Page 12 of Unwrapping His Naughty Secret

Grinning like an idiot, I open the app and tap into my DMs.

And then my grin falls away.

Idiot is right, though.

Where Hunter’s profile picture had been last night, now there’s just a gray, anonymous illustration. A generic profile “picture”.

Fingers shaking, I click on it to see our messages, but the chat thread won’t even open. All I get is an error message pop up instead: this user cannot be found.

The best kiss of his life?

I don’t think so.

But that jerk stolemyfirst kiss and then ghosted me.

And right before Christmas, too.

Chapter 6

Hunter

Deleted accounts cannot be restored. Continue?

Those words haunt me now.I created another account almost immediately, regret pulsing through my veins, but I couldn’t find her anywhere.

The app wasn’t going to match us twice, because I’m not the right man for her.

It’s been a week since our kiss, and Kira has snuck into my work—apple-cheeked beauties with dark, glossy hair suddenly the only characters I want to draw—and everywhere I go in town, I see couples with obvious, visible age gaps.

The barber has a young wife with a baby on the way. The lighthouse keeper, too—his young wife works at the retirement home where I volunteer a few times a month, drawing pictures of the residents.

And once the feverish guilt over how far I’d taken the kiss had passed, I’d realized that even in my own family, Wyatt and Heath are both older than their wife Emily—the gap between Heath and Emily even larger than my seventeen years on Kira.

All of them, men who are bolder and braver than I am.

As I’m waiting for my family to arrive on Christmas Eve, I look up the tutoring sessions at the library. There isn’t one this week, but they’ll resume in the new year, and when they do, I’ll be the first dummy to show up at her table and ask for help.

After the holiday break, I’m going to go there in person and explain why I went dark. And then ask her out on a real date. Not coffee and a dry hump in an alley. A proper, keep-my-hands-off-her date where I find out more about her and show her moreabout me and do whatever it takes to get a second chance.

Muscle memory has me swiping to the dating app, even though I know I won’t find her. Frustration churns as I swipe through faces I’m not interested in. Mouths I don’t want to kiss. Bodies I don’t want to cradle in my arms, because they aren’t the unique soft, lush shape I can still feel trapped against my chest if I close my eyes.

A text message to the family group chat slides down at the top of the screen, interrupting my pity party.

Wyatt

On our way

And then another, not a surprise.

Hannah

Running late, just picking up Cara now

My daughter is always running late.

I’m not sure what to make of this last-minute addition to our little family gathering. Hannah insists this friend is just that, a friendfrom school. A new bestie, she said, and not a date. Although she also insisted that this friend stay over and participate in all of the holiday moments with us, so I’m not sure I believe her denial.

My daughter is a chaotic energy demon of the best sort, and I’ve learned it’s best to just roll with her ideas.

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