Hey all, thank you for your continued support. I appreciate it.
The original title of this story is Chasing Christmas Eve and the author is Jill Shalvis.
I do not own Glee or the characters, neither do I own Chasing Christmas Eve.
"Oh Pluck It!"
Mercedes Jones stood in the crowded LaGuardia Airport, staring up at the flight departure board.
Her chest was tight and her throat felt like it was closing in.
'Classic anxiety,' she told herself. 'Just breathe right through it.'
Not that her body listened to her brain. Her body rarely listened to good sense.
In any case, it was December 1st and people were rushing all around her like chickens without their heads, while she stood still, trying to figure out her choice of destination.
Her only requirements were warm and tropical...an exotic beach would fit the bill perfectly.
'Aruba. Jamaica. Ooh, I wanna take you...'
'Great!' she thought momentarily, 'Now I have the Beach Boys song stuck in my head.'
Doing her best to shake it off, she eyed the board again.
There were so many choices for a twenty-eight-year-old runaway, with a packed bag and no regrets.
From inside her purse her phone vibrated and she grimaced.
Okay, so there were regrets. Buckets of them, that made her suitcase feel like a thousand pounds and sucked the air from her lungs.
But she refused to let herself turn tail and go back.
She was doing this.
But even as she thought it, the board changed and a bunch of flights...all the southbound ones...blinked off and came back on, showing as delayed or cancelled.
"A surprise late season hurricane," someone said in disgust next to her. "Of course."
Okay, so she wasn't going south. But there was a flight to Toronto in twenty minutes, she noted with interest.
'Hmm...Toronto is the opposite of warm and tropical, and plus, it doesn't give me enough time to grab some breakfast,' she thought.
Apparently, running away really ramped up a girl's appetite.
That's when her gaze locked on a flight leaving for San Francisco in an hour.
'California, the land of celebrities, avocados and surfer dudes.'
She'd never really had a chance to enjoy any of those things. In fact, LaGuardia was the furthest she'd been from home in three years.
But hey, there was a first time for everything, right?
'Right!'
Mercedes nodded, psyching herself up for this.
After years of taking care of her family and working herself half to death, she deserved this.
She needed this.
"So...San Francisco or bust," she murmured to herself. And then, as if needing a little assurance,
"It will work...it has to."
Getting away would allow her to re-invent herself, to find her muse again...which is her love for writing.
And so, convinced, she strode to the ticket counter, with a confidence she wasn't quite feeling.
Fifteen minutes later, Mercedes hit the very long, very slow-moving security line.
Surrounded by people complaining about the wait, she was in the process of removing her laptop, her sweater, her shoes, her watch, and her bracelet and was patting herself down to make sure she'd gotten everything out of her pockets, when a TSA agent pulled her aside.
"Oh," she said, "I'm not carrying any liquids over three ounces."
The guy shrugged.
"Random female," he said. "Is that your bag?"
"Yes."
This is what she got for buying a last-minute one-way ticket, she thought and bit her lower lip, as the agent started to go through her things.
Mercedes favored layers, especially tees and sweaters with loose skirts or yoga pants...even though she'd never been to a yoga class in her life.
She watched as the agent pawed through everything, pausing at the sight of her bunny slippers...which totally completed her favorite writing uniform.
"My three-year-old kid has these," he said and then kept going, alternately looking up at the X-ray monitor and down at her bag, clearly seeking something specific.
He moved aside a lightweight jersey dress and Mercedes grimaced, as some of her lacy, silky things were exposed.
Maybe her clothes were nothing special, but she did have a thing about what she wore beneath them...her one concession to feeling sexy in this crazy life she'd built, where she didn't have time to actually be sexy...
Luckily for his health, the agent's stoic expression never changed. No doubt, he'd seen it all and couldn't care less, as he dug passed her favorite peach lace bra-and-panty set, a box of tampons, and...
"Ah," he said, holding up an apple.
"Are apples a problem?" Mercedes asked.
"They sometimes look weird on the screen."
"No weirdness here," she said. "Just a morning snack. It's not even poisonous."
She added a harmless smile, but he didn't return it, because, he was staring at some papers she had paper-clipped and shoved in her bag to read on the plane.
"How to murder people by poison without detection," he read aloud.
The woman behind Mercedes gasped in horror.
