Page 24 of Merrily You

“I’m too tired to type. You took it out of me, you monster,” she said, laughing.

“Yeah, I know how you feel. Tonight was…something else.” Something amazing, incredible, unbelievable. All of those words.

She kept smiling.

“I can’t believe this is happening, Danny. I just… Wow. You’re kind of dirty, you know that?”

Now I was the one laughing. “I guess? I think you brought it out in me. I’ve never really thought about it before.” In my past sexual experiences, I guess I’d taken the lead of whomever I was with at the time. With Holiday, it had been different. Everythinghad come easily and naturally by knowing her and by knowing myself.

“Well, it was hot as hell. I’m a big fan. And I can’t wait for this holiday to be over so we can go back to our apartment and not go anywhere but the bedroom for a while.” Right. In a few days we’d be heading back to our regular lives and I’d be going back to work and so would she and we’d pick up our lives, but everything had changed.

“How is that going to work?” I asked.

She pretended to think about it for a second. “Well, we can use your bed until we just absolutely wreck it and then my bed and go back and forth. You’ll have to do a lot of laundry, but it will be worth it. I’ve always wanted to have sex in the kitchen too.” It took me a moment to catch up. She was talking about sex.

“No, I don’t mean that. I mean everything else. Are we together, together?”

She snorted. “Are you asking me if I’ll be your girlfriend? Are you saying youlike me, like me?” Holiday was making this into a joke, but I was serious. I needed to know what we were to each other now after everything had changed.

“Yes, Holiday. I like you. A lot. In every way. And I want you to be my girlfriend.” There. The only thing I’d held back was the fact that I was completely in love with her. This should have been a startling revelation, but it wasn’t. I’d realized sometime around when she’d taken her dress off. I’d just known, in every cell of my body, that I loved her in every way you can love a person. In loud ways and in quiet. I had always loved her, but that love had grown and stretched and moved with the two of us as we matured into the adults we were now.

I’d tell her tomorrow.

“Well, I want you to be my girlfriend. So there,” she said.

“Sounds perfect to me.”

She gazed at me and was quiet for a moment, but I knew she was thinking about something.

“I love you, you know,” she said, her voice quiet.

“I love you,” I said, the words coming out of my mouth before I considered what they meant. We said them all the time, but now they had a different definition.

“I know,” she said. “But it’s different now, isn’t it?”

I nodded. “Yeah. It has. But I don’t regret it. I wouldn’t change anything about how this has happened between us. Nothing.” There was no way to know how things would have worked out if we’d discovered feelings for each other when we were younger. I wasn’t interested in playing that kind of game. I was only interested in who we were now, and the fact that we loved each other.

“We’ve got a lot of sex to make up for,” she said, wiggling her eyebrows.

“Mmmm, yes. But other things too.” Not that the sex wasn’t amazing. It was. But I was excited about everything with her.

“You know, it was pretty smart of us to fall in love now, because we already live together. It’s like we skipped a step. Didn’t even have to UHaul.”

I laughed. “We did UHaul. Just not in the usual way.” We’d rented the truck together and had crammed it full of our stuff before we’d moved into our current apartment.

“We’ve literally been living together for years.” Since our freshman year in college.

“You’re still my best friend too,” she said. “I know my brain is all loopy from the sex, but I need you to know that you’ll never stop being my best friend, Danny. Always.”

I’d never wished I could teleport somewhere more in my life than I did at that moment. The clock on my phone screen showed me that it was after midnight, so it was officially Christmas.

“You’re my best friend, H. Always and forever. Merry Christmas, baby.”

“Merry Christmas, babe.”

Chapter Thirteen

Holiday

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