Good Elf Gone Wrong: A Holiday Romantic Comedy

What if she didn’t have the laptop?

She always has the laptop. Gracie’s paranoid. She’s not leaving it in her parents’ house with her sister.

Stay calm.

It was a struggle to maintain my composure as Gracie poked around one of the boxes and bags she’d brought with her.

She beamed at me and pulled out her computer. “Don’t worry. I came prepared.”

I tried not to laugh from relief.

Thank fucking god she has the laptop.

“I have downloaded a list of heavy metal Christmas songs. Thought that might be more your jam,” she said as she went through the excessive password unlock sequence.

The music app loaded on the screen, and hard rock Christmas carols blared through the speakers.

Step one down.

“Keep an open mind. You might discover you like Christmas after all,” she teased.

“I think your outfit is doing the heavy lifting on that one.”

I opened a bottle of wine and handed her a glass.

“Merry Christmas!” She toasted me.

I set my glass down and leaned in to taste the wine on her mouth, my hands slipping up her thighs.

“Merry Christmas to me,” I replied as I trailed my fingertips up her bare thigh.

“You make it sound so dirty,” she said, giggling into the wineglass.

After kissing me again, she went back to her bags and pulled out a box of Christmas-tree lights. She handed me the end of the strand, and I helped slowly wind it around the tree.

If I weren’t about to steal the data off her laptop, it would almost be like we were a real couple.

“Now some ornaments,” she said, grabbing a box. “Don’t worry. We’re not going all out. This will be a super-minimalist tree with just some glass ornaments.”

She held the box out to me. “Come over here Mr. Tall Person. You can do the star.”

I approached her as she sat under the tree, a perfect Christmas card, and accepted the ornaments.

Then I let out a heavy sigh as I stared down at them.

In a horrible twist of fate, they did look like the ones on the last Christmas tree my family ever had.

“I actually—we did use to celebrate Christmas, before it all went to shit,” I remarked as I opened up the box. “Huh. Funny, I had forgotten about these.”

“What were your holiday traditions?” she asked softly.

The memories resurfaced.

“My brothers and I would always wait up for Santa,” I said, staring out the large industrial steel windows. “My dad loved Christmas—he liked to spend a bunch of money, buy us anything we wanted even though we couldn’t afford it. He just loved the magic. Always went all out.” Then he and my mom would fight, but Gracie didn’t need to know that. “Anyway, we would use these ornaments. They were my mom’s favorite.”

“It’s fate.” Gracie was smiling, big and happy.

“Yeah. Fate.”

I hung an ornament on the tree. It glittered in the low light.

“I actually,” I said casually, like I’d just thought of it, “have some videos of me and my family from Christmas, if you wanted to see them. My brother’s been dubbing over old home movies.”

“I’d love to,” she said softly.

The external hard drive was sitting in the kitchen counter waiting. Last night at the headquarters, I’d paced around while Talbot configured it and loaded the Trojan program on that would steal all of Gracie’s data.

She took it from me and plugged it into her laptop.

I had spent hours carefully selecting a clip, the perfect thing to entice her to put her password in the computer so that the program could steal it and run the data scraper.

“Oh,” I said as the message popped up that administrator permission needed to be granted. “Never mind. It doesn’t like my hard drive. I think the video is a weird format. It was copied over from one of those old video recorders. Don’t ask me how—my younger brother Talbot is the tech wiz in the family. I’ll have him look at it later.”

I saw her wavering, saw part of her thinking.

I picked up my wineglass, took a swallow.

Gracie mimicked the gesture.

I reached for the hard drive.

“I do want to see you as a kid,” she relented.

Yes.

“Now I don’t know if I want you to see it,” I said wryly. I put my hand on the hard drive. “It was just some dumb video of me and my brothers when we were little. We’re cutting a Christmas tree.”

Gracie slapped at my hand.

“You’re not going to keep me from seeing little Hudson!” She grinned as she typed the password.

ARE YOU SURE YOU WANT TO CONTINUE? the program asked.

She hit Yes then verified her identity, fingerprint, face recognition.

I could barely breathe as the video played, disguising the program in the background that was unpacking.

“Aww!” Gracie clasped her hands together as the video started.

