Page 15 of Cruel Winter with You

“Mmm.”

“You can’t just hold me until the power comes back.”

“Why? Is there an anti-hug law in Illinois I don’t know about?”

“No, but ... you probably have better things to do.”

“Jamie.” He says it like it’s a firm no. Like hereallydoesn’t. But I push away anyway, and even though he sighs deeply, he lets me. “Come sit by the fire. We can ... I don’t know. Play a game to pass the time.”

“A game? Like what?”

“I’m sure we’ll findsomethingto take your mind off things.”

My cheeks heat. There is something a little suggestive about the way he saidsomething. An open-ended hint, just a touch filthy.

“We have UNO somewhere in the attic,” he adds, pensive.

I flush even harder, realizing it’s my mind that’s filthy and nothing else.He’s over you, Jamie. You fucked up. He no longer sees you that way.“Not sure it’s the ideal time to go through old boxes.”

“Yup.” He glances around as if the Genus Edition of Trivial Pursuit might have materialized on the coffee table in the last few minutes. Then says, “What about Truth or Drink?”

“Oh my God.” Laughter bubbles out of me. “I haven’t thought about that game in years. Since high school.”

“That’s okay. I’m sure we can scrounge up the rules.”

Therules—and I use the term generously—are pretty simple. Players take turns asking questions. The other can choose to either answer truthfully or take a shot. Pretty straightforward, but it wasthe shitwhen we were teenagers—mostly at the kind of parties where Marc thrived and I was never invited. “You know, I don’t think I’ve ever played it.”

“You were way too pure for that in high school.”

“I wasn’t ‘pure,’” I say reflexively. “I was just ...”

“Shy, and reserved, and focused. A bit of a people pleaser. Afraid that your dad would get mad at you and leave you if you screwed up.” He stares at me like he sees me. Like he has been seeing me all along.

It’s too intense.

“We can play,” I hurry to say. “If you can find something to drink.”

He does—a bottle of tequila, unopened, in the back of a kitchen cupboard. He brings it out on a tray and sets it on the soft rug in front of the fireplace, a shot glass on each end. We sit across from each other, the tray in the middle, as he pours the thick liquid.

I’m not so anxious anymore. It’s warm here. Cozy. I feel safe and cocooned while the storm rages outside. It also feels oddly forbidden, doing something like this in the room where Marc probably learned how to walk, even though we’ve both been adults for quite a few years. “Why do I feel as though your parents could walk in any second and ground us?”

“Because whenever we come back home to visit, we regress back to when we were eighteen?”

“It’s so true. Last week I had the weird compulsion to leaf through my yearbooks. What is wrong with us?”

“It’s a pretty common condition. Yesterday Maddy texted to ask if I wanted to meet up with her and break into the high school at night.”

“Oh. And what ... what did you say to her?”

His eyebrow lifts. “What do you think, Jamie?” The shadows play with his cheekbones in a way I can’t compute. Arrestingly handsome, that’s what he is. “You can have the first question.”

“Oh. Um ... Let’s see.” I look up, studying the projections of the flames onto the ceiling. There are a million things I want to know about Marc, but only about two and a half of them won’t hurt me. Ignorance, sometimes, is bliss. “Why didn’t you go on the cruise with your parents and Tabitha?”

“Shareholders’ meeting. Three days ago.”

“Ah.” I nod. “Um ... your turn, I guess?”

He doesn’t hesitate. It’s like his question was always there, on the tip of his tongue, ready to be rolled out. “When’s the last time you had sex with someone?”

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