Page 51 of Christmas at Hart's Ridge

So much togetherness should have been suffocating. That was one reason I had never wanted to date another dancer. At the ballet, dancers were together for long twelve-hour days. Why would I want to spend my nights with someone I worked with?

But somehow with Luke, it wasn’t suffocating at all. It was freeing. I felt like I could just do my thing without worrying about how to fit in time with him, too. Whether I was tending bar at Goat’s Tavern or helping the chorus perfect their pirouettes, he was always around, in the periphery.

Until we were tangled in bed. Then he came into sharp focus.

And it wasn’t all sex, either. Although, I had to admit, sex was pretty amazing. But it was more than that. It was the little moments. Curled up together in bed, Luke reading trip reports from Appalachian Trail through-hikers, me catching up on all the celebrity biographies I had missed over the years, cursing Justin Timberlake to the rooftops. The way he made my coffee in the morning, just how I liked it. Talking about anything and everything under the sun.

I had told him things that I had never thought I would be comfortable discussing with a boyfriend in a million years. Like how I had spent most of my life hovering around an eating disorder, never fully falling in, but never fully free of it, either. It had always been a dark cloud in the corner of my mind. I had worried he wouldn’t understand, because the question for me was never whether I was thin. The question had always been was I thinenoughto make the most beautiful, elegant line, and the answer was always no.

And he shared his life with me, too. He told me about his parents leaving him in charge with his senile grandmother and Ethan. He told me that the day Ethan had broken his arm when he was twelve had been the worst day of his life. Because he was in charge, and he no longer had the excuse that he was a kid himself. Luke had been twenty at the time, a full-grown man. My heart had ached for him, for them both.

I had told him that it wasn’t his fault. Lots of kids fall out of trees, right in front of their parents’ very eyes. Luke had nodded, but I had the feeling he didn’t agree.

I hadn’t known it could be like this. That the person I wanted to break my back in bed could also be the person I wanted to tell everything to. I hadn’t known that a lover could also be a friend.

It was nothing short of amazing.

On Friday Luke gave me a ride to Goat’s Tavern for the dinner shift. Jasmine was already there behind the bar.

“You’re on bar? Where’s Ethan?” I asked, looking around. Usually he beat me here, seeing as Goat’s Tavern was practically his front yard. “Isn’t he working tonight?”

Jasmine shook her head. “He had something to do, so I offered to cover for him. We switched shifts and he covered lunch.”

Something to do? Like what? His only hobbies were hiking and reading, as far as I knew, and I knew him pretty well.

It felt like we hadn’t connected in forever. We saw each other at work, but not much outside that. He had invited me over for pizza and a movie a couple days ago, but Luke had been there, too. That shouldn’t have surprised me, what with it being his own house and all, but it did. I felt awkward. For some reason, Ethan and I had fallen out of sync. And it wasn’t because I was sneaking around behind his back, banging his hot older brother.

No, wait, that was definitely it.

Shit.

I needed to have a talk with Luke. I couldn’t have a conversation with Ethan until I knew where things stood with his brother. Ethan would have questions. Like, was this a holiday fling? Was it more? I didn’t have answers for that. I knew that anytime I thought about January and leaving Luke in Hart’s Ridge, my stomach felt like a black hole, swallowing up my heart. But I didn’t know how Luke felt about it. Was he interested in trying long distance? Was I?

Or maybe I was interested in trying local distance. Here, in Hart’s Ridge.

Could I do that? Could I stay? The idea knocked the wind out of me. I sucked in a deep, steadying breath. I didn’t have to decide anything now. It was just something to consider.

Maybe I had been considering it all along. Before I slept with Luke. Before I had even left New York.

Later. I would think of all that later. After I talked to Luke.

Because one thing I did know for sure was that I didn’t want to keep lying to Ethan. I couldn’t. Not without irreparably harming our friendship, and I wasn’t willing to let that happen. He meant too much to me.

Luke and I worked the dining room while Jasmine handled the bar, until the dinner rush passed. When the clientele shifted from mainly eating to mainly drinking, Luke joined Jasmine behind the bar, making drinks that I hustled out to the tables and booths.

I was pouring six beers for a booth when a woman leaned across the bar top to get Luke’s attention. I recognized her as the woman who had come in with her friend my first night working at Goat’s Tavern. Amber something or other.

“Are you here until closing?” she asked.

“Sure am.”

“I think I’ll stick around, then,” she purred. She ran her tongue over her lips in an obvious invitation.

Luke, bless his heart, didn’t even blink. “You might want to rethink that. You’re in Evergreen, right? The weather’s supposed to turn nasty. You don’t want to have to drive over the mountain in a storm.”

“I could stay here. With you.”

“No,” Luke said. “You couldn’t.”

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