There was my father and my mother, arm in arm, maybe the last time they were happy together.

It had been emotionally brutal, sifting through all the old home movies, remembering when things were good, and with the benefit of hindsight, finding clues of the oncoming disaster.

“Don’t drop Elsa,” my dad called as my brothers and I trooped through the rows of snow-covered Christmas trees.

“Sleigh bells ring …” my mother sang out.

Anderson’s face appeared briefly in the camera.

“I want a dinosaur for Christmas,” he said solemnly. “Hudson, what do you want Santa to bring you?”

“Hmm.” The younger version of myself considered it.

“You’re so serious,” Gracie said softly, taking my hand.

“I think new hockey skates,” younger me said.

“Elsa, what do you want?” Jake yelled, jumping around me as I held my baby sister.

She burbled.

“I think she want a dinosaur too.” Lawrence grinned at the camera.

“We need to get this tree,” Talbot called, toddling over to a nearby fir.

“No,” younger me said, pointing. “That one. That’s the best tree.”

“Bring ’er down, boys!” my dad whooped.

“They’re little children.” My mom swatted him playfully while my dad laughed and kissed her.

God, what happened to you two?

My mother took Elsa and the camera while my brothers and I took turns with a saw, bringing down the dark-green tree. All five of us had a go, though I finished it off.

“Say merry Christmas!” my mom called from behind the camera.

“Merry Christmas!” we all chorused.

“That was so sweet!” Gracie clapped her hands then kissed me. “We’re going to find that Christmas spirit that’s been hiding inside of you.”

“You’re all I want for Christmas,” I said, grabbing her jaw and forcing her face to me so she wouldn’t notice the scraping program running on her laptop.

Smoothly I plucked the wineglass out of her hand and pushed her back against the couch, turning her around so she was face down.

“Remember how,” I said, sliding the short little green skirt up her bare thighs, “you told me when my tongue was on your clit that you wanted me to tie you up and fuck you raw?”

I heard her gasp a yes.

I mouthed her through the panties, a red lacy thong that was made slightly less sexy by the addition of smiling, fat, happy snowflakes.

“You have a Christmas addiction,” I told her, raising my head.

“No.” Her voice sounded slightly muffled. “I have a you addiction.”

“I haven’t even given you the holiday special.”

“Someone’s been holding back.” She raised her head slightly up off of the couch pillows.

“I think your Grandmother Astelle would have a heart attack and die if she saw me doing to you what I want to do to you.”

“Granny Murray’s going to be sorry you wasted all that effort.” She smirked then moaned as I mouthed her through the panties.

“So is that a yes?” I breathed.

“I’m not sure what I’m agreeing to.”

I grabbed her ass in both hands, kneading it.

“I told you I’m going to tie you up and fuck you raw. Or is that not your fantasy?”

“Um … It’s actually more of my grandmother’s?”

I glanced over at the laptop. The status bar in the corner was at 5 percent.

Fuck.

“It was from a book she gave me. I actually really sanitized it for you.”

“I don’t want anything sanitized,” I told her, sneaking my hands under the crop top to cup her breasts.

“So there was this alien with all these tentacles …”

“Christ help me.”

She giggled.

“As long as you’re not sprouting tentacles, I’m game.”

“Famous last words.”

Her eyes were dark with anticipation. “You know, I love a holiday exclusive.”

I picked her up and carried her to the other side of the room.

I’d tested various vantage points, wanting to make sure there was no way Gracie could see what I was doing to her laptop.

Then I reached up and pulled down the handcuffs I’d already attached to the steel beam in the ceiling of the loft.

Gracie shivered under my hand.

“They’re Christmas themed.” I waved one of the handcuffs that had silk green-and-red-striped padding on it.

She seemed slightly apprehensive.

“Handcuffs?”

“Don’t worry. I’ll let you order me around after this if you let me make all of your fantasies come true. You just tell me when you’re good and fucked, and I’ll let you down. Swear on my honor.”

I kissed her, my tongue slipping into her mouth, kissed her until she was breathless and half collapsed on me.

Then I stepped back.

Her eyes were glazed with desire.

Slowly, she held up her arms.

The handcuffs fastened around her wrists with a metallic click.