Snowed in for Christmas

Chapter 15

Chapter Fifteen

Benjamin

JETT DOESN’T RETURN TO the living room for some time. I clean up the Scrabble game and the bits of apple, preserving as much of the fruit as I can. I don’t bother marking any of it on my spreadsheet, though. We’ll easily make it through this, and for once I just … don’t care.

I’m not stupid. I know why Jett got up like that. He’s sitting outside, which I want to tell him is a desperately stupid idea, but I fear my presence will make things worse before it makes anything better, so I leave him to his grumbling. We have plenty of wood. If he stays on the front step, he can warm up beside the fireplace when he comes back in.

I tidy up the kitchen, then head back into the living room myself. I plop onto one of the easy chairs clustered around the fireplace. We pushed them back to make space for our game, but they rest close enough for the warmth to reach me as I hunch there listening to the silence of the house around me.

How long is Jett going to stay out there? I understand his worry. The past twelve or so hours have been like some strange, whirlwind dream. Reality crashed back in hard and fast, a merciless slap to the face, but we both knew it was coming sooner or later. We couldn’t go on like that forever. Would we even want to? It’s just attraction, just stupid, animal attraction. Maybe it would have faded in a couple days anyway. There’s no reason to mourn the inevitable.

The front door jangles. I jerk to my feet, darting for the stairs and pounding my way up them like the coward I am. The moment Jett started to head back inside, I panicked. I’m not ready to face him or talk about this, so I scramble into my bedroom before he makes it through the door.

I stand there panting for a moment, listening to him shuffling into the house. He doesn’t return to the living room, instead padding up the stairs and into his own room. He shuts the door softly behind him.

I let out a breath, unsure if it’s relief or something else, but I don’t want to let myself dwell on this, so I pull a blanket off my bed and head to my desk. I wrap myself up, then sit down with my textbooks, cracking one open at random. It’s what I’ve always done. Ever since I was a teenager and we lost Mom, I’ve retreated to my books, and it’s always worked. It’s always managed to turn my mind away from the things I don’t want to see. People think I’m smart, determined, single-minded, but in truth, this is simply my preferred form of running away. Not booze. Not boys. Not video games or drugs. Books. Setting myself impossible goals and throwing myself into them with absolute dedication. Yes, I care about repairing the world, protecting natural spaces, all of that stuff, but I might have left the work to someone else if I hadn’t needed to run from real life for the past decade.

Today, it isn’t working as well as usual. I try to focus, but the words slide off my brain. I keep looping back to Jett. No matter what I’m reading about, eventually the words turn to static, and all I can hear is him smoothly lying to our parents as his heart broke in front of my eyes.

I put my head down, trying to block it out, trying not to see the hurt so plain on his face, and suddenly I’m startling up hours later, my back sore from hunching and a glossy textbook page sticking to my cheek.

I blink. It’s grown dark. The house lays quiet and cold. Is the fire still alive? Probably not, if neither of us have tended it. My breath puffs out in a plume as I sigh in frustration at my own dereliction of duty.

Shedding my blanket is like stepping into a cold pool, but I leave it behind and shiver my way through the dark house, navigating the stairs by familiarity and feel. I don’t find Jett downstairs, and the fire has burned itself down to embers. I carefully feed in more newspaper scraps, waiting until they catch before I gingerly add logs. We don’t have much fuel left of either kind. If we need to spend another day or two this way, we’ll have to make the logs last.

A creak on the stairs alerts me while I’m still building up the fire. The stairs run alongside the living room, but they let Jett down in the kitchen, which lies to my back. I listen as he shuffles around, searching beneath the crackle of the flames for some sign of whether he’s grabbing a snack and fleeing or he actually intends to stay.

Soft footsteps crunch on the carpet. I tense as they head toward me. Then Jett is kneeling beside me, watching the flames lick their way up the side of the fresh logs I added to the fireplace.

“Did it go out?” he asks.

Even I can hear how hard he’s trying to sound casual. Tension thrums between us, pushing us apart like a force field in a superhero movie.

“Almost,” I say. “I think it’ll be okay now. Are you hungry?”

He touches his stomach like he never considered the question until now. “Yeah, I think so.”

“We should see what we can make,” I say. “We can eat it in here. It’ll be warmer.”

I almost expect him to say no, to retreat back to his room, but he nods. We rise, leaving the warmth and glow of the fire behind. In the kitchen, we set out several more candles in cups, leaving them on the counters and island to help us navigate the rapidly darkening kitchen.