"Okay," she said, pointing to them. "That's not what it looks like."
The woman behind her, cradling a leopard-print cat carrier, had turned and was frantically whispering to the people behind her at this point.
"Really," Mercedes said. "It's a funny story, actually."
But the TSA guy was flipping through her notes, not even remotely interested in her funny story.
He didn't need to read aloud what he was looking at, because, she knew exactly what was there...other Google searches, such as how to get away with murder, using a variety of different everyday products that weren't considered weapons.
"It's research," she said to the room.
"Yeah, that's probably what I'd say too," a guy said from somewhere behind her.
But Mercedes didn't look back, she just kept her gaze on the TSA agent, trying to look non-threatening, as she said something she rarely if ever said aloud.
"I'm a writer."
"Uh-huh." He pulled out his radio, and said an ominous "Female agent, please."
"Oh, pluck it!" Mercedes snapped.
But the agent narrowed his gaze ad asked,
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"Nothing bad," she said. "That's the point. See, we've got this swear jar at home, which means, I've gone broke swearing, so I say other stuff instead of bad words. Stuff that sounds like bad words but isn't. I don't lose any money that way, and..."
She broke off, because he didn't appear impressed.
"Look, never mind that," she said. "Just believe me, I'm not a problem. You saw the bunny slippers, right?"
"Ma'am," the agent said, pulling her bag aside. "You're going to have to come with me."
"No, really! If you look in my purse, you'll see it's filled with scraps of paper, napkins, whatever...all with handwritten notes on them. I write notes for my books all the time. Plot points. Characterization stuff. Just little things, really. For instance..."
She looked around and gestured to the woman behind her.
"Crazy cat lady with a leopard-print cat carrier..."
"Hey," the crazy cat lady with the leopard-print cat carrier said.
But Mercedes ignored her.
"...or friendly, sweet, kind TSA agent with a heart of gold..." she said, and added a flirty, hopefully innocent-looking smile. "I use the notes in my books. It adds color and heart to the story and all that."
The agent's eyes were still suspicious, but at least he opened her purse to check her story. And just as she'd said, it was filled with what probably looked like trash, but were in fact, little treasures to be revisited and added to her manuscript.
"What do you write?" the agent asked, unraveling a small square bar napkin and staring at the words Mercedes had scribbled on it. Icicle...the perfect weapon. It melts and vanishes!
He lifted his gaze and leveled it on her.
"Cheese and rice!" she exclaimed and drew a deep, calming breath. But it didn't help. "Okay, listen," she said. "It's not what it looks like. I write young adult action-adventure. Post-apocalyptic world."
She was hoping she didn't have to go further than that, but the expression on his face, told her she was on borrowed time.
"The characters are teenagers, with powers they acquired in the radioactive war," she added.
"And these teenagers, they...kill people?" he asked.
"No," she said. "But the bad guys do. And it's fiction. You know, made-up stuff." She pointed to her brain and shook her head, like, See? Harmless. "And, so really, all of this is for naught. It's not like I've got a bomb in my bag or anything."
In hindsight, she probably shouldn't have mentioned the word bomb. As a result, she missed her flight and almost the next one, instead, becoming intimate, very intimate, with a pair of female TSA agents.
And she also missed breakfast.
And lunch.
And the nap she'd been counting on, since she hadn't slept more than a few hours in so long, she couldn't remember what a good night's sleep felt like.
It wasn't exactly an auspicious beginning to her vacation from life, but hopefully, all of her trouble was behind her now and the rest of the trip would be perfect.
'A girl could dream anyway...'
Eight hours later, Mercedes had her face pressed to the window of her plane, as it banked and came in for a landing at SFO International.
They'd been diverted twice, because of too much air traffic, which turned out to be a blessing, because they came in from the north, giving her a view of the Golden Gate Bridge glowing red in the late afternoon sun.
The water was a gorgeous sparkling blue, all of it looking like a postcard, and something in her tight chest loosened. It seemed like the entire world was laid out in front of her and she brought a hand up to the window, as if she could actually touch the sight.
'This,' she told herself. 'This is exactly what the doctor ordered.'
If she'd actually gone to a doctor for her anxiety and crippling writer's block, that is.
But here, she would find herself, so that, by the time she returned home in three weeks for Christmas Eve, she'd be happy again.
She was sure of it.
Stay safe!