Abdominal Snowman: A Feel Good Holiday Romance Page 3

  My teeth started to chatter from the cold as I followed my daughter’s boot prints back to the house. I imagined the sun eventually coming out, and melting away our silly attempt at holiday cheer, the same way everything is eventually melted away.

  _____

  Later that night I lay wide awake in my bed, staring up at the ceiling. The wind outside was howling more angrily than ever, and a part of me feared we might be sucked up in some sort of snownado, pulled up by our roots like the old farmhouse in the Wizard of Oz. Indeed my home’s wooden skeleton was creaking dangerously in the wicked winds, and I swore I thought I could sense the floor and the ceiling shifting in opposite directions on either side of me.

  I’d already been awake for hours, thinking through my life choices over and over again, and wishing Jule could have a father again for Christmas- not just some deadbeat slimeball who only came around when he was sober enough to remember their visitation schedule.

  But the blizzard had only continued to intensify along with my own internal angst, until I found myself blaming the loud and terrible weather for my sleeplessness, instead of my many personal problems.

  The wind grew so loud it sounded like someone was actually standing there and whistling outside my second story window, or maybe just like a wolf was howling its lungs out at some invisible moon.

  Goosebumps prickled along my back, and finally I forced myself out of bed with a fleece throw wrapped around my shoulders. I slid my feet into the reindeer slippers Jule had given me last Christmas, and drifted over to the window like a Dickensian phantom, my oversized blanket dragging along across the floor in my wake.

  I lifted up the curtain, and was astonished to find myself staring into nothing at all.

  Seriously, there was nothing but a blank, empty void, a total whiteout as the snow ripped down from the heavens, as though the clouds themselves had been sucked directly down on us. It strangely reminded me of some old Daffy Duck cartoon I remembered watching as a kid, where the animators completely erased the background out from behind him. It really was that bright white outside, and at two o’clock in the morning, no less.

  Then, just as I thought things couldn’t get any more surreal, there was a tremendous KRASH! that practically left me jumping out of my skin, accompanied by a blinding flash of light that managed to somehow illuminate the snow even brighter. I shrieked without meaning to, and quickly drew a hand to my lips to quiet myself.

  “Holy snowballs! Was that... Thundersnow?!” I had to whip out my phone and check to make sure that was even a real thing. But even as I was scrolling through Google two more bolts of lightning split cleanly across the whited-out horizon, letting me know it was in fact very real, regardless of what Mr. Google had to say about it.

  I pulled the blankets tighter in around myself, and shivered to the very core of my being. I didn’t wish for an instant that I had Scott back in the house to comfort me, but I couldn’t help but long for a big strong pair of manly arms to help me feel warm and safe at that particular moment.

  I took a deep breath, trying to calm myself down, and decided to go check in on Jule. Terrible parent that I was, a small part of me hoped she was wide awake and as afraid as I was, so that I could crawl into bed with my little snuggle bug and pretend to be the one comforting her, and not the other way around.

  I crept silently down the hallway, and eased open the door to Jule’s room. More flashes of silent lightning shone in through the window on her sleeping face as I stood there, revealing a little girl as soundly asleep in heavenly peace as the Christ child in his manger.

  I fought the urge to sneak into my daughter’s bed and disturb her anyway, and shut the door as quietly as I could.

  I stood in the hallway and thought for a long moment, listening to the hollow sound of the wind and the creaking of timbers all around me. At last I decided I would go crazy if I returned to my bed and tried to sleep in these conditions, and I elected to go downstairs and light up the fireplace instead.

  Moments later I found myself sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of a crackling golden hearth, its radiant heat divine against my goose pimpled flesh. I pulled the blankets around me as tightly and securely as I could, so that I felt like a caterpillar in its cocoon, with only my mussed-up bedhead sticking out.

  My cheeks grew hot with the kiss of the flames, and soon my swaddled warmth began to overtake the icy cold of the night which surrounded me. The hiss of the whipping wind was drowned out by the snaps and pops of the burning logs, their neon orange cinders twisting and winding their way up into the chimney.