I find lettuce and veggies in the fridge. Fortunately, we haven’t actually opened the refrigerator this whole time, and the house is freezing, so the things in there have remained fresh.

“I know a salad isn’t exciting,” I say, “but it’s either that or more peanut butter sandwiches.”

Jett shrugs. “I’m down for salad.”

We set out the ingredients, find a couple cutting boards, and start chopping. Without a word, we end up shoulder to shoulder at the island, huddled close as the cold steals into our fingers and toes. Maybe that’s why I lean toward him, for warmth. I can’t say, but when our shoulders brush as we chop up lettuce and tomatoes and carrots, neither of us pull away. Whatever tension pushed us apart this afternoon, those light touches melt it as surely as the fire in the living room. It ebbs like the tide going out, and soon things feel almost normal again. Well, “normal” insofar as any of the past day has been normal.

We end up with massive salads, the lettuce speckled with tomatoes, carrots, avocado, onion, bell pepper, even the dried cranberries from my trail mix. There’s an old bottle of ranch dressing in the fridge. We give it a careful sniff, declare it probably not deadly, and dump it on top. Then we carry our bowls into the living room, sitting on the floor as close to the fire as we can get.

Just like that, we’re back where we were this afternoon, back in the spot where we played Scrabble and flirted and kissed — at least until that phone call came in. That call changed everything, dunking us in an ice bath of reality before either of us were ready for it.

I poke at my salad. I’m starving, yet it’s hard to eat after all that’s happened. I look up and find Jett similarly dour. The firelight splashes against him, casting a warm glow against what little skin he’s left exposed. It’s mostly his cheeks, rough with stubble from the lack of shaving. My own facial hair hasn’t grown in nearly so much in such a short time.

He catches me watching him, but his eyes quickly dart away.

“I’m sorry I walked away like that this afternoon,” he says. “I needed to think.”

“I understand,” I say. “I don’t think either of us were quite ready for that call.”

“Yeah, maybe not.”

He pushes around the remains of his salad, which he devoured nearly in a single breath. He sets his bowl aside, picking at the carpet beneath him instead.

“It happened so fast,” he says. “I wasn’t ready to hear it might be over already.”

My chest goes tight. Who is this small, hunching, scared man before me? He’s so unlike the Jett who swaggered in here, the popular guy always going to parties back at school, the playboy who has a different person in his dorm room every night. His shaggy brown hair hangs over his face, hiding his eyes from me, and suddenly I can’t stand it anymore. I set my half-eaten salad aside and shuffle closer to him, taking one restless hand in mine. He looks up instantly, the firelight dancing in his eyes, turning them into dripping amber trying to encase me in this moment.

“We knew this would happen eventually,” I say softly.

“Yeah, but did it have to be so soon?”

I almost flinch away from his sincerity.

“If it didn’t happen now,” I say, “it would have happened tomorrow. Or the next day. The snow can’t last forever.”

“Is it crazy that I suddenly wish it would?” he asks.

My heart lurches, jolting from this sudden shock. I need a moment before I can respond, “No, it’s not crazy.”

“Is it quixotic?” he asks with a smirk.

Some of the tension melts. I smile back at him. “Perhaps, but there’s nothing wrong with being a little quixotic at times. The world could use more dreamers.”

His thumb bumps along my knuckles. He stares at me, throat working, his smile falling off his lips.

“God, Ben, I just want to fucking kiss you every time I see you,” he says.

My gut tightens. I don’t disagree, but wouldn’t that only serve to make this worse? If we keep climbing higher, the inevitable fall will hurt more when it comes. And it is coming. Perhaps it’ll be a day. Perhaps a couple days. But the timer is ticking down, and there’s only one way this ends once our parents are here.

“We should stop doing this,” I say, but the words are weak, flimsy. They’re like a single snowflake thrown at that fire crackling and spitting beside us, and they have no chance of surviving of the heat in Jett’s gaze.

“Yeah,” he says. “We should. Eventually. But for now, we still have time.”

He rises up on his knees, cupping my face to draw me to his lips. I put up no resistance, leaning in without any insistence on his part. Because by now his mouth is so warm, so familiar, so safe that I don’t know how to resist it.

Oh God, this is going to be a problem.

But a problem for later. For right now, I let Jett kiss me all the way down to the carpet. He gently sets me on my back beside the fire, his lips never leaving mine until I’m flat on the floor beneath him. The he pushes himself up on his hands, gazing down at me, his eyes so warm they could drip on me like wax.

“I’m not letting this end before I suck your dick,” Jett says.

And those might not be the most romantic words in the world, but coming from Jett, they mean everything.