Page 154 of The Nightmare Before Kissmas
Shock only seems to hit a few pockets within the room, mostly reporters who whip towards Iris and me, and I brace, angling in front of her on instinct.
My brows skyrocket at her. “Just that easy, huh?”
She shrugs. “Maybe it always was.” Her voice is soft and reaching, like she’s trying to convince herself that it’s that easy, that nothing bad will come from making a choice for ourselves like this.
“If anyone in Easter uses this to start shit,” I tell her, “they’ll have Kris and me to contend with—”
But Iris cups my face in her hands and the look in her eyes shuts me up.
“Coal. I’d rather talk about those dreams we’re allowed to have now.”
I go rigid. Suddenly aware of Hex’s ring on my thumb where I’m holding Iris’s hip and I can’t see her through the way my head is a struck gong of imagining what his reaction to this would have been. Would he have been proud of me? God, I hope he’d be proud of me.
Thinking about him is a tap on my emotions and I realize how taxing it is to run on pure adrenaline. I need to sleep for maybe the rest of the year.
Iris pinches my cheeks in her hands. “Coal. Did you hear me?”
She’d been talking. Shit. “Yes. Yeah. Fine.”
Her eyes roll. “Isaidmy only dream tonight is to dance with my best friend.”
I smile. “I’m pretty exhausted. I think I’m going to crash. Dance with Kris?”
“No. You do not get out of celebrating this.”
She has my cheeks fully squished between her hands now and I break away with an exasperated head shake. “You’re impossible.”
“We’re a matched pair.”
I loop my arm through hers and turn to wave over Kris—
He’s gone.
“Where did—”
“Come on!” Iris tows me into the crowd. People shout for me as I pass, introductions and pleas to talk in the next few days and oh, fuck, I’m going to be in wall-to-wall meetings, aren’t I? But I catch Wren’s gaze in the chaos and she nods, tablet already out, and mouths,I’ll handle it.
Again, she needs a raise. Multiple raises.
Iris drags me back into the ballroom. The orchestra has switched to faster songs and the floor is packed with people—not everyone funneled out to watch me restructure our Holiday in ten minutes while dressed as a Christmas toy.
I should want nothing more than to fling myself into dancing with Iris and Kris and shake off this stress and emotion, but the sight of the crowded ballroom only adds to my exhaustion.
I don’t want to be here.
I want to be in my room, ripping off this choking suit, and lying flat out on my bed until my chest stops aching.
Today was a victory but it doesn’tfeellike a victory, and the thing that’s missing is taking up so much space that I tug on Iris’s hand once we’re a step inside the ballroom.
“I’m going to bed,” I tell her, voice raising as the music gets louder.
“Like hell you are!” She grips my hand in both of hers. “You need to dance.”
“I don’t. What happened to Kris? Did he get swallowed in small talk? I should go find—”
“He’s over there.” Iris points into the ballroom. “And youneed to dance,Coal.”
She says each word with an odd weight. A sparkle in her eyes.
