Have Yourself a Crazy Little Christmas by Megan Crane

Author:Megan Crane
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tule Publishing
Published: 2017-11-14T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Ten

Devyn did not excuse herself. She sat cross-legged on the floor while her grandparents talked back at their news programs, eating cheese and crackers her grandmother had imported from Montana by hand.

Grandma made time during the commercial breaks to say the kinds of things she always said. Grandpa responded to all attacks and asides the way he always did.

And it wasn’t until Devyn was swaddled in her winter clothes once again and headed back out into the snow that she realized she finally—finally—felt filled with the Christmas spirit.

Apparently, all it took was her grandmother’s caustic tongue and a meal she never would have eaten if left to her own devices.

Her grandparents’ hotel was only a few blocks from Jackson’s center square, so Devyn decided to walk. The December night was thick and dark, with faint snow flurries here and there as she picked her way down the center of the snow-packed streets, only moving over to the side when the headlights of oncoming cars tracked over her every now and again.

It was quiet. Hushed save her breathing in the frigid night.

When she made her way out of the dark side streets and straight on into the center of Jackson Hole, the lights seemed to dance as she moved. Bright. Happy. Merry, the way they should be at this time of year. There were clumps of people making their way around the square, up on the wooden sidewalks and out in the snowy streets, just as she was. Laughing groups moved in and out of this restaurant or that bar.

Devyn could feel the cold on the part of her face that was left unprotected. And ice formed where she breathed into her scarf.

The iconic arches made entirely of antlers, with one that read Jackson Hole, WY in case she didn’t know where she was, shone out there in the December dark. And she felt entirely too many things deep inside of her. The pull of the circus, the sweet madness that was her family, that she pretended not to love when she was locked in her hermetically sealed Chicago life. Because she was the cousin who liked order. She was the one who insisted on control after a childhood of being buffeted here and there by Melody’s latest whims.

Or do you only think you like those things? that voice inside her asked. Because claiming them as integral to who you are is the only way you can prove you’re nothing like your mother?

She could see her breath, leaving her in a great cloud, out there on the dark streets lit up all around by the shops and restaurants. The streetlamps. All the happy, jolly people. She could see her breath, and she could feel it, as if she was releasing something she hadn’t known she’d been holding tightly to, deep inside.

Because the truth was, Devyn was as much Melody’s as she was anyone else’s. She was a Grey. Messy and imperfect through and through, no matter how much she pretended otherwise when she was off living her solitary life away from the rest of them.

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