Eric was never home. Periodically, Donna would see the Cruiser pull in after 9 but it was always gone again the next morning before she was up. When she tried to get information from Kitty, all Eric's mom would say is that he was working. Nobody seemed to know where. Kitty knew that he went into the muffler shop in the morning to help Red. Even though the elder Forman would almost certainly never admit it, he enjoyed getting the extra help from Eric.

The way Donna saw it, she basically had two options. She could either stay up late after one of her shifts and wait for Eric to get home and then try and talk to him in the basement; or, she could get up early one morning and try to catch Eric before he left for work. She figured she'd probably have better luck with him early in the morning.

Long days and early mornings were starting to catch up with Eric. A glass of orange juice used to be enough for him at this time in the morning. Now, it was a cup and a half of coffee just to get into the muffler shop. Once he got there, he normally had another cup with Red before heading over to the Mall.

"Hey." Donna's voice was soft when she opened the door.

"Hey." Eric gulped the coffee down and sat their stoically at the kitchen table.

"I just, I felt we should talk, ya know?" Donna took a seat across from him. "We haven't really talked or been alone since you got back."

"Yeah." Eric wasn't sure what to say, so his strategy was to say as little as possible.

"Look, I don't know what you think, but what happened with me and Randy…that started after you and I broke up." Donna tried to avoid making eye contact. "So, I mean what happened when you got home…"

"Donna, look, it's about more than that." Eric put his hand flat on the kitchen table. "In the entire time we've been together, something always kept us from getting serious. It's not just your fault. I'm the one who ran away from our wedding. But there's always been something. If I thought there'd never be another Randy, another Casey Kelso, another jilted wedding or promise ring problem…but there's always going to be."

"You don't know that." Donna protested.

"I do." Eric sounded more final than he intended to. "All you've ever wanted to do is get out of here. You've always said that. That you don't want to be trapped in this small town. When I got out, all I wanted to do after a few weeks was be back here. I missed everyone the whole time I was there."

"You never called me." Donna fired back. "You'd only talk to me when you'd call your mom and even then I couldn't get a word in."

"It's a little expensive to call overseas from a village with one phone." Eric sarcastically shot back. "I wanted to talk to my Mom because I wanted to be reminded of home and getting an emotion out of Red is like getting Chewbacca to speak English."

"Were you running away from me when you left for Africa?" It was a question she'd always wanted to ask. It was the reason that she thought asking him to stay had always seemed to fall on deaf ears.

"I don't know." Eric paused. "Maybe. It felt like, after graduation we just weren't doing anything. I needed to force myself to grow up and that meant outgrowing things."

"But not Star Wars?" Donna jibed playfully.

"Rebel Alliance till the day I die." Eric smiled back at her.

"I guess I'm one of those things." She sounded resigned, not quite defeated. If Eric was being honest, that was how he felt about it. When he was in Africa, he wasn't the only American in the village. There was a Jesuit from Philadelphia named Dante Cabrelli. On the occasion that the two of them would talk and Eric would try to explain what was going on in his head, the young Jesuit would just smile and quote scripture at him "When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things."

The Priest said more of course, but it was that passage from Corinthians that had stayed with Eric. Maybe it was because in Africa, there simply weren't that many childish things to occupy yourself with. There was no TV. The only thing they'd gotten on radio was Armed Forces Radio, which was good for transmitting baseball games and news but not much else. He'd even gone seven months without sitting in the circle with the guys.

"I don't know, maybe." Eric didn't know why he couldn't be final with that sentence. Maybe it was the look on Donna's face and the thought that if he was more certain, it would hurt her more. "You're the only girl I've ever…ya know, loved and I just think that if I come back here and nothing's changed then…"

"You know what?" Donna had a look of resolution on her face. "I kind of get it. If it was going to work by now, it would have. I just never thought about…"

"What would happen next?" Eric interceded. "Yeah, I hadn't either."

"So…" The silence lingered between the two of them. "Where are you working? Everyone sees you leave in the morning but no one seems to know where you're going."

"Yeah, that's for me and you to…not." Eric got to his feet just as Red came walking into the kitchen.

"Donna." Red came in and poured himself a cup of coffee. "Eric, did you offer Donna anything for breakfast or did you just sit there like some kind of dumbass lump on a log waiting for her to help herself?"

"Pretty sure that burn was directed at me, but somehow you got called a dumbass." Eric leaned over and whispered. Donna laughed. Red walked a cup of coffee over to Donna. "Thanks, Dad."

"Well, I figured this talk was probably a long time coming for you two." Red took a sip of his coffee. "Now, get your ass in the car. The new shipment at the store isn't going to unload itself."

