Page 82 of Meet Me Under the Mistletoe
Nory felt immensely pleased with herself and her lips. “Well, I’d better go, leave you to your salad search.”
Isaac cast his eyes around and nodded grimly. “But I’ll see you tomorrow?” he said, brightening.
“Yes, you will,” she said.
She reached up and kissed him, resisting the urge to wrap herself around his body like a vine, and then stepped away from him as though not trusting herself. “Bye, then,” she said. And she called, “Bye, Milo!” over to the young man, whose cheeks blotched again.
As she left Isaac and Milo to their damage-limitation exercise, there was one thing of which she was now absolutely sure: Isaac was as hot for her as she was for him, and the knowledge kept her grinning all the way back to the castle.
Twenty-two
Nory found Jeremy and Charles in the library, where she had left them. They had been joined by Guy, who had taken a shower but looked like a man with one hell of a hangover. He and Jeremy sat on opposite wingback chairs, each intermittently applying ice packs to their swollen faces. Charles motioned for Nory to sit on the sofa next to him and poured her a cup of coffee from a large cafetiere on the side table. The three men were mid-conversation and continued on as Nory sipped her coffee.
“Couple’s counseling?” snorted Guy. His voice was nasally from the nosebleed. “You weren’t even married.”
“You don’t need to be married, Guy, you just need to be a couple. It was helpful, I’d recommend it,” said Charles.
“What could you have possibly needed it for?”
“That’s a bit personal, mate,” said Jeremy.
“I’m a journalist, it’s my job to be personal.”
“Maybe I should go,” said Nory. Though she was friends with both Charles and Jenna, her loyalties lay stronger in Jenna’s favor. She didn’t want to be put in a position where she knew things about her friend that Jenna might not want her to know.
“You don’t have to go, Nory. It’s nothing Jenna won’t tell you herself. At the time, we’d been together for three years...”
Guy gave another derisive snort, as though three years didn’t qualify as a serious relationship. Why did people in long-term relationships do that? Nory wondered. Why did they judge relationships by longevity rather than happiness? So far as Nory could make out, one didn’t guarantee the other.
Charles fixed him with a glare, and Guy shifted in his chair and said, “Sorry. Go on.”
“I knew I wanted to spend the rest of my life with Jen, and I knew she felt the same about me, but something was holding us back. Or rather, someone.”
Nory suddenly knew where this was going, and she felt a rush of warmth toward her old friend.
“Tristan,” said Jeremy, arriving at the same conclusion.
Charles nodded. “There was a part of me worrying that I was second best, that perhaps Jen had latched on to me because she was afraid of missing her chance at love. We all know how Jenna used to feel about Tristan,” Charles went on. “I didn’t know how I could compete with a ghost.”
“But they were over years before you two got together. We were still kids, really, when they were sweethearts,” said Nory.
“And you and Jen had been beating about the bush for years,” added Jeremy.
“Oh my god, the flirting!” Nory laughed.
“I honestly considered locking the pair of you in a room together just so you could get it on and get it over with,” admitted Jeremy.
Charles smiled, remembering, and then his expression clouded, and he said, “But when you’ve watched the love of your life be so in love with someone else, it makes you question whether you’ll ever match up in her mind. First loves are pretty enduring, even after they’ve ended.”
“And what about Jenna?” Guy asked. “Was she worrying about the same thing?”
Charles shook his head. “Not exactly. But that’s not for me to say, not to you anyway.” He looked pointedly at Guy. “My point in telling you this is that the counseling helped. We talked through all of our issues, and we made peace with them. There are no skeletons rattling their bones in our closets anymore, and it’s... it’s liberating, it honestly is. This is the healthiest relationship I’ve ever had with another human. We’re from the same stock, you and I, Guy, both from families who would rather die than express an emotion...”
“You mean repressed as fuck,” said Guy glibly.
“That’s exactly what I mean. But we don’t have to be like our parents.”
Norywishedher family would adopt a little repression, instead of expressing every emotion they had the second they felt it. She’d been well into her teens before she realized that not everybody expressed themselves quite as openly as her family, and she’d had to work hard at remembering to keep some of her thoughts to herself.
