Cruel Winter with You (Under the Mistletoe collection)

Chapter Four

T he outage is in the whole neighborhood. They’re working on fixing the power lines.”

Marc tells me this after checking the online app, but I’d already figured that out from Dad’s text.

Dad: No power! You okay?

Me: Yup, safe at Marc’s.

Dad: Maybe it’s better if you stay put there for a while.

I sigh and force myself not to type: Gee, you really think so, Dad?

He’s always been a loving father. I know he tried to do his best, and in return I try not to blame him for being a little flaky and self-centered, and for all the times he forgot to pick me up from school or sleepaway camp before I got my license.

“It’s not that bad,” I tell Marc, trying to sound unaffected. Unfortunately, the semi-obscurity is already making me want to hide under the nearest bed and rock myself to sleep. Is it embarrassing for a twenty-seven-year-old woman to be afraid of the dark?

Probably. Maybe. If I try hard enough, I might be able to cringe myself out of this situation.

“At least we have the fire,” I add. “For warmth. And some light.”

“I need to introduce my parents to the concept of generators.”

“I’m surprised you didn’t buy them one.”

“I did,” he grunts. “But they never got around to installing it.”

Crap. “You know what?” I turn on my phone’s flashlight. I can feel a panic episode coming up, and it’s probably better if I am alone for that. “I’m gonna go check on Sondheim and be right back, just to make sure that he’s okay.”

“Sondheim can see in the dark and hates everyone. He’s having the time of his life.”

“Still, just to make sure—”

I try to brush past Marc, but he stops me with a hand on my wrist. “Jamie.”

“I— What?”

“You know I’m not some guy you met on Tinder, right?”

I blink. “I do not have time for a Tinder account, and I’m not sure what you mean by—”

“I know you’re about to have a panic attack,” he says simply. I wish I could read his expression better, but his back is to the fire, and he’s little more than a dark, haloed silhouette.

Also, I wish he wasn’t right. “I’m not—”

“You’re chewing your lip, and you’ve been white-knuckling my mom’s Live, Laugh, Love throw pillow for the last three minutes.”

I look at my hand, and sure enough, I’m clutching the pillow. I toss it back on the couch like it’s covered in spiders and ask, “Can I just go into your room and—”

“Have the panic attack on your own, then come out in fifteen minutes and pretend that nothing happened? Let me think about it.” He pretends to squint into the distance, then looks at me. “No, Jamie.” He pulls me closer, right into him, and I don’t even attempt to hide the relief that comes with having my cheek pressed against his chest and his arms close around me. He’s the warmest thing I’ve ever felt, smells like pine trees and soap, and slowly, gradually, my heart stops racing.

“Marc?”

“Mmm.”

“You can’t just hold me until the power comes back.”

“Why? Is there an anti-hug law in Illinois I don’t know about?”

“No, but ... you probably have better things to do.”

“Jamie.” He says it like it’s a firm no. Like he really doesn’t. But I push away anyway, and even though he sighs deeply, he lets me. “Come sit by the fire. We can ... I don’t know. Play a game to pass the time.”

“A game? Like what?”

“I’m sure we’ll find something to take your mind off things.”

My cheeks heat. There is something a little suggestive about the way he said something . An open-ended hint, just a touch filthy.

“We have UNO somewhere in the attic,” he adds, pensive.

I flush even harder, realizing it’s my mind that’s filthy and nothing else. He’s over you, Jamie. You fucked up. He no longer sees you that way. “Not sure it’s the ideal time to go through old boxes.”

“Yup.” He glances around as if the Genus Edition of Trivial Pursuit might have materialized on the coffee table in the last few minutes. Then says, “What about Truth or Drink?”

“Oh my God.” Laughter bubbles out of me. “I haven’t thought about that game in years. Since high school.”

“That’s okay. I’m sure we can scrounge up the rules.”

The rules —and I use the term generously—are pretty simple. Players take turns asking questions. The other can choose to either answer truthfully or take a shot. Pretty straightforward, but it was the shit when we were teenagers—mostly at the kind of parties where Marc thrived and I was never invited. “You know, I don’t think I’ve ever played it.”

“You were way too pure for that in high school.”

“I wasn’t ‘pure,’” I say reflexively. “I was just ...”

“Shy, and reserved, and focused. A bit of a people pleaser. Afraid that your dad would get mad at you and leave you if you screwed up.” He stares at me like he sees me. Like he has been seeing me all along.

It’s too intense.

“We can play,” I hurry to say. “If you can find something to drink.”

