Page 35 of Rebel Without a Claus
“I have a confession, too,” she says. “I lied before when I said I didn’t have a secret.”
I suck in a breath, holding it. Waiting until she finally says, “I lost my job.”
My face goes slack. I wasn’t expecting that. Eve lived for that job. She gave up everything to move out there.
“In Los Angeles,” she continues, sniffling. “I don’t have anything to return to the city for. I don’t know what to do after Christmas. I always thought that’s where I’d be happiest, but now? Now I’m not so sure. And now that my parents are struggling to keep the lodge afloat… I don’t know. I feel like I have to win the festival. For them. For us. For our legacy.”
Her confession unlocks a whole new level of sadness, but also relief that she finally told me. “The North Star Lodge has been a staple of Holly Ridge for as long as I’ve been alive. I can’t imagine it not being here.”
She shrugs and picks at a piece of lint on the blanket. “The big chain hotel moving in right outside of town is really hurting business.”
“Well…” I lean forward and put both of our mugs onto the coffee table. “I guess that means we have no choice but to win the festival this year.”
Her eyes widen slightly. “We?”
I nod. “We.”
“You know what I love about Christmas?” she says.
“What?”
“That I don’t have to be who people expect of me. For a whole week, I don’t have to be the executive scraping by in Los Angeles. I can just be the real me. The me who loves cookies and hot chocolate, not kale smoothies that cost twenty bucks.”
My face twists. “A twenty dollar smoothie?”
She rolls her eyes, “You have no idea.”
I glance at her. “Well… you’re never what I expect. It’s one of the things I love about you.”
Oh shit. Why did I say that? She meets my gaze, startled, something sparking between us.
We sit there like that, quiet and close, the air humming with words unsaid. Something shifts. The air changes. It’s like that moment before a storm, electric and still. I don’t know who leans in first. Doesn’t matter.
Our lips meet in the soft glow of firelight, tentative and searching, until it deepens—hotter, slower, like we’ve both been waiting for this too long. My hand slides to her waist. Hers tangles in my hair. She tastes like peppermint and chocolate and stubbornness, and I’m half a second from losing my damn mind.
I stand up, wrapping Eve in the blanket and caveman style, I carry her all the way to my bed.
CHAPTER 12
Eve
He carries me across the threshold of the bedroom, his arms steady beneath the curve of my back and the crook of my knees. The hall light casts long shadows that stretches ahead of us, touching the edges of the unmade bed.
The cabin is dark except for the firelight and the glow of a single lamp on Luke’s nightstand. Snow scours the windows, but inside the walls everything feels impossibly still. The silence between us is thick—heavy with all the things we never said in high school and everything we’ve been saying without words since I arrived back in Holly Ridge.
Luke crosses the threshold of the bedroom with me in his arms as if I weigh nothing. His flannel shirt hangs open on his broad chest; I’m still swimming in a different one, the hem brushing my bare thighs. My pulse is a drumline in my ears, but I keep my gaze steady on his face. A million questions flicker in his eyes.
He lowers me onto the bed with a gentleness that belies his eagerness. He lays me down on the edge of the quilt-draped bed, the mattress sighing beneath me. I sit up on my elbows,watching the play of firelight across his features: the straight line of his nose, the shadows at his jaw, the tiny scar by his left eyebrow I’ve secretly loved since tenth-grade biology.
He moves to step back, like he’s afraid of crowding me, but I capture his wrist, my hand finding the solid warmth of his arm. The contact is simple enough—-skin against skin—-but it triggers a cascade of memory fragments: his fingers brushing mine as he passed me in the crowded hallways of our highschool; the accidental touch of our shoulders as we stood side by side in show choir; the deliberate press of his palm against my lower back as he guided me through a doorway. Each memory a small flame, separate but part of the same fire.
"Are you sure about this?" he asks, his voice low enough that it might have been mistaken for the rustle of sheets. The question hangs between us, his eyes, dark in the half-light, search mine with a tenderness that makes my chest ache.
"Yes," I whisper back, my voice thin but unwavering. The single syllable carries the weight of years of history, of lingering touches cut short, of conversations that orbited but never landed on this moment. I had imagined this moment for years; fantasized about his kisses when I was a teenager. I had rehearsed this answer in my mind during sleepless nights, but the reality of saying it aloud sends a current through my veins, as if my blood’s been replaced with something lighter, more volatile.
We’re no longer dancing around possibilities or speaking in the coded language of maybe. It’s both exhilarating… and maybe a little bit scary.
With a deep breath, I trace the contours of his forearm, feeling the slight raise of veins beneath his skin. The room seems to contract around us, exhaling with me as the walls pull in close, witnessing this collision of past restraint and present abandon.