Eric smirked, put his palms on the table and pushed himself to his feet. It was going to be yet another long day. He now understood why they usually had a few men playing Santa at the store. He was already in for a lot of overtime but he just kept thinking about the paycheck at the end of it all. It was getting him closer and closer to paying for school. "Hey, Hyde will probably be up in a few hours if you want to hang out in the basement."

"Sounds like a plan." Donna took a sip from the cup that Red had handed her. Eric disappeared through the door over her shoulder. She sat there thinking about work for a second and all the songwriters she enjoyed that the guys she hung out with weren't necessarily into. The radio in the Forman's kitchen was tuned, as it always was to WFPP and they were playing one of those songwriters now as they fired up the morning show.

Baby time meant nothin' anything seemed real
Yeah you could kiss like fire and you made me feel
Like every word you said was meant to be
Babe, it couldn't have been that easy to forget about me

Baby even the losers
Get lucky sometimes

BAD-TIME-TO-BE-IN-LOVE-THAT-70s-SHOW

Jackie only got short closing shifts on the weekends. Two of the other elves were high school seniors, so they weren't available when the mall was open during the day. Usually, Jackie got the afternoon shifts during the weekend and the evening shift on Saturday. She was also the one that the other elves usually asked to cover their shifts if they couldn't make it. Which, a week into their jobs, was already too much.

If one of the other elves flaked out and simply missed her shift, it usually meant that Shelly Wessler in her role as Mrs. Claus ended up filling in on candy cane duty while the one elf remaining – usually Jackie – took over behind the camera taking pictures.

Santa's workshop opened every week day at noon and at the same time that the Mall opened on Saturday. That usually meant that the employee locker rooms were full for the half hour before a shift. Jackie and Shelly had lockers at the same end of the aisle but they almost never spoke. As Jackie pulled on her curly-toed shoes, she heard her blonde co-worker clear her throat.

"So, uh, Jackie?" Shelly's voice was slightly less ditzy than it had been in high school.

"Yeah." Jackie pulled her elf hat on.

"Is Eric still seeing Donna?" Shelly seemed to blurt it all out at once. "I only ask because the last time we had kind of a flirty thing, it was Donna that made it all weird."

Jackie didn't remember it working that way. She remembered Eric freaking out a lot because Donna wasn't jealous enough. She remembered her and Donna walking in on Shelly kissing Eric at the Hub. It definitely didn't seem like a two-way thing.

"No." Jackie wasn't quite sure how to take this question. "I mean, things have been a little weird since he got back but they're definitely not seeing each other anymore."

"Good." Shelly's smile got wider. "He's really sweet, you know. And it turns out that he's really good with kids."

"Yeah." Jackie gnawed on her lower lip. There was so much conflict going on right now that she didn't know what to do with it all. "He's a really good guy."

"I wasn't sure there were that many of them left." Shelly adjusted her white Mrs. Claus wig and headed for the exit to the locker room. Jackie stared into her locker. Her first instinct was to try and find some way to sabotage Shelly. That's what High School Jackie would have done. It's what Steven would have expected and planned for her to do. How was she going to deal with this with a guy who was actually a legitimately good guy?

She headed out into the store room where Eric was waiting for her, moustache and beard waiting to be attached as always. "Twinkle. Santa's ready for the makeup chair."

Jackie almost felt irritated when he did that. That didn't seem right. Eric had nothing to do with the conversation she'd just had. She took the moustache from his hand, lined it up and pressed it on to his upper lip a little more firmly than she had before. "Hey, hey, easy on the face. I've only got one of these and the moustache is a rental!" Eric protested weakly.

"Sorry." Jackie's expression was blank as the maelstrom of thoughts and emotions whirled behind her eyes. She pulled the blush out of her purse and started working on his cheeks. Another instinct crept up in her. If she wasn't going to sabotage Shelly, maybe she could do something to make Eric mildly less appealing. Only that idea felt even worse that the first one. It was starting to occur to her that the stuff that worked in high school might not work anymore. She pulled the adhesive protection off the back of the beard.

Every shift when she applied this beard to his jaw, it was like she got to watch him actually become Santa Claus. It was like he just stepped off a Coke display. "Hey Santa?"

"Yes, Twinkle?" Eric was getting better and better at dropping his voice the second the beard went on. He could keep it up for an entire shift without breaking character.

"How many Christmas wishes do you actually get to grant?" It was a cryptic question. It was supposed to be.

