Page 54 of Written in the Stars
“I’m bringing Darcy,” Elle blurted.
Mom paused. “Who?”
“You met her brother, Brendon? At breakfast a couple weeks ago?”
Several seconds ticked by before Mom made a hum of recognition. “Oh, right. The actuary?”
Mom had a terrible habit of reducing everyone to their professions. Jane, the pharmacologist. Daniel, the software engineer. Lydia, the dental student. She could only imagine what Mom referred to her as.Elle, the disappointment.
“Yeah, she’s an actuary.”
“You’re still seeing her?”
“I’m still seeing her.”
“It’s been a few weeks.”
“You sound surprised.”
“Honestly, Elle, can you blame me?”
Elle pressed her lips together, damming up the words inside her throat, none of them right.
Mom prattled on, oblivious to Elle’s plight. “Ten for dinner. I’ll need to come up with another side dish. I wish you would have told me you were bringing her sooner. But I guess you couldn’t have known, could you?”
After another two more minutes of back and forth, Elle managed to end the call.
Margot whistled through her teeth. “That sounded fun.”
“So much fun. Can’t you tell how overjoyed I am right now?”
Margot snorted.
Elle only hoped that phone call wasn’t a sign of what she had to look forward to at Thanksgiving.
Chapter Ten
Darcy sipped her coffee and stared at thecheck enginelight on Elle’s dash, biting her tongue. When Elle forgot to flip off her blinker after merging onto I-90, Darcy couldn’t help herself. “Your turn signal’s on.”
Elle made a soft noise of acknowledgment and flipped it off. “Sorry. I’m a little out of it. Didn’t sleep much last night.”
Neither had Darcy.
She had been up until two studying.Tryingto study. Between practice sets, her mind had drifted, thoughts occupied with Elle. How soft her lips had been when they’d kissed. How she’d tasted like strawberries and how she’d made a tiny sound, no more than a catch in the back of her throat when Darcy had bit down on her lip. The way Elle’s absurdly blue eyes lit up when she smiled. The bright peal of her laughter when Darcy made a truly awful joke. How she’d clutched the jacket Darcy had bought her—a purchase fueled by the desire to put another smile on Elle’s face—with the sort of reverence most people reserved for precious, priceless finds they planned on cherishing.
Elle might not have had on the jacket, but shewaswearing a truly out-of-this-world Christmas sweater.Truly. Colorful bauble planets with sequined rings popped against the black knit, but it was the addition ofactuallight-up stars operated by a battery pack tucked against Elle’s back that set the sweater apart. Darcy fingered the hem of her atrocious Grinch sweater that she’d only purchased because it made Elle smile. She felt a little less out of place than when she’d tried it on.
Thumbs tapping absently against the scuffed leather of the steering wheel, Elle pulled alongside the curb in front of a pale green bilevel house in a quiet, older-looking neighborhood. All the homes looked like they’d been built in the fifties, maybe sixties, but had been well-kept, the lawns manicured and the stoops swept free of leaves. In the driveway, there was an ostentatious green sports car parked alongside a white Honda CR-V and a silver Tesla.
“This is it,” Elle said, hands clenching around the wheel. “Home sweet home.”
“It’s nice.” Darcy rested her fingers on the handle, cracking the door. Elle continued to stare through the window, teeth worrying her bottom lip. Darcy wanted to reach out, tug it free. She cleared her throat. “Are we heading in?”
Elle relaxed her grip on the wheel and nodded. “Yeah. Probably should. It looks like everyone else is already here.”
Darcy wouldn’t say it, definitely not when Elle looked like she’d rather be anywhere else but here, but she was oddly looking forward to a family Thanksgiving even if it wasn’therfamily and even if thisthingbetween her and Elle was contrived. The last official family Thanksgiving Darcy had had was five years agowhen Grandma was still alive. Even then, the family was broken up and small—just Grandma, Mom, Brendon, and her. Now, Mom spent every holiday other than Christmas gallivanting off to some foreign country, a ski lodge or a sunny escape like Bali, with her flavor of the week, leaving her and Brendon to fend for themselves. Nothing new. It was the sort of behavior she’d learned to expect from Mom—frivolous, self-centered, careless. Brendon had learned to shrug it off; Thanksgiving was never his favorite holiday anyway, no matter how hard Darcy had tried to make it something they could celebrate together even if it was just the two of them. If there weren’t costumes involved or some tie-in to a movie franchise, Brendon wasn’t interested. At least, for some reason, he still liked Christmas.
Darcy followed Elle up the brick steps. The closer they came to the front door, the slower Elle’s steps became, like she was marching off to the executioner’s block and not her childhood home. On the landing, Elle spun on her heel, nearly knocking into Darcy who was right behind her. Her lips pulled back from her teeth in a grimace. “Look, Darcy—”