  At last my eyelids began to grow heavy.

  My vision started to blur, and my head felt suddenly as though it had been filled to the brim with sand. I kept lifting it up, only for the sand to displace and send me lurching forward again, my neck craning so low that I was practically doubled over in my unconsciousness.

  It’s impossible for me to say whether I was asleep for a few minutes, or only just a moment or two before a loud pounding on the door sent me jerking awake.

  My head shot up, my eyes wide, my heart pounding furiously in my chest.

  “What the North Pole? Jeez, I must have been dreaming...” I rationalized, thinking there was no way someone would be knocking on my door at this ungodly hour, and on a night like this especially.

  But then, there it was again- THUMP THUMP THUMP THUMP THUMP!

  An urgent rapping at my front door, only a few short yards away from where I sat. Only I wasn’t sitting now, I’d bolted upright facing the door, shivering more fiercely than I had been from the cold only moments ago.

  There was a final flash of lightning, and then suddenly the whistling outside sank down into a low, ambient hum, and my windows quit rattling in their panes.

  “What in Mr. Heatmiser’s blazes is going on?!” I hissed at the darkness, wondering whether I’d finally lost my marbles.

  But no, there it was again. The silence broken, by a third, much slower and more deliberate attempt to get me to answer the door.

  THUMP. THUMP. THUMP.

  A chill ran through my entire body.

  Whoever it was, they weren’t going away...

  I briefly thought about calling 911, but I knew they would never get here in time, especially not on a night like this. I doubted whether the roadways to my house had even begun being plowed yet.

  Seeing no other option I turned to the fireplace, and grabbed the steel poker from the spot where it leaned idly against my chimney.

  I whipped the pole around and wielded it like a sword, or at least how I imagined I would wield a sword based on Hollywood movies. I took a deep swallow of air, and began to creep slowly toward the door. Whatever courage I had felt tempered by my clumsy tripping over the blanket wrapped around me, and the flopping of my slippers’ reindeer antlers with every step I took made me feel a lot less threatening than I wished to appear at that moment.

  At last I made it up to the front door, and reached with torturous slowness for the knob. I held my breath as I began to turn it, and kept my eyes fixed on the shadow under the door, blocking out what little light there was coming in from the outside, in the spot where the intruder stood.

  Finally, unable to stand the suspense any longer, I whipped the door back so fast I nearly tore it clean off its hinges.

  I thrust my violently forward, completely blind in my aim, and was stunned to see a completely naked man stumbling backwards across my porch, a hand outstretched to try and protect himself.

  “Ay! Careful where you’re poking that thing!” he protested, and gripped the stovepipe hat I now noticed he held clutched over his groin a little bit more fiercely.

  My astonishment was almost enough to let my grip on the poker weaken. It slowly dawned on me that he wasn’t completely naked, and that it somehow might have been slightly less weird if he had been.

  Instead, in addition to the top hat being used to conceal his modesty, the man wore a familiar threadbare red scarf whipping wildly
in the wind, along a raggedy old mittens that also bore a weird resemblance to those once belonging to my ex-husband.

  None of this made any sense at all, but even a completely naked man standing there at my door would’ve made a little more sense than, well... Whatever this was!

  “Who the HO HO hell are you?!” I demanded, now gripping the poker in both hands, and extending it out in front of myself as far as it could reach.

  It was at that moment that I caught my very first glance of the man’s unspeakably handsome smile, his fine lips sort of twitching over to one side of his face. The fineness of his expression nearly disarmed me for a moment, and it suddenly dawned on me just what a fine specimen of masculinity this madman truly was.

  He wore his hair in a dark brown crew cut, the fine strands of it flaked with gently cascading fractals of snow. His finely angled face was peppered with a slightly darker stubble, and his piercing blue eyes made me suddenly weak at the knees.

