They invite their friends on a romantic vacation

SHANE

We got our Christmas miracle the very next day.

After I got back from lunch, my boss took me into his office, closed the door, and said, “Shane, I’ve been thinking—I don’t know if you and the Missus have got anything special planned for your first anniversary this year, but if you’re interested, you’d be more than welcome to spend the week at my cabin in the Sierras.”

I was shocked. He and I had always gotten along well enough, but we weren’t exactly buddies. His offer came completely out of the blue.

“Really?” I asked. “You wouldn’t mind?”

“Not at all. Turns out, I’m gonna be spending the holidays with my sister’s family in Utah this year, so we wouldn’t even miss it. Shame to let the place go to waste, it’s got a beautiful view of the mountains.”

I hugged him like he was Santa Claus, and didn’t let go until he whispered that I was making him uncomfortable.

Maybe that sounds like an over-reaction on my part, so let me explain why this was such a big deal:

A few hundred years ago, the closest most Europeans could ever get to seeing a lion or an elephant was in a painting of one. Sure, they knew that both these animals were real, but that didn’t change the fact that, deep down, the creatures they saw in those paintings must have seemed every bit as impossible and extraordinary as a dragon or a unicorn.

That’s how I felt about snow.

Growing up in the arid, desert wasteland of Southern California, I had never once in my life enjoyed a white Christmas. Hell, I’d only ever been someplace with actual snow on two occasions, both before I entered Kindergarten. There’s a photograph my parents took when I was three—all of us building a snowman together somewhere near Tahoe—and I look like the happiest kid on the planet. But it was so long ago, I have no memory of it actually happening.

So, when my boss offered to let Ria and I spend Christmas at his place in the Sierra Nevadas, it was a minor dream come true. And, because December 25th fell fortuitously on a Tuesday, Ria and I only had to use up a few of our days off to arrange an entire week of vacation up in the mountains.

But we didn’t intend to spend the holidays alone.

It didn’t take a psychology degree to see that Connor and Tracy were each miserable without each other—floundering about from one meaningless fling to the next. They were my best friends, and I was onto their bullshit. Deep down, they both equated the idea of a committed relationship with “getting old” or something—so as they approached their thirtieth birthdays with rising terror, they fought back harder and harder against the idea of settling down. Tracy deliberately dated assholes, Connor deliberately dated bimbos, and they both stayed the hell away from any member of the opposite sex who could actually make them happy.

Specifically, each other.

Hence: “Operation White Christmas.” It was the code name for the plan Ria and I cooked up to get Connor and Tracy back together.

Step 1 was to remind them what they’d been missing. Ria and I agreed that the simplest way to accomplish this was to take advantage of the utterly ridiculous sex appeal they both had. After all, regardless of how confused Connor and Tracy may have been about emotions, the raw animal magnetism they felt for each other was hard-wired into their body chemistry. That shit was never gonna go away.

To this end, Ria and I posted a few carefully selected photos on our Facebook accounts. The pictures that I put up on my page were all from an afternoon I had spent hiking with Connor—and as a result, his muscular physique was prominently featured in almost every shot. Meanwhile, the photos Ria posted were from a night she’d spent out on the town with Tracy—so most of the images showcased Tracy’s tall, busty body squeezed into a tight, sexy dress.

The result, we hoped, was that Tracy and Connor would both be getting an eyeful of each other every single time they logged onto their computers.

Step 2 was a little more complicated: getting the two of them in a room together. After all the awkwardness that had built up over the past year, it was impossible just talking to them about each other. They’d invariably act disinterested and change the subject.

But luckily, thanks to my boss’s cabin, we finally had a way to trap them in the same place at the same time, with no hope of escape.

Muahaha.

“Are you sure you want me there?” Tracy asked, leaning into my cubicle so as not to distract the other people working around us. “I mean, it sounds amazing, but are you sure that you and Ria wouldn’t be happier spending your anniversary alone up there? As in, just the two of you? Fucking like rabbits?”

I laughed and shook my head. “Nice as that sounds, no. We actually want to spend our Christmas this year doing Christmas stuff. Decorate a tree, hang stockings, eggnog, all that stuff. And it wouldn’t be the same without you there with us.”

“Okay, okay, if you insist! Just promise me, whenever the two of you decide you want to get intimate with each other, you’re just gonna go for it. No worrying about leaving me all alone when you run into the bedroom, no worrying about being all lovey-dovey in front of me just because I’m single—I don’t want to get in the way of you two having some romantic time on your anniversary.”

“Tracy, I promise that won’t happen.”

With a squeal of delight, she gave me a quick hug around the neck and turned back to her work station.

As always, I inwardly groaned at the view of Tracy’s magnificent boobs in that fuzzy pink sweater. My wife was built specifically for swimsuit season—tight ass, perky tits, bronze skin—but Tracy was at her sexiest in the winter. Those more-than-ample curves and that sweet, wholesome smile made her exactly the sort of girl you wanted to cuddle up with in front of the fireplace on a cold night. Preferably, without any clothes.

I reluctantly banished the thought from my head. What had happened between Tracy and me on the night of my bachelor party was a one-time deal. We’d all agreed, hadn’t we? At first, I’d secretly hoped that she and I would get plenty more opportunities to fool around in the future—after all, we’d already crossed so many sexual boundaries, it didn’t seem that far out of the realm of possibility. But when Tracy and Connor broke up, the situation changed. It had been one thing for Ria and me to screw around with our friends when they’d been in a committed relationship of their own—the fact that we were all essentially “swapping” somehow made everything seem fair. Quid pro quo. Nobody was left out. Nobody got hurt.

But the idea of getting intimate again with Tracy, now that she was single, felt a lot more like cheating. Not that I wasn’t sorely tempted sometimes.

“And you’re sure Connor’s not coming?” she asked, bringing me back to reality.