Merry Random Christmas Read Free

Mine.
    Mine.
    “Why are you growling?” Joanne ask ed, grabbing my phone out of my hand before I could stop her. Her eyes darted to the picture and if I coulda recorded her face in that moment, I woulda, because her eyes bugged out like someone squeezed her so hard they shot out on rubber bands.
    “Is that E die Chadron touching my son ?” she screeched. “And why is Joey wearing a g-string and covered in money?”
    “Money?” I snatched the phone back. Joe’s wrists had finally healed and he was playing bass again, but our next gig wasn’t scheduled until after the turn of the year, in Las Vegas. Tyler, aka Frown, had been filling in for Joe as our substitute bass player , but he and his girlfriend, Maggie, had their own side gigs going. At this precise moment, I didn’t g ive a shit about them, but the bottom line was that money was a little tight until the next gig, and if this is what made Joe resort to turning his cock into a joystick for old, rich women to ride on Christmas Eve, then I was about to start crying.
    “I cannot believe that Edie Chadron, the chairwoman of the second-wave feminist organiz ation she co-founded with my mother , is sticking her fingers all over my son’s buttocks!” Joanne fumed. “ What in the hell is Edie thinking?”  
    “I don’t know what half of that meant,” I said, scrutinizing the picture. By my eyeballing, Joe was wearing at least five hundred bucks in glossy money stuck all over his hips, g-string, ass and back.
    Then I read the caption on the Instagram photo:  
    Here Comes Santa Claus
    “Ho ho fucking ho,” I hissed, texting Joe. The effort was silly. He hadn’t answered anyone else’s texts.
    Texting Trevor was a worthless practice, too.
    I tried Liam, using tact and grace with a text that read: WHY IS JOE WEARING A G-STRING AND COVERED IN MONEY?
    I texted the same thing to Sam, because the germ of an idea began to grow in my mind.
    And once you plant a seed in the fertile soil of my imagination, step back.
    “Sam and Liam were strippers,” I muttered to myself, starting to pace on the sidewalk . “Now Joe’s in a g-string with a bunch of old women in that picture he sent from his account.”
    “Hey!” Joanne barked. “They’re not old!” The skin under her eyes shot up in outrage, but her forehead stayed in place.
    “Any of those women got a Snapchat account?”
    “What’s Snapchat?”
    I shook my head. “They’re old.”
    “Is Snapchat like that T witter thing?” she asked, frowning. Or, at least, I think she frowned. “Are you implying that because we’re not all up to date on the latest social media craze, we’re old?”
    “You use your phone to talk to people, Joanne?”
    “Yes.”
    “Yer old.”
    She opened her mouth to protest. I covered it with my palm. She shrank back.
    “Anyhow, quit interrupting me. I’m thinking.”
    “You’re quite the multi-tasker, aren’t you?” she said with a derisive snort.
    I gave her the stink eye. “You ask a woman in a threesome relationship that question, Joanne, you might need to brace yourself for the answer.”
    She paled.
    “ Look, you can stand here and gawk at your own son’s mighty fine hindquarters covered in money and—” I squinted at my screen. Then I shoved it in her face. “Is that a lipstick imprint on his ass?”  
    Joanne push ed the phone out of her face and made a sound like a frustrated moose.
    “But,” I continued, looking up into the night sky, the rest of my thought buried by an increasingly disturbing sense that something was very wrong .
    Cambridge lights crowded out the stars. I didn’t care. If the North Star was good enough to guide The Three Wise Men on Christmas Eve to find Jesus , and Mary, Joseph and baby Jesus had animals to huddle around them and keep them warm, then it was good enough to guide me to find my str i pping, naked-ass boyfriends who were currently being kept warm by the overly enthusiastic huddling of an entirely different kind of