Page 49 of Love Letters to Christmas

I drop my chin and stare at my feet. “I’m sorry I made you worry.”

His brows dip. “I’ll order you a Creep Be Gone kit.”

“Creep…Be Gone kit?”

“Pepper spray. Taser. One of those tags that sends location to emergency contacts if you press the button.” Pulling his phone out of his pocket, he lounges against the kitchen island, tossing one ankle over the other. “It’ll make me feel better. I hadn’t even realized you left today after we got back from work. Your favorite color’s blue, isn’t it?”

“Green…”

Green flicks toward me. “Green? Do we need to repaint yourroom?”

My head shakes. “No.”

“Are you just saying that because you don’t want to trouble me?”

I’m saying that because if youtouchthe room you prepared special for me, I will go feral. “I like how calm and pretty my room is. Green and blue are my favorites. Mostly blue. I only like a…very specific sort of green.”

“Nature shades suit you.” He pops his phone back in his pocket. “Alrighty. The gift of mail that promises your future protection is imminent, since you insist on leaving me all by my lonesome these days, what with all the tasks you’re doing outside the mailroom and now this after-work abandonment.”

My shoulders bunch.

He tucks his hands in his pockets and angles his body toward me. “Relax, A-mail-ia. I’m teasing you.”

Yes, you are. But not in the way you think. If I’m honest, I barely know what he’s saying right now, on account of the half-nakedness.

Humming, he lets his head fall back so he can peruse the ceiling. “Tomorrow, I’m thinking we should go out to dinner before we head to the fireworks.”

That gets through to my brain.

“Dinner?” I whisper. Together?Just the two of us?

“Assuming my palate can adjust to inferior food after having been spoiled rotten by homecooking, yes. Dinner. Is there somewhere you like best?”

In Bandera, the best place to go isn’t a chain. It’s a diner that sells homecooked meals and treats you like family…which means that the open kitchen in the back has a lot of unrestrained yelling. The best part is probably that no tourists show up there.

Bandera, on the whole, isn’t exactly a tourist hot spot, but it does happen to be located on the way to one of the mostbeautiful little towns in West Virginia. I forget the name, but that place is practically a fairy village. Travelers opt for the chains. Locals scurry away to our unfriendly diners with questionable health code scores.

I’m…not sure if that’s my favorite place actually, or if it was just the only place my parents would ever take me.

“What’s your favorite place?” I ask.

“Sweet & Salty.”

I suppose that is the only other place I’m sort of familiar with. I open my mouth to suggest we go there, but he cuts me off before I can, “They’re closed for dinner, though. Only open til five-thirty.”

“Oh.” Well, great. I don’t know what else to suggest. I’d rather not go to Taco Bell. Even if Taco Bell is the only other place I can remember exists since Mars and Ceres are unnaturally obsessed with it.

Now I’m being annoying, not knowing the answer to a simple question. I should be able to make stupid easy decisions like this.

Squeezing my eyes shut, I will an answer to appear. It’s useless. All I can see is bare Brian chest in my brain.

“It’s okay if you don’t know what you’d like,” Brian says.

Softly, I say, “I don’t even know what’s around here.”

“Everything.”

Great. That’s not helpful at all.

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