Page 49 of Born in the Spring

She raises her hands higher for me to take the ornaments, that torturously inviting pointed pucker in her lips, and with a chuckle, and another graze of my skin against hers, I do, stepping to the tree with two blue balls.

“You’re getting closer to being back on the board,” Elara says, jumping right into conversation with a slight haste I don’t miss, when she joins me with two white balls, hanging each on the branches beside where I just hung both of mine, giving me a knowing side glance.

She sees me, and shesawme make it halfway to Emmy’s Blanket yesterday before I turned right back around.

I didn’t have my board, but I wanted to see the slope. Take a step forward to see if my ass really is missed out there before taking several steps back when I remembered that’s not a feeling you can observe in sport, when, in this case, staying on the board has to be your main focus.

Unless they were looking for my brother, stretching their necks when they knew he was coming in.

Maybe my ass is missed, maybe it’s not, but right now, snowboarding isn’t my main focus.

“You were spying on me,” I tease to Elara, the one in my heart who’s occupied myeverysingle thought sinceThanksgiving, since I let loose some of my control. Shepherd’s still there. He always will be. He’s my brother. And I know he’ll always be there for her too. But I’m not halfway here, knowing I could stand a chance with her and wanting that chance more than I want air. I’m completely hers and I want her to be completely mine.

Her cheek creases as she hangs her next ornament beside my last one, following my placements around the tree as we bend to boxes and decorate. “I go to both sometimes hoping to see you. Just like so many others,” she adds to encourage me, when she knows she’s all the encouragement I need. I only made it as far as I did because of her.

“You don’t have to go there to see me,” I tell her, placing emphasis on the locations and forgetting her loping in of other people. “My door was never closed,” I add, lower, with my own pointed look as I meet her gaze, already waiting for mine, in a kneel for some berries.

Our Saturday nights. Her coming to my lodge. She closed both those doors herself.

The low lighting of the fire flickers over the hesitation in her parted lips as I stand, staying close, and she blinks down to the berries in my hand before she takes them, like I was passing them off, so she can pass off what I just said.

I grab more—quick handfuls so I can be beside her again, still have her close and following my lead around the tree, since she swerves from all my other leads.

But I watch her in my side vision, trailing each of her movements with a different understanding for all the rest, for why she listened to my brother, a sight I couldn’t see then, past just the surface of Elara being Elara.

When I was dating Robin, she never once askedme to stop doing something with Elara, because she knew Elara was completely taken withtheShepherd Cassidy, so she thought my feelings were one-sided. She knew she had nothing to worry about.

But maybe my brother thought he had something to worry about.

He was alwayswaymore sure of himself than I am. More confident in a woman’s wanting of him. That shouldn’t have changed, especially when he had her.

“I mean it,” Elara says, her arm bumping mine, after quiet moments of passing decorations between our hands. “Come find me when you’re ready. We’ll take our first ride of the season together.” Her tone is light like when she offered before, and my same response feeds off hers, the opposite of before.

“Only if you hold my hand.” Mine brushes hers with the flirt as she passes me an end piece of ribbon, then slides her fingers away, down the velvet to catch the other end, with nothing but her smile.

“Elara.” I sigh her name at my first thread of the ribbon through the branches, and she stills as I do, her grip and mine both paused in a cling around the velvet. Her eyes are all that move as they meet mine, a slow shift, a second to hide behind a prepared airiness that she expects me to keep letting her do.

“I really want our Saturdays back,” I tell her, the yearning from being back in this lodge with her now, on this day, in this way, and needing to be back with her in my own space sparking to life in my next heartbeat, thrumming through every one after. “I want you knocking on my door at night when you can’t sleep.”

She breathes a laugh at the tail of my words, swaying theribbon likeshewantsmeto continue the wrapping so she can escape inside another task. “I don’t have a snacking roommate to keep me awake anymore.”

“For any reason,” I press low, with a pull on the ribbon, continuing my threading for a breath before I press more—because she’s come to me for more than justthat, and though it wasn’t a lot, it still happened—when she gives me a press that almost jars the ribbon out of my hands.

“And what about Robin?”

“Robin?” I blurt out to her blurt, whipping her a look she doesn’t meet as she reaches in front of me to pick up where I’ve fallen slack, an arch in her brow, apparently knowing something I don’t.

“You two seem to be getting closer again. . .” She says the wrong assumption like a shrug, her voice dropping as she lets it hang, but not like the ribbon, her grip now stronger around the velvet as she works it between the branches with that slip past her lips.

Thisis the best accident, because it tells me shehasbeen spying on me—eyeing me with Robin.

I think back to the way she watched me with her that afternoon when she was supposed to be watching Skylar. A familiar look I’ve felt on my own face when I’d watch her with my brother. A kind of lingering I couldn’t admit I was seeing then.

But she has itwrong, and she knows she does.

Elara’s never tried toforceRobin on me, and I’m not about to let her now. I’m not about to let her make us over before we’ve even started.

“I’m not doing this,” I say, giving up my hold on the ribbon, that she then replaces with hers, as if the damn decorating iswhat I’m talking about, as if she’s not focusing so hard on this tree because her head is being as loud as mine.

---