Page 18 of The Holiday Honeymoon Switch
“Aiden, I have to tell you something. I’m not really Ivy. She’s my best friend, and we swapped holiday trips this yearbecause…” Holly now experiences a heartache so sharp she puts her hand to her chest for a moment, wondering if she might need medical attention. But it passes, leaving behind the dull, empty ache that is becoming a familiar companion.
“Because?” Aiden prompts, looking concerned.
Holly’s heart lurches into action again. She thinks fast. “This was a Christmas gift,” she manages. “A surprise from my best friend. I’m…super into…eco-cabining, and Ivy knew that, so she booked this for me but then forgot to make the switch of our names after she gave me the gift. Sorry about that.” She is so bad at lying and tries to rein in the details. “Work has been really hectic for me, and I needed to go off-grid and decompress. But yes, to answer your question properly, yes. I am Holly Beech.”
As he steps closer, she searches her memory for an Aiden she might have known once—and, under his still-intense gaze, feels as warm as if a fire had already been burning in the cabin’s stove for hours.
“Holly,” he repeats, stepping closer. All at once, she feels the empty cavern of her heart spring to life again. “Dalton School, class of ’13.”
She watches, mesmerized, as he removes a pair of glasses from the pocket of his flannel shirt. When he puts them on, he’s made the transition from Eco Superman to Eco Clark Kent—and, just like in the movies, she recognizes him immediately.
“Aiden! AidenColeman! It’s been…forever. You’vechanged.”You got disconcertingly hot.The Aiden she remembers from high school was tall, but scrawny and bespectacled. This version of Aiden is anything but, even with the glasses back on. His shoulders are football-linebacker broad, his jaw sexy and square. He looks like a model in a catalog for winter camping gear.
“Just reading glasses now,” he says. “I got laser eye surgery a while ago. And you…” She wonders what he’s thinking as he continues to stare at her, his expression a mix of surprise and something else she can’t parse. “I can’t believe it’s you” is all he says.
“I can’t believe it’s you, either.” Now that the shock is wearing off, she feels something else: curiosity. Back in high school, Aiden was her academic rival. He disappeared, didn’t come to grad, and she never saw him again. But she had always wondered what became of him.
“I can tell what you’re thinking,” he says, biting his lip and grinning. “And no way, I amnottelling you my SAT score.”
“Comeon! I heard someone got higher than me, and I figured it was you!”
He crosses his arms over his firm, broad chest. “My SAT scores are my business and my business alone.” But he smiles when he says this, and then adds, his voice full of shy pride, “I did get a full scholarship to MIT, though.”
She laughs at his humblebrag. “I’m not surprised.” They hadn’t traveled in the same social circles, but the Aiden Coleman she remembered had been brainy and driven. If she won the academic medal for highest average in the school, he would get it the next year. She got the Outstanding Student Award, but he got the Principal’s Award. Back then, she’d half expected she would see his name as the CEO of some high-tech start-up someday, but he vanished from her view, and her thoughts. Until today.
“I’ve tamped down the competitiveness over the years, so it’s fine, you don’t have to tell me your score.”
“Really?” he teases.
“Was I that bad?”
But she knows she was. Which is why she had to put a stop to it. When Holly reached college, she was tired of constantly comparing herself to others, exhausted from the pressure she was putting on herself to excel. When she met Matt, she was happy to simply keep up with him—which was certainly easier than keeping up with someone as smart as Aiden Coleman had been, for example. But now she admits something uncomfortable to herself: Perhaps she stopped trying so hard soMattcould shine. Maybe she was trying to turn him into the man she wanted him to be by shining a little less brightly. The aching pain in her chest is returning; she pushes the thoughts of Matt away—but Aiden is now regarding her with concern.
“You weren’t bad at all, Holly,” he says, his expression turning earnest. “You were amazing. Smart, kind, interesting…” He trails off, as if there’s more he wants to add, but doesn’t. “I really admired you.” There’s something familiar in his words, but the sensation is fleeting and then slips away from her.
“Thanks,” she says, with a grateful smile that belies the ache still pressing against her chest. “So…what have you been up to all these years, Aiden? With a full scholarship to MIT, surely you must have done some amazing things.”
He looks away. “A little of this and that,” he says, his tone evasive now. “How about you?”
“I’m in corporate law. Mostly patents. Budgell, Hall, Jansen and Jones.”
“Right. The job you’re here trying to decompress from.”
“It’s intense,” Holly says—and her junior lawyer jobisbusy and at times all-consuming, but that’s not what she’s here to get away from. She feels a small spasm of guilt from all the lies she’s told Aiden so far. In the awkward silence that follows, she misses the sense of comfort she just felt with him—and the memory of the person she once was.
He glances at his watch, and his expression now fills with regret. “I have to run. There’s a dinner I need to get to in town.” He takes off his glasses and slips them back into his pocket, and she finds herself struck again by the clear blueness of his eyes. “Do you mind if I bring a new contract for you to sign tomorrow? I think technically there might be aninsurance issue if there’s someone else staying in the cabin other than the person who booked it and signed the original contract.”
“Oh. Right. Ofcourse. I’m so sorry. I’m a lawyer, I should have thought of that,” she says, slightly embarrassed.
“It’s no big deal, truly.” He walks to the door and pulls on his winter boots. “Around nine o’clock tomorrow morning okay for me to stop by?”
“Perfect. Great to see you,” she says.
“You, too, Holly.”
She stands at the window and watches his taillights retreat down the snow-banked driveway, then disappear into the starlit winter night, still trying to reconcile the handsome, broad-shouldered,great-smelling adult male with the gangly, bespectacled teenage boy she went to high school with. He has changed so much. And so has she. But she knows they both contain shadows of the people they were, that those high school kids were the seeds for the adults they now are. She feels a surge of nostalgia. It felt nice, for a few minutes, to forget about the present and get lost in the past.
She retreats from the window into the kitchen, where she opens up the bagged salad she brought along for dinner and pours the salad dressing directly inside—feeling a flash of guilt at what Aiden would say about the single-use plastic bag. She pushes the guilt aside and sits down on the couch, wrapping herself in a soft, cozy blanket as the cabinfills with warmth from the stove. She’ll get some proper food tomorrow—no single-use plastic, she promises herself, as if Aiden were still there in the room.
