock shifted, coming to life.

“Sugar?”

I glanced up from where I was hiding behind my fanned cards.

“Your turn.” He tapped the discard pile.

I couldn’t make sense of it for a moment. Was his card one I wanted? My hand looked disordered. I quickly discarded something without looking.

Grant grabbed the card and laid out his hand, announcing, “Rummy.”

“Damn, I’m terrible at this game.” I began to gather up the cards.

Later, Grant turned on the TV. Over the next few hours, he left the room and came back a few times, obviously puttering. At one point, he came back into the room and walked up to me.

“I put your suit in the wash. Just to be sure, I checked your pockets and found these.” He held out two I.D. cards.

I frowned at them. One said Canada. One said United States.

“Those aren’t mine.”

“They have your name and picture on them.” Grant put them up to his eyes for a closer look. “Cute picture.”

“Let me see those.”

He gave them over and I stared at them, not quite believing it was real. “It must be part of the spell.”

“Well, you can’t get far in this world outside of Santa’s Village or its associated townships without proper I.D. You can’t get housing or a job or anything, really.”

I kept staring. “He set me up to fail, but then he didn’t.”

“Looks that way,” Grant said. “But you don’t have any money to even get started.”

“I do have an account, but it’s at the bank in Santa’s Village.”

“And you’re not allowed back there. I mean, the spell won’t allow you.”

I didn’t know what to do. Grant was offering me safe harbor. He was a good man, but I was his guest. I would be leaving here, and the sooner the better to face my fate or whatever the spell had in store. Why prolong it?

“I’ll figure something out,” I said. “When I leave.”

Grant looked horrified. “I could never just drop you in the streets of a city with no money.”

“This is a test. My test. My punishment. Not yours.”

Grant lowered himself to sit on the couch. “Sugar.” Voice soft, low. “Why are you being punished?”

“Did you ever do bad things when you were young?” I asked.

Grant chuckled, nodding. “Who hasn’t?”

“No, I mean like really bad?”

Grant frowned. His voice was smooth as he spoke. “How bad?”

“When I was fifteen and sixteen, I ran around in the middle of the night with a sort of bad elf crowd. We did a lot of mischief. Some minor. Some not so minor. Once, we stole an elf bus and took it to an ice cliff. We wanted to see what happened if we could push it off. Like would it hold up or smash to bits and pieces? My friend Suntea drove it right up to the edge. I was—I was in the passenger seat.”

Grant’s mouth dropped open. “You could’ve been killed.”

I heaved in a breath. “I know. We got out just before it went over edge and dropped. It fell a long, long way, hitting the ice and obliterating itself. No one ever found it. The next day the bus was discovered missing and it was in the papers that it was stolen, but nothing ever came of it. It was replaced.”

“I don’t remember ever doing anything that dangerous.” Grant’s eyebrows rose. “Are you still a daredevil like that?”

“No. Suntea and I did a lot of stuff like that. But I stopped going out after about a year or so. Suntea was getting into drug dealing and stuff outside of Santa’s Village. I didn’t want to do that. I knew Sno was catching on to me sneaking out anyway and I was ashamed. I never wanted to have to see Sno’s face if he found out about the stuff I did.”

“Well, if no one ever found out, you’re not being punished for that.”

“No. It’s cumulative. I’ve always been a disappointment; I know it’s true. Fighting with other kids before I was taken out of school and tutored. Bad grades. Being a general pain in the ass. My job at the toy factory was the final straw. But I just hated that job. So much.” I put my palms up to my eyes, rubbing.

“Thank you for telling me,” Grant said.

I glanced up. “And now you probably want me to leave as soon as possible.”

“No.”

“You don’t think I’m a horrible person after what I told you?”

“No.”

“But I put sugared candy in stockings for diabetic kids.”

Grant’s mouth went tight, his lips nearly disappearing.

“See? You do think it.” I pointed at his face.

Grant’s eyes began to redden around the edges. A glazed look came over them.

“What?” My voice rose. “Why are you looking at me like that?” I was ready to leave now, barefoot if I had to.

Suddenly, his lips opened and a burst of air came out along with a choking sound. He was laughing. Laughing at me.

“Stop laughing,” I commanded.

He said, between heaving breaths, “You put candy in stockings for diabetic kids?”

“Yeah. It was terrible. It’s a good thing they weren’t delivered.”

He started laughing even harder. “They weren’t?”

“It was an assembly error.”

He bent over, slapping his knee. “Now that I know kids didn’t get sick, it’s even funnier. I can only imagine the horror on all the elves faces when they discovered it.”

“I was immediately fired.”

“I’ll bet.”

“And my father was so mad when he came home. I’d never seen him so furious. He told me Santa’s Village was not the place for me. And he turned me into a figurine.”

Grant was only now calming down. “And then Velvet found you.”

“Yeah.”

Hearing her name, the Aussie shepherd stood and walked over to us, nuzzling at our knees.

“I’ve never heard of a spell of turning someone into a figurine.”

“My father was really angry.”

“So you’ve said.” Grant said those three words with a smile.

“It’s really not funny,” I said, hanging my head.

“I know. I was laughing because the story is so strange. And because truthfully? I thought you were going to tell me you maimed or killed someone. Or that you’d set the toy factory on fire.”

I couldn’t believe he thought those things. I was almost offended. “I’d never do that.”

“I know. And the trauma you’ve been through is very real.”

“Trauma? Like the spell and me being frozen?”

“Hmm, yes. That. Also, your descriptions of your childhood, feeling different, unwanted, outcast. Those are very real things that can affect you for the rest of your life if you let them. I took a few psych classes in college, and that’s what I recall.”

His words stunned me to silence.

Grant was a lot older than I was. Maybe he knew a thing or two.

Finally, I found my words. “So you don’t think I’m terribly bad?”

“I think a lot of people can make mistakes or do wrong things and still be good at heart.”

“But some people are just plain bad, right? Like a bad seed.”

“Maybe.”

“What if I’m one?”

Velvet bumped harder at my knee. I reached out and petted her. Grant was staring at my hand. Then he looked up at my face. “Velvet likes you. And she’s never wrong.”