Good Elf Gone Wrong: A Holiday Romantic Comedy

“So what the hell was that?” Dakota asked when I answered the phone the next morning.

I was making biscuits, so many biscuits, enough to feed an army. I had, on a whim, asked Dakota if she could talk, but since this was the Christmas season of me making terrible decisions, I realized belatedly that I should have just chosen an audiobook.

“I take it that my assumptions were correct and Bella and Violet were, in fact, live streaming the holiday party,” I said with a sigh.

“You mean live streaming the preamble to a porno.”

“What the—”

“God!” Dakota fanned herself. “That was so fucking hot. Where did you even find him?”

I looked around furtively.

It was early in the morning. I didn’t hear anyone else in the historic house. I almost typed in the words in the chat then remembered what Hudson had said.

Nothing in writing.

I lowered my voice, cupping my hand around the phone receiver.

“I hired him.”

“He’s an actor?”

“I think he just needs the money. He works as a custodian.”

“I didn’t know they made custodians that hot.”

“Keep your voice down.”

“Oh my god, his eyes as he talked about taming you.” Dakota swooned.

I ground my teeth in annoyance.

“It wasn’t hot. It was demeaning.”

“I mean yeah, sure. But a guy like that you don’t want to do missionary with. You want hair pulling and dirty talk and getting fucked in his truck. I practically squirted when he said that. Also,” she snickered, “Kelly is so jelly!”

“I can’t even … This is … Argh! He’s so … so …”

“Alpha? Assertive. Cocky. Rough?” Dakota was practically drooling.

“Male.”

“That too,” Dakota purred.

She motioned me closer to the screen and whispered, “Does this arrangement come with conjugal visits?”

“Gosh no.”

“Boo.”

The ancient house creaked as my family woke up.

“Got to go.”

I hated Hudson and hated even more that apparently he was right. Women were falling all over themselves, panties raining from the sky, just because he had said he liked fucking a woman doggy style in the back of his pickup truck.

I angrily cut the ice-cold butter into the flour.

Not me. I did not like bad boys. I wanted a grown man with a dad bod and a 401(k). I didn’t do adventurous sex, and I didn’t do relationship drama. Finding James screwing my sister under the Christmas tree notwithstanding, the most drama I’d had in any relationship ever was this fake one with Hudson blowing in like a winter storm, riling everyone up, being all possessive alpha male and talking down to me and mansplaining what women actually want. Which apparently is being called a slut while a hot guy fucks their brains out.

I cursed as I realized I was overworking the biscuit dough. I hoped it would still rise. I put it in the fridge to chill it out.

I needed to chill out.

Hiring Hudson was a mistake. I should have told him right then and there when he had followed me outside last night that the deal was off, and he could kindly take his big dick energy, his motorcycle, and himself on out of my life.

“You always let yourself get bossed around,” I scolded myself as I started forming the sausage patties. Now I was angry and out of sorts. Nat King Cole blared from the stereo. I flipped the station to punk rock.

“Honestly, Gracie. It’s December. Let me have my Christmas carols,” my mother insisted, coming into the kitchen and flipping the radio back. “First, that man that you scraped up out of the trash and brought home, and now rock music.”

“Someone get the smelling salts.” I set the cast-iron skillet on the stove.

“And that attitude.”

I gritted my teeth as I stacked neat round sausage patties on a plate.

“All of Hudson’s big dick energy is rubbing off on her,” my cousin Bella said with a giggle, coming into the kitchen and pouring out the last of the coffee.

“Pot’s empty, Gracie,” she said.

“I’ll make some more in a minute.” Then added, “Or you could.”

“I’ll wait.”

“We can talk about your new man,” her sister Violet said, hopping up on a stool.

“Hubba-hubba!”

“I’m so jealous.”

“He is literally sex on a stick.”

“He’s not good for her,” my mother scolded her nieces. “I need you two to back me up here.”

My cousins just giggled.

“I’m one hundred percent team Hudson.”

Kelly was wearing a robe that had Bride embroidered on the back in pink and gold letters, made with toxic positivity by her only sister.

My mother had always insisted that a woman be fully dressed when not in her bedroom. I had always followed the rules. My sister had not. Therefore she got to run around in a robe while my mother still acted like the biggest scandal last Christmas was not that Kelly had been caught with my fiancé but that I had been downstairs in my pajamas.

Kelly scoffed. “I just can’t believe that he’s actually her boyfriend.”

Violet giggled. “He did say they weren’t dating. He was just f—” My mother gave her a dirty look.

“They were just getting it on.”

“In the back of his truck,” Belle added, and she and her sister erupted in more giggles.

“Gracie?” Kelly gave me an assessing look. “I don’t believe it. I bet he’s some street person you gave twenty bucks to, to try to get him to show up and ruin my big moment. Right, James?” she called to my ex, who was grabbing orange juice out of the fridge.

More of my cousins had wandered into the kitchen, unable to resist the siren call of drama.

“Do you want any help?” Connie asked sweetly.

Sure. I needed help three hours ago when I started cooking.

“Nah, I’ve got it.”

