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The venue was booked, the party decorations hung off the walls, the Christmas playlists ready for the playing. And at home, Carol had finally picked out her outfit. Therese even offered to wear an outfit that matched with hers, a cheesy little gesture that had Carol delighted for a good portion of that week. After some putting-together and making calls at the right time, all that needed to be done was wait for tomorrow night. She’d been preparing this party for a week and then some, picking out guests and sending out invites—hand-crafted, of course—as she went.
“You think it’ll go well?” Carol asked, turning to Abby.
Abby shrugged, though a silly grin was resting on her lips. “What’re you worrying about? It’s just a stupid Christmas party, babe. It could be just you, me and Therese and we’d still find a way to fuck shit up.” Abby had a point in saying that, but Carol couldn’t restrain the exhausted sigh that came from her lips. Abby paused for a moment, then began cautiously, “If you’re still really worried, go home. I’ll fix the place up a lil’ more. I gotta meet up with some girls in two hours anyways.”
“You’re sure?”
It wasn’t necessarily that Carol didn’t trust Abby, but she usually jumped at the chance to remove herself from her party schemes. She claimed that the social setting pressured her into oblivion, that she people did all this fussing and mussing, and for what?
“Relax. Besides, it’s payback for the time I ruined that coat. Call this my act of goodwill for the entire year.” Abby cracked a grin and Carol sighed. She had loved that coat dearly so, and the murky water stains never quite washed out the right way. Abby apologized for maybe about a day afterwards, because she definitely hadn’t seen how jostling Carol around like they were children could possibly be a bad thing. Especially not after Carol pointed out that she was in high heels and Abby was in moccasins and oh dear, Carol fell smack dab into a puddle of mud.
So, fine. She would accept the peace offering, with caution.
“Alright, I’ll meet you here tomorrow.”
In hindsight, Carol should have known that something was up when Abby said she was staying behind.
It wasn’t about the coat, of course, because Abby had found it kind of funny anyway. Abby was just that kind of asshole (the sort of asshole that Carol had learned to love and adore over the years, through all her phases and character changes), but she was just a loveable asshole at heart.
And Abby was the exact kind of asshole who would come to party venue in the dead of night just to plaster mistletoe over every surface imaginable.
Plaster mistletoe in an area, at a party, where most (if not all) of the guests already knew of Carol’s orientation, if not about Therese at her side. Speaking of Therese, that was an issue as well, because she knew full well how much Therese enjoyed displaying her affection for Carol in places deemed safe for the both of them. “Oh my God,” Carol breathed out in half-exasperation and half-disbelief.
Therese stared around the room, and though she may have commented on the interior design (as she knew more than anyone else Carol’s passion for this kind of thing), she ended up giggling instead. “My, Carol. Isn’t this a little overkill? Matching outfits, being very peculiar with our guests, and now this?”
“It was Abby’s idea,” Carol pointed out defensively. “God, I don’t even know what the correlation between mistletoe and kissing is, of all damn things. At Christmas, no less!”
“It’s bad luck to refuse the kiss if you’re standing under the mistletoe,” Therese explained, though it was less an explanation than it was simply her supplementing knowledge. Carol bit her bottom lip. Perhaps she was being a stickler for nothing. A fair statement to make. And you could also make a case that Abby knew Carol well enough to know that this was the exact kind of reaction she was going to get.
“Considering how my week’s been going so far, I hardly think that any more bad luck is actually going to do me any harm.”
Therese rolled her eyes and leaned up on Carol’s shoulder, her eyes continuing to look around the room. “Aren’t you being a little dramatic?” Therese didn’t wait for a response (and it was not like Carol was going to grace that with a response anyways) before making a kissy noise at Carol. “You’re literally standing in a room filled with mistletoe, gimme a kiss.”
Carol hesitated for a moment. If there was a time for Therese to be hounding her about kisses, it would be now, when there wasn’t a single guest in sight. Better now rather than later, when Carol decided to stop greeting guests, only to turn around and have Therese puckering up expectantly.
It wasn’t like she was ashamed of Therese. But considering the situation with Rindy and her so-called ‘predisposition’ to the same sex, Carol couldn’t help but to be the tiniest bit weary. Therese knew this too, but she was younger, more daring. It didn’t help that she sought out Carol’s reactions and found them cute. Carol relented. “One kiss.”
Of course, Therese would comply to just ‘one kiss’, but it was not the chaste peck on the lips that Carol half-expected (a flat-nosed lie, she hadn’t expected anything less from her darling Therese Belivet). It was long, deep, and held far too much passion for only five seconds (or ten seconds, or whatever it had been because Carol wasn’t counting and was too occupied with how much she loved the feel of Therese to care). Carol would afford this tiny bit of silliness too, because she would be lying if she said she didn’t crave the kind of stupid Holiday passion she’d never had with anyone else.
Her train of thought is broken off when the sound of doors opening in the distance resonates through the building and Carol can hear someone singing the lines to Deck the Halls, both loudly and off-key in way that only Abby could. Abby was also the only person she knew who would only sing the line ‘don we now our gay apparel’ and then supplement the other lines with various patterns of ‘fa la la’. She was ridiculous in the best of ways. “Looks like that’s our woman of the hour.”
“You’re going to kill her?” Therese asked with a small smirk, wiping at the lipstick stain she’d unknowingly created with her thumb. Carol watched for a moment, then let out a sigh.
“I’m going to kill her,” Carol confirmed.