Page 4 of Holiday Home 4

They were just beginning their third loop of the rink, passing by the bench where their shoes sat, when the server opened the window and called out their names. With a lifted hand, Anna signaled that she’d heard the call, and the server left the drinks on a small stone shelf just inside the open window. Once they made it all around, they collected their respective cappuccinos and warmed their hands around two pillars of Styrofoam heat. Eventually, they began carefully sipping—well,hedid, wary of the act of skating and drinking at the same time—their drinks. Anna, naturally, showed no difficulty in combining the two.

On their fourth loop, Anna’s shoulder brushed against his. He’d grown a little silent while focusing as he did on keepingeither type of spill—of him or his drink—from happening. But he didn’t miss the brief contact—an unquestionably intentional meeting between their coats.

Careful that his grip was firm, Liam released one of his hands from his drink—and then he finally lowered the warm object from where it’d been hovering inches away from his mouth since he’d placed it there. The act helped relieve the tense hunch on his shoulders. Freed of its purpose, his hand dropped to his side, where it then searched for something else to hold.

It only took a few seconds for a pair of recently warmed hands to connect.

“Thank you for bringing me here,” Anna said, voice quiet but charged with meaningful appreciation. “Embarrassing as it is, this is still a little novel to me. Dates, I mean.”

Liam smiled and squeezed her hand affirmingly. “I’m glad to have found this place. And we’ll keep going on dates until it stops being novel. We’ll make it so, so ordinary.”

Blushing slightly, Anna’s eyes sang their contentment when she looked at him. Her mouth—her everlastinglylusciousmouth—framed a smile. He could survive a single blow, but not two. Not from weapons as powerful as these.

Feeling as if there were no better time than the present, Liam leaned over. Briefly overcoming his mediocrity as an ice skater, he managed to kiss Anna while avoiding going off course. Instead, after initiating the kiss, he only needed to stay attached to a far more skillful skater. She didn’t need to see ahead to keep them flowing around the symbolic rink.

After their kiss ended, they spent about twice as long staring into one another’s eyes. In the dead of winter, on an ice-skating rink, there was somehow no place warmer in all the world. Fiji, Maldives, and Maui had nothing on the space between them.

Chapter Three

She Can

They made it back to his dormitory a little before it started getting dark. Which, given that it was still the dead of winter, meant it wasn’t all that late. Yet, they still headed back. Because Anna had requested it, much to Liam’s surprise. After skating for a while, then dropping by Perrymont’s famous bookstore—a brick tortoise of a building, dating its foundations to the early nineteen hundreds—he’d figured they’d spend a while longer checking out the campus’s places of interest.

Apparently not. A touch on Liam’s arm while in the bookstore had drawn his attention. A quiet but meaningful request had taken care of the rest. They’d made for the cashier, then been back in her car five minutes later.

Now, they were in Liam’s dorm, which was pleasantly empty. Kicking on the lights, it lit up a column of a room, split between the living room and a kitchenette. The first part had carpet, while the second had vinyl, so it might have looked like a multi-colored domino from an aerial view. Right before the carpet ebbed into vinyl, there was a door on either side of the wall.

“My bedroom is on the right,” Liam said, nodding. His door was shut, while Grant, as usual, left his open whenever he went out. It was a small but noteworthy commendation of their friendship. He’d heard horror stories about thieving roommates, or even just snoopy ones, but he and Grant had gotten along great throughout the months they’d lived together.

“Do you want anything?” Liam asked, gesturing toward the kitchenette. “It’s pretty well stocked. Kind of standard college dorm stuff, but I’ve been trying to cook a little more since I got back.”

“No, I’m alright,” Anna said, shaking her head. Emerging from her winter coat, she looked for a place to hang it.

“Just anywhere,” Liam said. There weren’t any hooks on the walls, and their dorm didn’t come with a shared closet, so Anna laid her coat neatly over the arm of the living room couch. After that, she stood in place. For a moment. Only a moment.

Their eyes met. Like a tottering steam engine getting going, Liam felt his excitement begin to build.

His room wasn’t anything worth writing home about. Not compared to Anna’s bedroom back at her and Avril’s apartment. It was still a fine enough living space. It was a little wider than the space behind them, and he and Grant each had their own adjoining bathroom. A full bathroom, even.

As he suspected nine out of ten students on campus did, he’d pushed his bed into the far corner of the room, near the single window. Granthatedthat there were streetlights outsidetheir windows, complaining of difficulty sleeping without things being pitch black. Even though he wasn’t supposed to, he’d sneaked in light-resistant curtains and stuck them over his blinds.

Liam had a desk filling up the space on the other wall, so he sat with his back to his bed whenever he studied or—as was becoming ever more common—texted Anna, Avril, or Tess when he should be studying. Two of those three seemed to have an instinctual awareness of when he ought to get back to it. One of them, however, didn’t mind if she was a bad influence on his GPA, though it leveled out. He’d always been a good student; he usually finished his workbeforehe started flirting with the three beautiful women in his life.

Most of the time.

“How’s it stack up?” Liam asked, waffling by the doorway. Should he shut it or leave it open? What if Grant came back? “To Bellmore’s dorms, I mean.”

Anna looked around the tidy space. He also had a full wardrobe in the room, which had been a total pain to squeeze through his narrow bedroom door. At least he lived on the first floor, though that came with a different problem. While he and Grant got along incredibly well, they were united in their hate of their upstairs neighbors. Early on, it’d been like living under Welsh clog dancers. Fortunately, one of the two heel-stompers had dropped out early on, and the one that had stayed behind usually didn’t stay up as late as his roommate had.

“They’re somewhat larger, but not bytoomuch,” Anna said. “The biggest difference is the lack of a laundry room.”

“That sounds pretty nice,” Liam admitted. “So, you’d say the average student there does their own laundry.”

“I wouldn’t go that far,” Anna said, striding deeper into his room. “I didmylaundry, though.”

“I wouldn’t imagine it otherwise. I can see a four-year-old Annabelle Royce on her tiptoes atop a stool, dumping her tiny clothes into the wash before dropping in a detergent pod and setting the cycle.”

“You’ve been talking with Avril too much, then. I wasn’t always so…adult.”

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