Worst Christmas Love Story Ever! #JustWriteIt #AHolidaySpectacular

Chapter 3: Memories

That night Cara refused to leave her suite although they were Christmas celebrations happening all over the hotel and the sound of Christmas carols begin sung everywhere was impossible to overhear.

"C'mon, Cara, don't act like you're the female Grinch who wants to steal Christmas!" Jayden exclaimed when he walked into the bathroom at 9 o'clock and saw her still sitting in the bathtub, reading something, probably one of those nasty romance novels from the 1980s that she liked, on her phone.

"It's not my fault that these people celebrate Christmas on the wrong day," Cara said, referring to the fact that Christmas wouldn't be celebrated until the next morning, December 25, in her native New York.

"Well, if I didn't know better, I'd say that your attitude also has something to do with your ex-husband," he began, choosing his words carefully because he knew that she hardly ever mentioned Nick Gregory.

This made Cara laugh. "If you think I'm hiding from Nick, you don't know me at all. If one of us needs to hide from the other, it's certainly not me."

"Because of the play?" This was a question Jayden had wanted to ask for a long time.

Cara did not answer his question directly, but got out of the bathtub instead and took her time getting dressed in a towel and makeshift turban.

It was not exactly a secret that Nick Gregory had written The Couple after the breakdown of their marriage. When Jayden had first gotten together with Cara, he had googled her and seen old pictures of Cara and her ex-husband that had been taken in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Back in those days, Nick had been a hot hunk as well as a struggling writer, and according to the play, he had picked her up at a New York bar one night when she had been out with a few girlfriends. He was completely unaware that she was this ambitious magazine editor and activist. At the beginning of their whirlwind romance, they obviously had other priorities. But when they made it out of bed a few days after they first met, they decided to get married immediately. In Nick's words, "That was the moment when our problems began." In The Couple, Lara, Cara's alter ego, was portrayed as the quintessential career woman who always put her business first, whereas Sam, her husband, was a writer/bum who was quite content to spend his days as home, which was something that Lara/Cara couldn't understand as she had been running her own magazine since she had been 16 years old (relying on the generous help of her father, of course). Moreover, she was paying all their bills and covering all of Nick's expenses, too. "Doesn't that hurt your male pride, your manhood?" Lara/Cara asked at one point in the play. "Not really because I'm a swell 'housewife' and not desperate at all to change a thing." Then they tried to have kids in the third act of the play and failed, which led to the end of their marriage because they both blamed each other for their inability to start a family. The more he thought about it, the more Jayden realised that Cara must have felt like a laughing stock when the play was released. Apart from that, the news that Nick was finally going to be a father after all must have hit her really hard. 

"I don't think anyone would like it if their partner, a person they trusted, shared their problems with the public on a theatre stage," Cara finally said with a sigh.

"I'm sorry your ex-husband was such a jerk. But why can't you forget him? I'm here with you now, and I love you."

Jayden was almost pleading with her, which made her feel incredibly guilty. "I know," she said and stroked his cheek tenderly. 

"But I'm not enough?"

"Oh, you are," Cara claimed, but she didn't sound all that certain. "I guess I just need more time to figure this out."

When they lay in bed next to each other that night, Cara couldn't sleep. As much as she liked Jayden, going on a romantic trip to Switzerland with him had been a mistake. Perhaps their entire relationship was a mistake, too, because it was bound to lead nowhere. In a few years, he would leave her for a younger woman, one with whom he could have children, and her heart would be broken all over again, just like it had been when Nick had left her. Meeting him again had brought back old memories, good ones and bad ones. She would have been able to suppress them under normal circumstances and avoid Nick and his girlfriend with the awesome figure. But unlike New York, this hotel was not a big city with millions of inhabitants.

Jayden had been right earlier: She wanted to stay in her hotel room because that meant she wouldn't have to see Nick. When they had met, she hadn't failed to notice that Nick was still a very attractive man, and he had acquired this new aura of the distinguished artist that she found as irresistible as the rest of him. Even after all these years, he still had this power over her. He shouldn't have it because he was in a new relationship and about to become a father... and there were so many reasons why he should be out of her life for good and she should no longer be attracted to him, but... Wait, was that the sound of a snowball?

She looked at a clock. It was 3 a.m. Surely, no one was up at this ungodly hour, and she had just imagined that someone had just thrown a snowball against her bedroom window.

As soon as she decided to let it go and turned around to face her sleeping boyfriend, a second snowball was thrown against the bedroom window.

There was only one person in the world who would want to see her at this hour. She knew she shouldn't go because if she did, it would lead to a lot of drama.

Therefore, she opened the window to tell Nick to get lost in the very second he threw the third snowball. It hit her directly in the face.

"Oops, sorry!"