My Holiday Love by Reba Bale

Author:Reba Bale
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Christmas romance, friends to lovers, friends with benefits, holiday romance, midlife romance
Publisher: Reba Bale
Published: 2022-12-11T00:00:00+00:00

Ashley

“You don’t like it?” I asked in alarm. “We can totally take that back to the store and get you something else.”

“No,” Hannah sniffed, hugging the ‘bed in a bag’ set to her chest like she thought I’d take it away from her. “I love it, really. I love it so much.”

“I don’t understand. No judgement or anything, but I noticed you were using a sleeping bag instead of sheets, so I figured She-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named swiped your sheets and blankets when she took off.”

Hannah unzipped the plastic bag, removing the blue sheets and pillowcases and the multicolored geometric patterned comforter. When I’d seen it, the color of the sheets reminded me of her hair.

“I’ve just, well, I’ve never had new sheets or a new comforter. When you’re in foster care you get all the hand-me-downs.”

Her voice as small and sad, making me frown.

“You’re thirty-five years old. You’ve been out of foster care for what, seventeen years? What have you been doing for sheets since then?”

“I usually get them from the Goodwill or garage sales.”

I flashed back to the day she’d told me that she’d gotten a new bed from a neighbor who was moving out and planning to put the bed in the dumpster. She’d probably still be sleeping on that air mattress if the guy hadn’t tossed his old bed.

Suddenly I was annoyed with my friend. I’d already noticed her penchant for thrift store shopping and dumpster diving, but now I was realizing that her desire to save money had more to do with self-esteem than budgeting.

“Hannah!” I said sternly. “Just because you had nothing when you were a kid doesn’t mean you have to act like that now. You’re stuck in a scarcity mindset, like you think you can’t have anything nice, or you don’t deserve it or something. I got that bed in a bag for sixty-nine ninety-nine at Macy’s. I’m pretty sure you could have spent seventy bucks on yourself at some point in your adult life, you spend more than that dying your hair. You’ve been living here for six or seven weeks now, working, making tips, and you couldn’t even pick up some nineteen ninety-nine sheets from a department store or something? Stop living like you have nothing, damn it!”

Her mouth dropped open in shock, but I wasn’t sure if it was because my words were striking a chord or because she’d never seen me angry before. And I was angry. Hannah was so kind and generous to everyone – everyone except herself. No wonder her previous girlfriends had walked all over her. She didn’t believe she deserved better, and neither did they.

When I stopped ranting she stared at me for what felt like an hour before she said, “Are you done?”

“Yeah.”

“You look really hot when you’re angry. I’ve decided that I want to put these fancy new sheets on my bed and spend the rest of the day, as you so eloquently suggested earlier, banging it out and getting each other out of our systems.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.