  From there I couldn’t help but notice the sheer perfection of the man’s body- it was, after all, almost entirely on display for me to soak in as I pleased. His form was chiseled and immaculate, his arms thick and powerful, his chest sculpted to perfection. The firelight from the hearth inside practically dripped along the planes of his pectoral muscles and down along the ladder of his six-pack abs, leading the eye, last but not least, to the salaciously cut trench of his Adonis muscles, that tantalizing arrow finally cutting off at the spot where he held his stovepipe hat in place.

  The icy cold flop sweat of my terror very briefly gave way to an unhelpfully woozy pang of desire, until I remembered I had a sleeping little girl upstairs, and that protecting her was my one and only priority right now as a mother.

  I redoubled my grip on the poker, and narrowed my eyes at the man as he continued to grin at me.

  “I can tell you who I am,” he said, “but I promise you, you aren’t going to believe me...”

  “Try me,” I shot back. “In case you didn’t realize it, greeting a naked man at my door in the middle of a blizzard is pretty darn hard to believe on its own... Actually, it would be pretty flippin’ weird regardless of the weather!”

  He smiled at this, a full toothy grin, and I had to remind myself not to swoon.

  “I probably wouldn’t be here in any other weather,” he said with a shrug. “You really don’t recognize me?”

  The question took me aback. My eyes returned again to the scarf around his neck, then to Scott’s old mittens, and- yes, naturally- to the stovepipe hat covering up his own stovepipe.

  I experienced a pang of recognition, but refused to even entertain such a ridiculous idea.

  “Oh, come on... Do I look like a child to you?” I asked, even as I found myself peering over his broad shoulders, to the spot in the front yard where Jule and I had built our snowman that afternoon.

  “Of course not,” he replied. “Not at all. But I don’t think children should be the only ones who get to believe in miracles, do you?”

  I was gobsmacked. Outside, Jule and I’s snowman had completely vanished. Not toppled over, or buried by the snowstorm, but just plain gone! Even more astonishingly, I noticed a set of bare human footprints that began in the exact spot where the snowman had been, and wound their way across my blanketed lawn all the way up to the spot where this stranger now stood.

  “What the holly jolly did you do to my snowman?” I demanded, already sure of what he was trying to convince me of, but not daring to believe it for a second.

  The man’s oh-too-kissable smile thinned back out again. “Baby, it’s cold outside,” he said. “I think you already know the answer to your question. Are you going to keep me standing out here in a blizzard while you keep giving me the runaround?”

  “So you’re saying you’re- you’re trying to tell me that-” I began to stutter, fluttering my lashes stupidly in confusion as I tried to think of a less insane way to phrase it.

  “I’m your snowman,” he finally filled in the blank for me. I don’t know if I thought hearing it would cause it to make any more sense than it did, but hearing it aloud left me in an even greater state of bewilderment.

  “That’s... That’s not possible,” I said, shaking my head.

  “I mean it is Christmas, after all,” he said with a casual shrug. “It is the season for miracles...”

  “No, you... Look, if that snowman came to life he’d be about four feet tall, dumpy and hook-nosed! And that’s, you know, assuming it’s not completely insane to even entertain the possibility that- that-” but I found I couldn’t even finish the thought.

  “Insane?” he asked, grinning. “Mmm, I prefer the term inspiring.”

  “So what’s your name then, hm, Mr. Snowman? Frosty? Jack Frost? Olaf?”

  Mr. Snowman laughed. “Don’t be silly,” he corrected me. “My name’s Nole. Just Nole. Your name is Addison, Addison Moss. Your daughter who helped build me is Jule Brennan. She kept her father’s last name when the two of you separated.”

  It was then that I started to let my guard down. My mouth fell open, and I gazed with my brown eyes locked on him in amazement. “How- okay... Okay, fine... You know a little bit about me,” I admitted. “But how does that make you, you know, magic or whatever? We’re living in the age of Facebook, pal. And anyway, Loveland is a small town. Everyone here knows everything about one another.”

  “Oh, so you’ve seen me around town, then, have you?” he asked, seeming less like a snowman at that moment than a riddle-loving troll trying to prevent me from getting across a bridge.

