Jamie Pope - Kissed By Christmas

Except for right that moment when she walked up to the school to see two of her brightest students in the middle of a heated argument.

“You are obviously too stupid to understand what he was saying!”

“Who are you calling stupid? You’re the one—”

“Ladies!” Hallie took a step toward them only to feel her foot slide across the sidewalk. It was like the world had slowed down, like she was having an out-of-body experience. Falling down in public was bad enough, but falling in front of a bunch of high schoolers was the stuff nightmares were made of.

Hallie heard someone scream. Maybe it was her. She wasn’t sure because she hit the ground hard, her head bouncing on the sidewalk, and then everything went black. She wasn’t sure how long she was out or if she had died and gone to heaven, because when she woke up again the most beautiful man in the world was standing over her.

* * *

“How was your Thanksgiving, man?” Asa Andersen’s partner, Miguel, asked him as they headed back to their station at the end of a long shift.

“Quiet. My sister went to her in-laws’ this year so my parents and I went out to a diner.”

“A diner!”

“Yeah.” Asa grinned. “My father usually does the cooking but he’s recovering from the flu and no one wants to eat my mother’s food. Trust me, the diner’s Thanksgiving special was a thousand times better than anything my mom would have produced.”

“Your mom can’t cook,” Miguel said, moaning as if it were tragic. “I feel for you. You should have come to my house. We have the roasted pork, along with the fried turkey. My grandmother and tías made hundreds of tamales. The pumpkin-pie flan wasn’t such a big hit, but my mother’s chocolate cake more than made up for it.”

“That sounds amazing.” Asa couldn’t remember the last time they’d had a big holiday meal with aunts and uncles and extended family. Most years it had just been his parents and his sister at the holidays, but since Virginia got married she split her time between her and her husband’s family. They saw less of each other now than they ever had and even though he knew that was how things happened, it didn’t sit with him too well. It felt like something had been missing.

“My mother sent you a plate,” Miguel went on. “And by plate I mean the twelve pounds of food she packed in a huge brown paper bag.”

“Your mother is sweet.” All of the Gonzaleses were. Sometimes Asa envied his partner. Miguel always had a big, warm family to go to after the end of a long, hard shift.

“My mother wants to hook you up with my little sister but—”

“You stay away from my little sister,” Asa finished for him, laughing. “I’m not going anywhere near Arianna, trust me.” Arianna was cute, but Asa had been working with Miguel since he joined the FDNY as a rescue paramedic. They were an elite squad of highly trained paramedics that worked alongside the firemen and administered medical care in dangerous, unstable conditions. The last thing he needed was Miguel pissed at him if things didn’t work out. Their job was too dangerous for personal feelings to get in the way of the work. “I think you tell everyone to stay away from your little sister. You won’t be happy unless she decides to join a convent.”

“She’ll be married to God. A man can’t ask for a better brother-in-law.”

“Mine is pretty cool,” Asa said as a call came in from dispatch. “I get box seats to any baseball game in the country.”

“If you were a legendary shortstop, I would let you date my sister.” Miguel picked up the radio. “We’re in the area, dispatch. We’ll respond.” He looked at Asa. “Slip and fall on some black ice. It shouldn’t take long.”

Asa hit the lights and they drove the two blocks to the scene. Eighty percent of their calls were typical paramedic calls that he rarely thought about when they were done. It was that other twenty percent that stayed with him. An innocent person getting struck by violence, a car accident that left the vehicle and the people inside of it unrecognizable. Last week Asa had gone through another one of those events that he just couldn’t get off his mind.

They had responded to a catastrophic crane collapse last week that had made New York City look like a war zone. Some people didn’t make it. Death was an unfortunate part of the job. He should be used to it by now but last week the loss had hit him harder than usual. Maybe it was the time of the year and knowing that a man wouldn’t be with his family during the holidays. Maybe it was the fact that he felt that his time with his family was growing shorter and shorter.

The longer he did this job, the more important his family became to him.

They pulled up at the scene in front of Wheatly Academy to see a horde of worried teenagers surrounding a woman on the ground.

“Clear a path, guys,” he ordered as they rolled the gurney toward her. “We’re here to help her.” He took in the woman’s appearance and noticed two things. The first was that she definitely wasn’t dressed for winter in her brown high-heeled boots and her thin trench coat. The second was that she looked incredibly familiar. But he couldn’t place her at the moment. “Does anyone know her name?” he asked the kids.

“She’s our English teacher, Miss Roberts,” a girl told him. “Hallie is her first name, I think.”

“Yeah, it is,” a boy confirmed. “We remember it because we say that she’s like Halle Berry, but sweeter. Is she going to be okay? She hit her head, really hard.”

Asa knelt down to the unconscious woman and touched her cold cheek with the back of his hand. Brain injury was a common effect of a slip and fall. “Hallie?” He called her name and she opened her eyes, looking up at him, and it kind of jolted him. He knew in his gut he had seen this woman before. Seen that beautiful shade of brown skin, seen those large, almond-shaped deep brown eyes with what seemed like a million lashes look up at him.

“Am I dead?” Her voice was soft; there was wonder in it. “Are you an angel? Am I dead?”

“No.” He smiled at her. He didn’t usually find injured people cute, but this one was exceedingly so. “You slipped on the ice and hit your head. We’re going to take you to the hospital to get you checked out.”

“Miss, are you okay?” One of the girls asked as she stepped forward.

“No. I’m not.” She shut her eyes again. “I remember walking toward you because you and Tiana looked like you were about to engage in World War Three and that’s when I slipped.” Her voice was much stronger this time. “I blame you two for this fall and that means thirty years of detention for both of you.”

“Thirty years!”

“Yup. That’s how long I’ll be embarrassed about this. I’m not sure I’ll survive it.”

“But, Miss Roberts! We were just talking about that poem you assigned us last night. I think it’s about a boy wanting his mother’s approval. Liza thinks it’s about romantic love, but clearly she’s wrong and takes everything literally because that’s how basic she is.”

The other girl turned around so quickly Asa was surprised that she didn’t have whiplash. “Who are you calling basic?”

“Girls!” Those pretty brown eyes flew open again. “If you don’t stop arguing you’re both going to be feeling basic when I keep you after school for the next two weeks alphabetizing my book collection by genre. And if you don’t think it’s that many books, I will gladly go out and get more to keep you busy until prom season.”

The girls clamped their mouths shut.

“Well, the good news is that your teacher is lucid, kids,” Miguel said stepping forward so that he could stabilize her neck. “The bad news is, she going to be on a war path if you don’t give her some space.”