The look in Eric's eyes was similar to that of an aged Santa Claus. It was amazing how many kids sat in Santa's lap and thought he could work miracles with people instead of just toys. "Twinkle. Santa knows who's been naught and who's been nice. And with the really nice ones, Santa tries really hard to make their wishes come true."

It was exactly the kind of answer she'd expect him to give if he was sitting in the big red chair in Santa's workshop. But there was an earnestness and a gravity in his eyes when he said it to her right here. In that moment, she wondered if she should just tell him what Shelly said and let things take their course from there. It was the one time that she thought gossip might be the right course of action.

"Hey." He playfully nudged her with his elbow. "Let's get out there and keep Christmas going, huh?"

"Yeah." She smiled, small but sweetly. "Let's go, Santa."

BAD-TIME-TO-BE-IN-LOVE-THAT-70s-SHOW

Donna sat on the couch in Forman's basement quietly, gnawing on one of her fingernails. It had been a couple hours since her talk with Eric and the vague emptiness of morning talk shows made for perfect white noise as she got lost in her own head. Sometime after nine, Hyde came stumbling out of his bedroom. Early in the week, they didn't open Grooves early. No one came into the store until at least noon.

"Hey Donna man, what's going on?" He took a seat in his favourite chair. She said nothing. She sat transfixed, her eyes doing a thousand yard stare right into the television. "Oh crap, you talked to Forman, didn't you?"

"Yeah." Her voice was a little weak.

"Not exactly what you were hoping for, I guess?" Hyde chanced. He kind of felt this one coming. But this wasn't typical Forman style. Normally, Eric and Donna would have some hugely embarrassing public blow up that the rest of them would get to witness and then talk about for days. Sometimes you even got a good burn or two out of it.

"I just never thought about what it would be like if Eric wasn't there, you know?" Donna's eyes started to water a little. "It didn't matter what happened, he was always there."

"Yup. That's Forman. Reliable as they come." Hyde crossed his arms. "Of course, that's not what you want. So, why do you care how reliable he is?"

"Shut up, Hyde." Donna couldn't quite muster the strength to get to her feet. "I wanted to marry the guy, isn't that enough?"

"Only after dating Casey Kelso and running off to California." Hyde completed the thought. "Then after Forman left, you dated the most Kelso-like non-Kelso that we know. You don't want reliable. No woman who wants reliable ends up dating Casey Kelso. That's like going on a diet and then buying a Hershey factory. It's like telling Fez not to peep into your bedroom and then buying him a new pair of binoculars."

"He hides in the closet now." Donna felt like she could address the minor point and score a small victory.

"You don't want Eric, you just want him to be there." Hyde finished. "Makes sense. If I didn't have the Formans, I'd probably be some drifter or in prison like my uncles by now. But you can't just keep people around in case things go wrong. In the entire time I've known you, you've talk about the things that you want from life. You don't talk about Forman that way."

"That…"Donna paused. "That's not true."

"Yeah, it is." Hyde grabbed a joint he kept tucked into the back pad of the chair. He fired it up. "Look, I don't expect that this is actually going to be easy. It's probably going to suck. But it sounds like what Forman did this morning was take away your safety net. It's hard to blame him. No guy wants to be a safety net."

Is that what Eric was for her. It was hard not to think that Hyde was right. It was hard not to deny that Eric had been a convenient guy her whole life. Right there, across the driveway, was always the guy that she thought she could end up with. But when you were a kid, or even a teenager, it was easy to view your block or your neighbourhood as the whole world.

"It's not even that I feel like I'm losing my boyfriend, I do." Donna still sounded frustrated.

"No, it's that you can't believe he was the one who ended it." Hyde cut right to the chase. "You've always thought that Forman needed you more than you needed him. You never doubted he'd go out to California, you never doubted he'd come back after he skipped your wedding. He was always there. That's because Forman rejected things about your relationship but never you. Forman always felt lucky to be with you and he told you. Now, he doesn't and you want to know why."

Wow, talk about a direct hit. Donna felt a little staggered by that one but Hyde had landed. It was right in the weak spot of her psyche. That insecure place where rejection and betrayal hung out after her mother had walked out. It did feel like Eric was just rejecting her regardless of what he'd said. The fact that he'd almost couched like he'd just grown out of their relationship only made it worse in a way. "That was, wow. That was deep, Hyde."

"Yeah, Red was right. When you're at home during the day, you watch a lot of Donahue." Hyde nodded and locked his eyes back on the television. "That or a lot of cooking shows. But Mrs. Forman does that around here and I'm pretty sure if anyone else tries to bake, her menopause acts up."

"Shut up." Donna laughed and frogged him on the shoulder.