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Felix glowered at the overly-enthusiastic holiday decorations in the window of the boutique on the quiet side street. A Christmas tree decorated in homemade ornaments all made of cloth, paper, and glitter stood surrounded by three mannequins wrapped in holiday apparel appearing ready to open the presents that spilled out from under it.
Felix sniffed disdainfully. If it wasn’t for that office party and that stupid game of Truth or Dare - “Seriously! What are we? Thirteen?!” - he wouldn’t even be in this predicament.
“I learned my lesson already. Champagne and dares don’t mix,” he grumbled mentally. “Shouldn’t participating in that stupid game be enough of a stain on my record without having to go through with this nonsense?”
But apparently, it wasn’t - not according to one Alix Kubdel. The scrappy efficiency expert had given him a dare that everyone would know if he failed to fulfill his side of the bargain.
Thus he stood outside The Knitting Fairy looking for, of all things… an ugly Christmas sweater. With a shudder at the very thought, Felix went inside.
The soft jingling of sleigh bells greeted him from above the door. Not the fake kind the plebeian masses wore around their necks, but the real kind used on horse drawn sleighs. The realism appealed to him.
“Welcome and Merry Christmas!” a sweet, female voice called from somewhere amidst the racks of clothes. “I’ll be out in a moment. Just holler if you need anything!”
“I don’t think I’ve ever ‘hollered’ in my life,” Felix thought with some amusement. “I’m not ever sure I would know how even if I wanted to.”
The store was, thankfully, free of the canned Christmas music that permeated the environs of every shopping facility in Felix’s experience. Instead, a calm selection of classical seemed to be the preferred choice - that is if Brahms Waltz in A Minor was any indication.
The walls were a soft gray and the shelving units were white, acting as a harmonious backdrop to the collection of clothes folded or hung neatly around the space. Everything in here was knit or tatted or crocheted with the finest attention to detail.
“Nothing here looks worthy of the name ugly,” he mumbled, shuffling through the racks of hanging sweaters nearest him. “I wonder why Kubdel sent me here?”
“Can I help you with anything?” A face peered at him through a gap in the clothes he had just been looking at. Raven hair pulled up in a bun, cheerful blue eyes, a mouth made for smiles - just as she was doing right then. Felix started a bit. It wasn’t his fault he was unaccustomed to faces popping out at him like something out of Alice and Wonderland.
“I doubt it,” he replied. “A colleague sent me here to find…”
Stepping out from behind the clothing rack, the pretty sales clerk tipped her head to one side questioningly. “To find…?”
Felix huffed in annoyance. “A Christmas sweater. I lost a bet and now I need to wear an ugly Christmas sweater to work.”
She was dressed to match her employment in a soft, boatneck sweater with three quarter sleeves in a pale pink chenille paired with a charcoal gray pleated skirt. Those rosy lips twitched as if trying to hide her amusement. “I wonder why she bothers. Everything she feels just pops up on her face!”
“And… I presume that you are only going along with this to save face?” she drawled, eyes dancing.
“What else can I do? I can’t just have her announce me a coward, now can I?”
The clerk rolled her eyes. “Sure you can! Who cares what she thinks - or anyone else for that matter!”
Felix felt a rusty chuckle bubble up inside him. “I don’t. Not really, but it wouldn’t look good for a VP to bail on an office bet, Miss…”
“Marinette,” she said, offering her hand in the friendliest, most genuine shake he’d probably ever had. “The owner, designer, and all around knitting fairy.”
She tapped one of the sticks securing her bun and Felix saw that they were knitting needles.
“An… interesting name for a business, Miss Marinette,” he said, relishing the warmth of her fingers against his cold ones.
She shrugged. “It’s kind of an inside joke, really. When I was little I used to want to be the knitting fairy when I grew up. Silly, I know, but it’s better than the other option. An old friend of mine wanted me to name it Knits and Sensibilities.”
“Ugh! An assault against Austen’s brilliant work if ever there was one !”
“I know! That’s what I told him! So, I became the Knitting Fairy instead.”
She blushed and he couldn’t help finding it charming.
“Your childhood dream is no more silly than my own. I believe I wanted to be a swashbuckling pirate, exploring the high seas and looking for buried treasure. Imagine my disappointment when I found out that pirates buried their treasure instead of digging it up and that the only hidden loot was behind the doors of bank vaults and the stock exchange.”
Miss Marinette threw back her head and laughed, clutching her sides as she gave herself over to it. It wasn’t what you would call a ladylike giggle nor a bland, polite titter. No, this was a genuine belly laugh that rocked her from the inside out and Felix was shocked at his own reaction.
He had made her laugh! When was the last time he had made someone bust out laughing like that?
He couldn’t remember a single time.
“So, I have made a few of what you might call ugly sweaters,” Marinette hedged as she pointed across the shop to a set of shelves against the far wall. “However, I’m not sure what your colleague would say about it, though.”
“She was the one who sent me to you,” he pointed out. “And I believe her exact words were ‘The tackier the better, Mr Veep, or it doesn’t count.”
“This colleague wouldn’t have been named Alix, would she? About so high, a sneaky grin, and changes her hair color about once every two months?”
“You know her?”
Marinette nodded. “Went to school with her. She sounds as spunky as ever. Does she wear her skates around the office or has she been ticketed for violating speed limits indoors?”
For the second time in so many minutes, Felix found himself chuckling. “She is definitely spirited, so much so that I’m glad she is working for us instead of against us.”
“Well, if Alix sent you to me, then she was probably giving you an easy out. She knows I don’t do tacky unless that is what the customer wants and even then only under specific conditions.”
“Such as?”
