Chapter Five

That was hands down the most accurate fortune cookie Wade had ever seen. Even if he didn’t count the two jaw-dropping things that had happened before he’d ever cracked the cookie open—stepping in as substitute Santa and meeting his fated mate—he was still having one hell of a week. One hell of a Monday , even.

He had buckled down for the post-lunch stretch of the workday and done his best to act jolly for that afternoon’s legion of kids. By the time five o’clock rolled around, he was exhausted. Even the most challenging woodworking was a breeze compared to being on for a non-stop crowd, especially when he knew that slipping up could ruin a kid’s Christmas. He knew every child stopped believing in Santa eventually, but he didn’t want it to be because of him.

But he wasn’t an actor. He wasn’t even usually that extroverted. It took a lot out of him to keep up that kind of performance for hours at a time.

And Petey hadn’t lied about how often kids liked to tug on the beard. Wade’s face hurt. Thank God Mira had encouraged him to really slather on the spirit glue.

Mira .

Even thinking of her made the whole world slow down. His whole frazzled spirit seemed to lift.

His polar bear had wanted to swipe a lazy paw at Marsh and bat him all the way across the food court for interrupting their lunch. But at least he was pretty sure it had been going well.

She was smart and funny, and she loved Christmas in Connecticut , and when she got excited, she lit up like a human sparkler, so bright and dazzling that he couldn’t believe everyone around her didn’t turn to stare.

Wade had wanted to ask her out at the end of their shift, but he’d still had a Santa beard gummed onto his face and he’d felt like his brain was on the verge of short-circuiting. He needed a little quiet and a good night’s sleep so he could give her the best, freshest version of himself. If he had tried to ask her on a date not ten minutes after a toddler had swiped a wet cherry sucker across his face, he would have fumbled it badly enough to become a Honey Brook legend.

Besides, Mira looked a little worn out too. Marsh had run her ragged all afternoon, keeping her on the hop by sending her from station to station.

“All I want right now is to go home and collapse on the couch,” she’d said, so he was taking her at her word.

Even if he couldn’t help thinking about how incredible it would be to collapse on the couch with her. He was so tired that he wasn’t even thinking about sex, just how much he would love to curl up with her, put his arm around her, and just be . She would still smell a little like gingerbread from her time at the bakery booth ....

Alas, he had to go home alone.

He spent an ungodly amount of time carefully peeling off his beard, making sure to stick it in a drawer afterwards. Fiona, his tuxedo cat, looked sweet and well-mannered, but she was magnetically drawn to anything Wade didn’t want her to mess with. He bought her countless toys, even ones infused with catnip, and she ignored them to spend her days batting around any personal treasures or necessities he hadn’t nailed down or locked up. He still hadn’t finished fishing all of his grandfather’s old baseball card collection out from under the bed, where she had knocked them on one particularly exuberant day. The bedframe was too low for him to reach under it by hand, so retrieving the cards had been a delicate and painstaking operation involving a fly-swatter. And even then, he was still down a few players that had to be lurking down there somewhere.

Fiona watched him close the beard in a drawer and gave him an imperious look.

“You mean do I really think that’s going to stop you?” Wade said. “I hope so. I’m not investing in a beard safe.”

He rubbed Fiona’s head, burrowing his fingers in behind her ears in the way she liked, and she arched into his hand and purred.

He would have to check to see if Mira liked cats. He had a hard time imagining that she wouldn’t. Even true mates could run into obstacles and conflicts, but surely none of them would be as grim and hard to resolve as “you have a beloved cat, and your true mate hates cats.” Fate would know to match one cat person up with another, just to keep it simple.

“Besides, nobody would ever not like you,” he told Fiona.

Her creaky purr said that she couldn’t agree more.

Fiona’s automated feeder would dispense her dinner in another minute or two, but Wade would have to make his own. His brain still felt too fried for anything remotely complicated, so he settled on breakfast for dinner and started fixing himself an easy omelet. He cued up Mira’s podcast episode on Christmas in Connecticut for company, but he barely got through her intro when his phone rang.

It was Petey.

“How’s Hawaii?” Wade said.

Petey laughed. It was the warm, hearty, easy laugh of a guy who had already sucked down a couple pi?a coladas. “Still that nice after your first day in the red suit? I was thinking you’d hang up on me. Seriously, Wade, I owe you one.”