“Hudson didn’t smell like a street person,” Bella said, wrinkling her nose.

“He smelled divine,” Violet swooned.

You don’t care that they’re talking about him like he’s a piece of fried chicken. You don’t even like Hudson, I reminded myself as I heated up the big cast-iron skillet on the stove.

“Prove it,” my sister demanded. “Prove that you actually are sleeping with him.”

“What do you want her to do? Throw down a used condom?” Connie asked, rolling her eyes.

“Text him.”

Just tell them you broke up.

If having Hudson tell everyone fake stories about having sex with me in his car was bad, if everyone in my family thought I had paid for a fake boyfriend to steal my sister’s spotlight, I would really never live it down.

I wiped my hands on my apron and pulled out my phone.

Gracie: Hey Hudson, my cousins don’t believe the story about the truck.

I waited, unsure if he was going to text back. This might be against the rules, or it could be counted as part of the scam.

A scam that you need to end.

I didn’t have the stomach for it. It hadn’t even been twenty-four hours, and I was spent.

Hudson: I’m still cleaning the back seat. You squirted everywhere.

“Oh my gawd!” Violet crowed.

“How do we know it’s him?” Kelly said with a scowl.

“Even if it is him,” James said, “Hudson could just be a liar. Where does he live, Gracie? Where does he work? What kind of car does he drive?”

“He drives a Ford F-150,” I said because that was the only brand of manly car that I knew.

“What year?”

“I don’t know.”

“What does it look like?” James demanded.

“It’s green.”

“Hudson has a green car?” Connie said in disbelief.

“It’s a dark forest green,” I backtracked. “Almost gray.”

I was sweating. Did they make trucks that color? Who knew?

“What does the front look like?” James insisted, drawing the attention of my uncles who had wandered into the kitchen, drawn by the smell of biscuits and sausage.

“Did it have a big grille like this?” Uncle Eddie asked, miming with his hand. “Was the center console sort of swoopy shaped?”

I nodded. “Sure.”

“It’s the limited edition 2018,” he said confidently.

“Sounds right,” I said weakly, feeling like I was digging a hole for myself that was also quickly filling with water.

My mom handed Uncle Eddie an apple and sent him on his way.

“Breakfast will be ready soon.”

“I think she’s making this whole thing up. Gracie could just be texting with a chatbot or something,” my sister declared.

Gracie: They want photographic evidence it’s you.

Hudson: …

My phone dinged with an incoming photo.

“Oh my lord,” I said as the photo finished downloading. Wasn’t it illegal to send photos like that?

It was … well it wasn’t almost porn. It was literally porn.

The photo was of Hudson, nude. I mean, I assumed it was. I hadn’t seen him naked, but there was what looked like a military tattoo of a sigil with Latin script on the right side of his washboard abs, partially covered by his hands that were grasping the biggest, thickest cock I had ever seen.

Not that I watched porn, but even if I had, I doubted anything on Pornhub would match that weapon in Hudson’s hands.

And this is why I needed to call it off.

Connie grabbed the phone and immediately started screaming.

Was it too early for a drink? Didn’t 1950s housewives start drinking at like nine in the morning?

“I see why you had to parade him around,” Granny Murray said, taking the phone and making an appreciative noise. “If you need a sex pad, you just let me know, girlie. I’ll clear out of the in-law suite.”

Violet and Bella screeched, holding on to each other and jumping around.

“What in the world?” their mother said as she and my other aunts rushed into the kitchen.

The phone was passed around. Appreciative noises were made.

“Kelly, are you so envious?” Connie teased my sister.

She snatched the phone.

“Is James that big?” Aunt Sandy asked me.

My mom glared at her sister-in-law, who shrugged with a smirk.

“She’s the only one who knows.”

James gave me an ugly look.

This was out of control. Completely out of control.

“And to think Kelly was bragging about James’s American Express Black Card.” Violet snorted.

Did she mean the company card? That I’d been on the phone for months trying to get from him? Sure. Okay.

“Can you text this to me?” my cousin begged.

“No.”

“Text it to me. I’m the one who just got rid of my cheating ball and chain,” Granny Murray declared.

“If you keep phrasing it like that, people will think you killed that poor man,” Granny Astelle harrumphed, her cane dragging on the floor as she stomped into the kitchen, which apparently was no longer my safe space.

“I wish I had,” Granny Murray stated.

“Do you want to see it, Grandma Astelle?” Connie asked as the elderly woman, hair perfectly coifed, slowly made her way to a chair at the kitchen table.

Astelle stared down her nose at the phone.

Connie gulped and handed it back to me.

She stomped her cane on the tile floor.

“This is absurd. Where is my son? Bethany, you need to control your daughter. One expects this type of behavior from lesser members of society, not from my granddaughters. You’re better than this, Gracie. And you wanted to wear my mother’s dress. She’s rolling over in her grave right now.”

I felt sick and ashamed.

“I’m almost glad Kelly destroyed it, if it was going to someone who’s receiving lewd photos from a man who refused to officially court her.”

Grandma Astelle was right. I was better than this.

And it ended now.