“Halloween. Almost exclusively.”
Reaching the shelf, she flipped through several sweaters.
“I take it you want something that will pass muster but not become the stuff of office legend?”
“Does such a miraculous sweater exist?” he asked sarcastically.
She snorted softly. “Well, you are talking to the Knitting Fairy after all,” she said, pulling out one that seemed to satisfy her. “What about this?”
She held up a black chenille sweater with three rows of little knitted Christmas lights right around the chest. He rubbed the sweater against his fingers, marveling at its soft, velvety feel.
“This doesn’t qualify as an ugly sweater in my opinion,” he said. “It’s festive, but understated. I like the texture, though.”
“Okay. Not ugly enough, but chenille is a possible,” she mumbled to herself, setting the sweater aside. “What about this one?”
The dark emerald green with a pattern of golden fir trees again seemed too normal to be considered unattractive - even if it was brighter than he was comfortable with.
“Again, it is well executed and and festive, but I doubt it has the embarrassment factor Miss Kubdel is looking for,” he said. He glanced around the store. “To be honest, Miss Marinette, I am beginning to doubt that anything you have made would be an acceptable fulfillment of my foolish bet.”
She giggled. “I suppose I should take that as a compliment.”
He grinned at her. He wanted desperately to get her to laugh again. “It was meant as one. Perhaps we can find a work-around. An ugly vest perhaps? That way I can prove I have a vested interest in the outcome of the bet?”
Marinette snorted, hiding her mouth and button nose behind her hand as she held back her amusement. Felix didn’t know whether to be charmed or disappointed that she succeeded.
“Ugh! That was awful!” she declared, shaking her head but giving him a brilliant smile. “Do you think you should really be rocking puns around the Christmas tree?”
Felix felt an odd lightness in his chest as he watched her cheeks turn pink from suppressed laughter. “Wait a minute! I used an atrocious pun and… she liked it anyway? Enough for her to pun back?”
He ran his hands through his hair, the lightness inside turning into a swarm of butterflies. “You’re right. That pun was awful. I’m not sure what I was thinking. I apologize.”
“Aside from the fact that I wanted to make you laugh some more.”
“No. Don’t. I haven’t laughed so much in a long while. I needed that. Thank you.”
Then it was as if the solution hit her like a bolt of lightning, lighting her up from the inside out.
“Stay right here,” she commanded, grabbing his arms by the elbows as if pushing his long legs into the floor. “Don’t move and I’ll be right back.”
She disappeared in a swirl of gray pleats and pink chenille, leaving a suddenly flummoxed Felix in her wake. He stared after her, unable to slow the pleasant swirl of his thoughts as they revolved around this pretty girl.
“What happened to me?” he wondered. “I haven’t felt this way since… since Angelica Parks back in grade school. Was it really that long ago?”
But the warmth and attraction he felt towards this young woman was completely unlike the childish crush he had once treasured on his freckled and bespectacled grammar school classmate.
For the most part, he had passed through puberty unscathed in matters of the heart, but now he found himself growing warm under his great coat and a strange tugging sensation from his sternum as if he was anxious for her to step out of the back room and to his side once more.
“Ridiculous! Absolutely absurd! How could I feel such things for a woman I have only known less than a quarter of an hour?”
But, sure enough, when Marinette returned from the stock room, Felix felt his breathing ease and the smile inch back onto his face.
She held out a dark blue cashmere sweater with burgundy banding around the cuffs, hem, and collar, a large white outline of a reindeer rampant on the front.
“I know, it doesn’t look ‘ugly’ either, but if you come back tomorrow, It will be be enough to get Alix off your back without making you look like a nerd.”
Her voice was so confident and her eyes so bright and brilliant that Felix would have had to put up a fight with himself to resist her - a fight he wasn’t particularly in the mood to undertake.
“Are you sure?” he asked?
“Positive.” She winked at him and his heart started beating out a samba that clashed horribly with the violin solo that was now playing over the shop speakers. Rolling up on her toes, she tapped him on the nose lightly. “Trust me.”
He thought about it for the span of three very rapid heartbeats.
“Do you take check or credit?”
***
Felix returned from lunch the next day with his coat draped over one arm to show off the dark blue sweater with the large white reindeer underlined by the words ‘Sleighing it!’ in a glittering golden script.
Alix, who had been picking up her mail at reception, caught sight of him and whistled.
“Lookin’ good, Mr Veep,” she drawled. “Did you come up with that pun yourself or did you steal it from someone less funny than you?”
“Ha. Ha. It is to laugh,” he quipped, slinging his coat over his shoulder as he strolled past the little woman. “You set me up, Kubdel. That store had nothing that might be called ‘ugly’. The proprietress had to customize this sweater to meet my needs. You’re slipping in your mischief making.”
Unlike Marinette, Alix made no attempt to hide her unladylike snort. “That’s what you think, hot shot. Don’t you realize I would know Marinette better than you? Don’t you think I know she despises tackiness with every iota of her creative being?”
Felix stopped mid stride, turning back to see the woman smirking at him. “You played me to get your ‘friend’ to try something tacky?”
She shrugged, the smirk sliding into a full blown wicked grin. “Either that or I played her to get you to un-starch yourself for a day.”
“So which is it?”he asked, glowering at her.
“The real question is, does it really matter?” With that, she sauntered off, giving the impression that, despite her five foot one stature, she was ten feet tall.
Felix huffed in annoyance. He didn’t care anyway. He had, seemingly, beaten Kubdel at her own game, had an amusing - if not ugly - sweater for the holidays, and, most importantly, the personal number and the promise of coffee with his own knitting fairy.