“It turns out I owe you one too.” He would have liked to tell Petey all about Mira in person, but he couldn’t stand waiting until his brother came back from Hawaii. He had to tell somebody now . “You know Mira, the elf who’s stuck in the Galadriel costume?”

“Sure. She’s nice. I can’t believe Marsh is screwing her over like this.”

That almost got Wade sidetracked because yeah, he couldn’t believe it either. No one would care if Mira’s candy cane leggings had slightly thinner stripes than the elf’s next to her.

But that was beside the point right now.

“She’s my mate,” Wade said.

There was a muffled clatter on the other end of the line as Petey clearly dropped his phone. It was followed by a scrambled sound and then, “Are you serious?”

“Completely.”

Petey let out a whoop of pure joy that reminded Wade of why it was always worthwhile to cover for his little brother, even when Petey tended to get him into the occasional sticky situation. Petey was sweet , plain and simple.

“God, Wade, that’s amazing! Congratulations!”

Wade couldn’t stop grinning. “Thanks. Like I said, I owe you one. Or a thousand.”

Petey laughed again. “Well, you don’t have to play Santa a thousand times. Just until Christmas. But what was it like? Was it like the clouds parted and the sun shone down on her? Lightning bolt? Dramatic voice rumbling down from the sky?”

“A little bit of all three, except the voice was from my bear.” He turned the burner on low to keep the omelet from scorching. “No, she came over to ask what I was doing there—she could tell I wasn’t you—”

“Because you’re much less good-looking,” Petey said somberly.

Wade ignored that. “And our eyes met, and I just ... knew.”

Because I told you , his bear said. I’m a pretty important part of this story, you know.

It had a point.

“My bear knew,” Wade said, correcting himself, “and it told me. She’s the one.”

Petey aww -ed. “That’s so cool. Hey, Anne, are you the one? Are you my soulmate?”

“You got Anne to come with you after all? Good for you.”

“I know, right?” Petey said happily. “She says she’s not my soulmate but I’m pretty cute.”

“No offense, but you’re also pretty ‘had two tickets to Hawaii.’”

“That too,” Petey agreed without missing a beat. “I have lots of things going for me. Anyway, I have to go to a holiday luau right now, and you’re so busy being in love that you’re not even jealous, which is taking half the fun out of it.”

“I’d be jealous if I could go with Mira.” What could be a better way to get to know someone than a week in Hawaii? It was clearly working out fine for Petey and Anne.

“Maybe next year,” Petey said. “Love you.”

“Love you too.”

Wade let Mira’s podcast keep him company through dinner. Even with only one episode under his belt, he could already see how she made a living off this: she was knowledgeable, witty, appreciative, and colorful. She wove easily back and forth between trivia, analysis, and sheer enthusiasm without ever missing a beat, and her love for her subject matter was clear. He picked one of her “hate-watch” episodes for a follow-up, just to hear how she handled a movie she didn’t like, and even when she was poking a lot more fun at something, she was still insightful and generous.

“I need to watch some more romance movies,” he said to Fiona, who—in between meowing plaintively for bites of his dinner—had been listening to the podcast almost as avidly as he had. She must have liked the sound of Mira’s voice.

So did he, but that was hardly surprising.

“We’ll pull together a list from her show,” he told Fiona, running his hand down her back until she let out another rumbly little purr. “She’s bound to have a bunch of good recommendations.”

She looked up at him with her lamplight-yellow eyes. Fiona had two expressions: surprised and judgmental. Right now the dial was set to “judgment.”

He was going to have to hope that in addition to liking cats, Mira would also think it was totally reasonable for him to have whole conversations with his. Otherwise he was going to be in big trouble.

“How am I going to tell her? That’s what that look’s about?” He scratched around her ears again. “I don’t know. I’ve never had to do this before, obviously. I can’t drop it on her out of nowhere, but I can’t let it go on too long without telling her, either, or it gets weird. I’ll have to find a quiet time this week to ask her out and then go from there.”

Fiona narrowed her eyes, as if asking him if he even remembered how busy things had been today. Or as if falling asleep, but Wade liked to pretend it was the former.

“I know, but this was my first day,” Wade said. “It’ll calm down.”

Then he remembered the fortune cookie’s promise and felt a shiver of trepidation.