He does—a bottle of tequila, unopened, in the back of a kitchen cupboard. He brings it out on a tray and sets it on the soft rug in front of the fireplace, a shot glass on each end. We sit across from each other, the tray in the middle, as he pours the thick liquid.

I’m not so anxious anymore. It’s warm here. Cozy. I feel safe and cocooned while the storm rages outside. It also feels oddly forbidden, doing something like this in the room where Marc probably learned how to walk, even though we’ve both been adults for quite a few years. “Why do I feel as though your parents could walk in any second and ground us?”

“Because whenever we come back home to visit, we regress back to when we were eighteen?”

“It’s so true. Last week I had the weird compulsion to leaf through my yearbooks. What is wrong with us?”

“It’s a pretty common condition. Yesterday Maddy texted to ask if I wanted to meet up with her and break into the high school at night.”

“Oh. And what ... what did you say to her?”

His eyebrow lifts. “What do you think, Jamie?” The shadows play with his cheekbones in a way I can’t compute. Arrestingly handsome, that’s what he is. “You can have the first question.”

“Oh. Um ... Let’s see.” I look up, studying the projections of the flames onto the ceiling. There are a million things I want to know about Marc, but only about two and a half of them won’t hurt me. Ignorance, sometimes, is bliss. “Why didn’t you go on the cruise with your parents and Tabitha?”

“Shareholders’ meeting. Three days ago.”

“Ah.” I nod. “Um ... your turn, I guess?”

He doesn’t hesitate. It’s like his question was always there, on the tip of his tongue, ready to be rolled out. “When’s the last time you had sex with someone?”

My stomach drops. For the longest moment, I cannot breathe. “I should have known,” I say, glaring, “that you’d start with a very invasive question.”

He grins. “Meanwhile, I did know that you’d squander yours in the name of peacekeeping. So, last time? When?”

I down my shot exclusively out of spite. The thing is, Marc knows that Shane and I broke up last year, when he proposed and I couldn’t bring myself to say yes to him, because ... because he’s a great guy, who deserves to be with someone who’s crazy about him. Ideally, somebody who’s not in love with someone else, either.

I have no intention of admitting that there hasn’t been anyone else. “I should ask you when the last time you had sex was, too,” I mutter, the burn of the tequila still trailing fire down my throat. I watch Marc’s strong hands as he pours more, already feeling a little lightheaded.

“Is that your question?”

“ No, ” I bark. I have subzero interest in finding out how he amused himself after the last time we saw each other. There’s something else I’d rather know. “Dad invited you to spend Christmas with us multiple times. And you kept saying no.”

He stares calmly. “That’s not a question.”

“Why?”

He glances down at his still-full shot glass. I’m convinced he’ll drink it, but his eyes calmly meet mine again. “Because I wasn’t sure I wanted to spend time with you over the holidays.”

It’s like a knife is planted into my abdomen. I have to clench my fists against the almost-physical pain. “And by you , you mean the singular you— me —or my entire family—”

“No follow-up questions. It’s my turn.” His smile has a crooked, cruel edge. “Are you happy, Jamie?”

“I . . . Right now?”

“In general.”

“What kind of question is that?”

“The one I wanted to ask.” He points at my glass. Tops it off. “Your drink is right here, if there’s something you don’t want to admit to.”

So I do just that. I swallow the alcohol in one big gulp, then set it back on the tray with too much force. “Are you happy, Marc?” I ask, immediately retaliating, daring him to lie to me or drink.

He doesn’t waver. “No, I’m not,” he says simply. “My turn.” He refills my glass again. And asks, “What would make you happy?”

“I— This is way too generic. World peace. Puppies. A magic wand that destroys greenhouse gasses—”

“You’re right,” he concedes. “It was a poorly formulated question. Let me ask you again: Is there anything I could do, right now, that would make you happy?”

On the plus side, my panic is long gone. However, it’s now swallowed by anger—toward none other than Marc. I think I might hate him. Actually, I’m certain of it, as I angrily pick up my glass with trembling fingers, ignoring the liquid sloshing stickily to my fingers. I usually have a pretty high tolerance for alcohol, but the last time I ate was several hours ago, and—

I’m not drunk yet, but a hazy wave of heat and ethanol hits me all at once. It softens my defenses and dissolves all my filters. Fuck it, I think. Right when it’s my turn again.

“Are you angry at me?” I ask. Or maybe the tequila does. “For what I did to you the last time we saw each other?”

His expression hardens. “Yes, Jamie. I am fucking furious with you.”