Page 38 of Back Home For Christmas

“I miss the beach every time I am away,” he said.

“That is surprising,” I said.

“Why?”

“Because you left and never came back.”

“I come back every chance I get, but without my parents here, I only have friends to come back to, and I lost touch with everyone but Darren. I love it here. It is slow and quiet and stress free.”

“That is what vacation always feels like,” I said, thinking of the tourist mindset that crowded in during the summer.

“Maybe, but New York City is busy and loud and easy to get lost in, both literally and metaphorically. You could walk for blocks and not see a single familiar face. You could live there for years and go days without seeing the same person twice,” he said.

“Sounds kind of amazing. Maybe we could ditch Darren and the booth and run away to the city, to blend in with the crowd and become street performers.”

“I’ll take you anywhere you want to go, Cat,” he said. In the quiet insulation of the car, buffered away from real life, I was inclined to believe him. But we had to go back, and we both knew it. At least one of us was looking forward to it.

Chapter Twenty-Six

We pulled into the lot behind the store and the anxiety that had dissipated from spending the car ride alone with Jay came back in full force. I turned to him, grabbed his sweater, pulled him close to me over the center console, so he knew I was serious.

“No one can know,” I said, locking eyes with him. His gaze strayed from my eyes to my lips, and I felt lightheaded as desire mixed with my worry.

“Okay,” he said without any of his usual ribbing, which I could have kissed him for, except I couldn’t possibly do that, of course.

“Okay.” I let him go and smoothed out his sweater, feeling the tight muscles hidden beneath it, remembering what his bare skin felt like pressed hard against my body last night. “I guess we have to do this.”

“Yep,” he said, pushing open the car door, grabbing some chocolate and walking toward the booth.

“Jesus Christ, I didn’t think you guys would make it,” Darren said.

“I told you we would,” to my great chagrin, Aubrey stood leaning against the booth, looking at the closed bins and partially decorated space with her usual disdain that gave me war zone flashbacks to high school, which made me want to put distance between Jay and me. He had been pretty cool during our little excursion and scorching hot at the same time, Jesus when did I get so cheesy, but now that we were back in real life, staring down the booth, Darren, Aubrey, my parents and the Christmas party, my growing feelings were significantly dampened.

“We gotta finish,” Darren said with a frantic voice.

“I’ll get the hot plate and the cocoa urn,” Jay said. It was really a coffee urn, but we repurposed it for our specialty cocoa.

“I’ll finishing setting up. It will only take me thirty minutes,” I said. I felt Aubrey’s eyes on me as I brushed past her into the booth. I thought Darren had some nerve rubbing her in our faces after we had braved a blizzard for him. I knew that he wanted me to give her another chance, but I wasn’t in the mood. Maybe Jay had grown up, or I had somehow grossly miscalculated who he had been when we were younger, but I didn’t have the patience to deal with Aubrey.

As I opened the bins that I had been planning on using, I flashed back to the Christmas shop Jay and I had visited the night before. I tried to keep my mind from remembering the rest of the night, although I didn’t really want to sit with the memory of the Christmas store, either. My booths had always done well. I had always had some spark of creativity that managed to bring people in and lead them to buy things, so this year shouldn’t have been any different, but somewhere along the path of growing up, being on my own, and facing failures, that spark had faded. Sometimes it felt hard to access at all, clouded by doubt and overthinking.

There was nothing to be done about it, though. The booth had to get done, whether the creativity flowed or not. I took a deep breath and tried to tune out Aubrey’s hovering. When I turned around in the process of unpacking and choosing products to sell and decorations to use, I saw that Darren had left as well, leaving Aubrey and I alone. Was this his ploy for some forced bonding? As stupid as that sounded, it had apparently worked for Jay.

“So, you and Jay survived your trip,” she said.

“Yep,” I said, not taking my attention off my task in the hopes that she would take a hint.

“I can’t believe you forgave him,” she said.

“Forgave him for what?” I asked. If I was talking to Jenna, I would be able to read between the lines. I would guess that she was talking about his general assholery throughout my formative years, but I had no idea what Jenna was talking about.

“For ruining your photographs, the night before the scholarship contest,” she said. I stood and stared at her, the things in my hands forgotten. My chest tightened, squeezing until my lungs were paralyzed.

“No,” was all I could say.

“But it’s great that you forgave him. That was a long time ago and now Darren said you are in school for therapy or something.” Her tone was so light and carefree for someone who had just stabbed me through the heart.

“No, he couldn’t have. How do you know?” I asked.

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