How Nick and Holly Wrecked...Saved Christmas Read Online Free

passes me his list. “What does this look like to you?”
    “Whole chicken.”
    “That’s what I thought. But which whole chicken? The Sunday roaster or the fryer.”
    “No idea. Can you call her?”
    “Bunco night. She won’t answer.”
    We stare at the bags of poultry as it sloshes around in its own pink juice and looks more unappetizing by the second. I study the massive cases of meat running as far as the eye can see. “I guess there aren’t many vegetarians in this part of West Virginia.”
    “I’m going to get one of each,” he says and dives for the chickens with both hands.
    “Wait!” I grab his sleeve.
    “What?”
    “I remember this from my Food Science and Nutrition elective. Here,” I say and rip a couple plastic bags off the spool above our heads. “You’re supposed to put poultry in these bags. There’s nothing but bacteria on those things.”
    “Then why do we eat it?”
    “It dies when you cook it.”
    “I think the chicken’s already dead, Holly.”
    “Not the chicken, the bacteria. It can be on there if the packaging leaks. Take the bag, please.”
    He does and loads the fryer and tosses it in the cart. I pass him another one.
    I’m laughing into my scarf because I’m nervous, and this is the funniest thing I’ve seen since Amanda tried to wax her own bikini line.
    Now he’s laughing because he can’t get the bag open. In the struggle, the roaster drops out of his hands and slides across the tile floor.
    “Forget it,” he says and grabs another one like a football and tucks it under his arm. “Let’s get out of here.”
    I swing around so fast I knock a box of diapers off the edge of a display.
    “Winner, winner, chicken dinner,” Nick calls out like a goofy ten-year-old as he rushes ahead with his cart.
    “Wait, Nick!” I wrestle the diapers back onto the wobbly stack.
    He spins with the cart, nearly knocking over more groceries. “What?”
    “Aren’t you gonna pick up that chicken?”
    “And do what with it? Put it back in the case with the other chickens that haven’t taken a slippery trip across the germy floor?”
    He has a point.
    “Oh, all right, Holly,” he says with a smirk. “If the chicken means that much to you, I’ll let someone up front know I dropped it and didn’t want to put it back with the others.”
    “The chicken doesn’t—I mean I don’t care that much about the chicken…”
    But Nick Zernigan is teasing me and races away with a snort of laughter while someone else’s Sunday dinner still sits on the floor of the meat department.
     
    ****
     
    I stare into the inky blackness toward the lake as Nick speeds around Lakefront Drive toward his house. The moon shimmers between bare trees and dances on the water’s surface. I am dizzy from watching it move and change in the night.
    He pulls into the driveway which is the size of my whole yard. I’ve arrived on the wealthy side of the lake with its shimmering outside lamps that illuminate huge houses with balconies that overlook the frozen waters of Black Diamond Lake.
    I wait. I don’t know if I’m supposed to come inside or simply sit in the truck while he does what he needs to do.
    “C’mon in,” he says. “I have to do a couple things and get my Aunt Ivy’s Christmas present I forgot.”
    He lets us in through the garage and punches in codes on a large panel. I hear clicks and see lights flicker on elsewhere in the house and I wonder if his father is somewhere watching us from a phone app. Nick bends to remove his boots. I do the same and we pile the rest of our winter gear on a table by the door.
    There are long wooden stairs and large vases of odd bushy stalks I’ve seen only in my mother’s magazines. Nick tosses his keys on the kitchen counter. He makes his way around the huge island and glances at a note.
    And then pulls a six-pack of longnecks out of the fridge.
    “Want one?”
    I tuck a piece of hair behind my ear. “No,” I say, as if I don’t care. “No,