  “Well no,” I admitted, “but- well, what stalker worth his salt lets his target know they’re being followed?”

  “Addison, I’ve never followed you anywhere,” he said, speaking to me like we were somehow old friends. “I’ve literally only traveled from the spot where you built me to your doorstep throughout my entire life.”

  “Okay, but-” I began, but again he interrupted me.

  “You and your daughter built me this afternoon. You wanted to bond with her, since things have been tough for her this year since you and her dad got divorced. You two had a snowball fight when you were halfway through finishing me, and you took a selfie with me once I was done. Then Jule, who you often call Jujyfruit, told you that the holidays didn’t feel the same this year, and asked if she could go inside. You went in, made her hot cocoa, then sat around in your PJ’s together watching Elf for about the hundred thousandth time on Freeform.”

  All I could do for a moment was stand there and gape at him, stunned by his insight, and doing everything in my power to fabricate some other explanation about how he knew all of this.

  “Well, I... I have to admit that is, um... Impressive...”

  He gave me a knowing smile, like he was sure he had me now.

  “Well that’s a start, anyway. Now can we please talk about this inside? You’re the one armed with a deadly weapon, and I’m standing out here naked and defenseless. And I mean, even a snowman can get frostbite. I’m especially worried about a few highly sensitive areas in particular, if you catch my snowdrift...”

  I blinked at him, trying to think of any other possible reason to tell him no. I’m ashamed to admit it, but maybe he was simply too handsome for me to turn him away altogether. Or maybe I just had too many questions that needed answered for my common sense and parental instincts to get in the way.

  “Okay... Fine. Get in here before the neighbors see you, and think I’m crazier than I already am.”

  He laughed at this. “Thank you, Addison. But I promise you you aren’t crazy.”

  “Please don’t promise me that,” I said, and ushered him in through the front door with a steel poker’s length between us.

  I took one last look at the place where Jule and I’s snowman had once been, wondering whether I’d just made a terrible mistake, then closed the door behind us.

  “Oh, merciful Saint Nicholas, you’ve got a fire going,” he said the moment we were both inside together. He mov
ed quickly over to the hearth, and I couldn’t help but admire the corded muscles of his back as he receded from me, coupled with the sculpted planes of his shifting buttocks, and two cute as hell butt dimples just beneath his spine.

  I felt my face growing quickly red for reasons wholly unrelated to the temperature. I was left even more breathless, then, when I watched from behind as he lifted the stovepipe hat from his manhood and extended both arms toward the fire to warm himself.

  “I’m sorry for the full frontal, by the way,” he said over his shoulder. “The transition from snowman to man-man was a chilly one, and my chestnuts are in bad need of a roasting...”

  “Here,” I said, sliding my bundle of blankets off from around my shoulders. I balanced it on the tip of the poker and handed them over to him, looking coyly away as he grabbed them and wrapped them around himself.

  “Oh, bless you,” he said.

  “I think I might have an old men’s bathrobe upstairs. My ex stole it from a hotel a few years ago. Promise to stay exactly where you are and I’ll go get it for you.”

  “I swear I won’t move a muscle,” he said. And great, here I was thinking about his muscles again...

  I padded up the stairs and made another stop at Jule’s door. I peered in, and somehow, almost impossibly, she remained as fast asleep as ever. It was like my entire world had been flipped upside down since the last time I looked in on her, and here she was lost in sugarplum land, her reality completely unchanged as far as she was aware.

  “Lord help me, what did I get us into, Jujyfruit?” I asked, and closed the door on her again.

  Moments later I’d dug Scott’s old bathrobe out of the closet and given it to Nole. His hulking chest filled the robe to maximum capacity, so that his gleaming muscles still pulsed out above the place where it was tied at his midriff, but all things considered it fit well enough.

  The two of us sat with considerable distance between us on the couch, the room lit only by fire, and scored only by the steady sound of its pops and hisses.

  “Okay I changed my mind,” I said after a lengthy silence. “Tell me again that I’m not crazy...”