Page 44 of A Christmas For Holly

He pulled out a stack of games—Monopoly, Scrabble, Jenga, and Codenames.He held up Monopoly with a questioning look. “You want to play?”

“In the middle of the night?”

“Good a time as any.”

“We’ll use up all the battery on the flashlight!”

“I have candles.” He waved them at me, lit one, and then switched off the flashlight. The change was intimate—romantic—and I blinked, confused. The idea of playing a board game right now felt… weird. I needed space, a way to clear my head, not pretend everything was fine with a round of Monopoly.

“I think… I want a shower first,” I muttered. “I need to…” I thought about hiding in the bedroom again, burying myselfunder the covers until the weight pressing down on my chest eased up.

“You can have a shower,” Lucas said, unfazed. “The tank should still be hot. Just don’t take too long. I had mine a couple of hours ago before the power went out.”

I nodded, grateful for the excuse to step away. I hurried to the bathroom and stripped. The space was cramped, with barely enough room to turn around, with a window frosted over with snow. The shower itself was smaller—basic, with plain tiles and a single shower head—but the hot water was a blessing. As soon as it hit my skin, I felt the tension in my shoulders ease, but the relief didn’t last long. The pressure in my chest was still there, tightening like a vise.

And my cock was awake, and I needed something…

“That’s not helping,” I told it, because getting off was a painfully long experience on these meds, and I didn’t have time.

I want it to be with Lucas.

The water helped to clear my mind but didn’t wash away my confusion about everything. About Lucas. About the way being around him was messing with my head. I scrubbed my face, my fingers trembling a little, and forced myself to get through the quickest shower of my life.

When I turned the water off, I realized I hadn’t brought any clean clothes, so I grabbed a towel, wrapping it low around my waist before heading out of the bathroom and up the ladder to my room. Halfway up, I felt Lucas’s eyes on me, and when I glanced back, I caught him looking. His eyes dropped to my waist briefly before snapping back to my face.

“I’ll set up the board and find some midnight snacks,” he said, almost too casually, his tone betraying a hint of something else.

I hurried up to my room, but as soon as I was alone, I realized I was stillhard. What the hell? Normally, the meds dulledeverything and kept me in this neutral space where I barely felt… anything. But right now? My body was trying to send a message loud and clear—the attraction I felt for Lucas was still very much there.

I sat on the edge of the bed, towel still wrapped around me, my heart racing for a different reason now. My head was a mess, but my body? My body knew what it wanted. And that scared the hell out of me.

The Monopoly board lay sprawled between us, the colorful pieces and fake money feeling almost surreal in the middle of this snowstorm. Lucas and I sat across from each other, his focus sharp as he counted cash for a property he’d bought. The crackle of the flames in the stove was the only other sound inside, the storm howling in the background as we played this domestic game. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d played Monopoly, and the familiarity of it made everything feel… weirdly normal.

I rolled the dice and landed on Boardwalk—my favorite property. But Lucas had already bought it, of course. “I see how it is,” I muttered, handing him a stack of rent money, which he took with a smug grin.

“You gotta play smart, Hollister,” he said, leaning back confidently. “Monopoly’s all about strategy.”

I raised an eyebrow, smirking as I took my next turn. “Strategy, huh? I guess that’s what I’ve been lacking.”

We played on in silence, the board filling with properties, houses, and hotels. It was calming in a way, mindless, but it made me think of simpler times. Times before everything got so damn complicated.

“Did you get a message out to your family?” he asked as if it suddenly occurred to him.

“They know I’m here,” I said as my fingers traced the edge of my little silver dog, and I realized I’d never really talked about my family with Lucas.

“I don’t have a traditional family,” I began, and he hummed as he rolled a five and a four. “I mean, you probably know my dad died young. Aneurism. He was thirty-four and barely had a chance to see me grow up.”

He stopped counting out his moves. “Yeah, I remember reading that. I’m sorry.”

“It was a long time ago, and my uncle Brad and Aunt Letty raised me like their own. Brad took me to my first hockey game when I was six.”

“What about your mom?”

“Remarried,” I said as if that explained everything. Not all of us had strong, close families like Lucas’s, but I wouldn’t explain Mom to him when she wasn’t even part of my life.

Therapy had made me realize she hadn’t abandoned me; dating other men was her way of dealing with her grief. I didn’t have to have therapy to know that, but talking it through allowed me to accept it as truth. We weren’t close, but we exchanged birthday and Christmas cards, which was okay because Aunt Letty was more my mom than she was.

I moved my piece across the board, landing on one of Lucas’s hotels—another fat stack of cash heading his way. “Brad’s the one who got me into hockey. He’d take me to the rink every weekend. After a while, hockey became everything. I loved it, and I was good at it.”

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