Page 36 of The Hanukkah Hoax
“What a mangled mess,” he said, shoving his hands into his coat pockets, secretly wishing the bagel shop where he’d asked Marisa to meet him had decided to close due to three inches of snow so he wouldn’t have to explain the what and whys of his mistake.
No, not a mistake. His actions.
He’d kissed Marisa. Not just kissed her but stormed over to her during her family’s holiday celebration and captured her as if she were the last survivor in a gruesome battle theater he’d been charged with protecting. A bit dramatic to think of things in such a way, but he hadn’t exactly been working with an abundance of common sense lately, had he?
Desperation made for lousy decision-makers. Though, try as he might, he couldn’t bring himself to regret his choice. Oh, he certainly didn’t love the open-mouthed stares and barely shielded giggles that had tittered around him as his arms sank into the curve of Marisa’s lower back and he savored the moment when she relaxed against him, the anxious tension fleeing them both.
But when he’d seen that man—who he later learned had zero interest in Marisa—get so close to her, touching her elbow and breathing against her ear, and her forcing out a smile Alec didn’t bloody well care for, something inside him had snapped.
And because he’d always been a right bastard when provoked and a particularly selfish one when it came to Marisa, he was finding out, Alec had held her against him longer than he needed to.
Longer than he had any right to.
Essentially, his brutish body had taken over once his brain had been benched.
Alec cupped his hands to his mouth and blew heat into them. Even as he fought off the chill of the snowy morning, his fingers still remembered that slight shudder that had run through Marisa when the air left her and she’d finally settled against him. He was fairly certain essential parts of him were now dedicated to that little shiver.
Then everyone started snapping their damn photos, and before Alec could muster the urgency to tear himself away from her, the social media storm he’d hoped to carefully and strategically craft with Marisa’s say-so ignited like bloody wildfire, and there was fuck all he could do to call it back.
He didn’t know how much of the social media storm she’d seen yet, but if she’d been tagged in at least half of the gossipy posts he’d been, all because of his foolishness . . .
Alec’s elbow bumped into a pine garland snaking over the doorjamb to the bagel shop, karmically knocking a chunk of snow onto his T-shirt.
Thankfully, unlike when he’d met Marisa at the pizza place, which was clearly an establishment devoted to her turf and terms, the bagel shop he’d chosen was closer to Cal’s apartment, in a different side of town from where Marisa lived.
Plus, he was thirty minutes early, and due to the snow, the place was blessedly quiet. No way in hell was he going to apologize to a woman who’d already been given the upper hand by letting her choose her battlefield and set up camp early. He wasn’t that thick.
When the wee bell above the door chimed and Marisa finally joined him, the five different scenarios he’d run through his mind of how their conversation might go evaporated. Stuffed beneath the egregiously chunky scarf that seemed like more of a shield to hide behind than a way to ward off the weather, Marisa’s lips were tight, her face drawn in frustration. Her eyes, though, were unmistakable in their messaging.
In the new light of her thirties, Marisa Silver was scared. All because he’d bloody kissed her.
Alec stood and gestured to the seat in front of him, where a steaming to-go cup sat far more patiently than he had. “Hey there. I got you coffee. Wasn’t entirely sure how you took it, but I figured?—”
Marisa’s scarf hadn’t even unwrapped from her hair fully before she plopped down and took the lid off the cup. With the practiced precision of a woman who’d likely cut her teeth on Jersey diner caffeine and convenience store carafes, she didn’t say anything as she took in the black coffee, reached for the little cluster of half-and-half creamers Alec had brought to the table, and dumped in two. She didn’t bother stirring it. Instead, she simply swirled the cup around until the liquid obediently lightened to her mental specifications.
Once satisfied, she took a sip, let her eyes fall closed, sighed, and only then did she bother taking off her coat. “Coffee will forever and always be my favorite person.”
When she opened her eyes and came back to him, her worried gaze returned, and her expression had taken on a bit of a lecturing look that seemed to silently plead for an explanation.
It was the sweetest form of condemnation he’d ever witnessed, and it was bloody effective at making him feel two inches tall.
“I should never have kissed you,” he blurted out, hating the lie as soon as it left his lips. If his heated blood was anything to go by, he most definitely should have kissed her, thoroughly, eagerly, and with as much expediency as the fire lit beneath his heels granted him. Which had been just shy of a metric fuck ton. But how the hell could he say that when they weren’t even dating in the first place?
Marisa halted the cup she brought to her lips, her features morphing from aggrieved to . . . Was that hurt? Or was she just sick of his words already?
Bloody fucking hell, he was making a mess of this.
“No, what I mean is that I shouldn’t never have kissed you,” he added quickly, “but I never meant for you to suffer because of it.” Alec took a sip of his black coffee, hoping to find answers in something with more experience being so bitter. He got nothing except a burned tongue and a mug of judgmental sludge.
“I wasn’t suffering for it,” she replied, looking down into her coffee. “It was?—”
“Unexpected and out of line, I know. My agent called me and gave me some shitty news, telling me that, basically, unless things change, come the spring, I’ll likely be traded to Argentina as a veteran player tasked to lead their young club, or I can retire. Great Britain’s apparently already shopping around to replace my position, and everyone seems to have forgotten that I’m still on the fucking team, even when my doctor says I’m on track to rejoin in January for the next tournament. Brennan’s a good guy and all, but he’s not hearing me. None of them are. They haven’t even given me a damn chance to prove what I’m still capable of, and they’re already moving on to the next name on the roster. So, right when I finally hung up on all of that mess, I looked through the patio glass door and saw that blonde bloke moving in on you, trying to make you laugh but mostly seeming to make you cringe, and I wanted to fucking kick myself for abandoning you there when I promised to be by your side.”
He was beginning to spiral a bit, but he didn’t care. The seal had been broken, and it felt good to get it all out. “I kissed you because if we were really dating, I’d want people to know that you’re worth keeping, worth claiming, even if I’m not. I’m so sorry, Marisa. I should have asked earlier. I should have gone over some ground rules about how you wanted things handled. And I bloody well shouldn’t have put you in a position where half the fucking Internet gets to see me pawing at you in an unstaged intimate moment.”
A chilled silence stretched between them, settling around the word intimate like an avalanche of poor choices. Alec winced at just how few favors the confession did him, especially the ripple of awareness that crept beneath his skin and started to get his blood up when he saw just how crimson Marisa’s cheeks had flushed after he’d said the word.
Oh, for fuck’s sake. Was there anything he could say that wouldn’t land him mired in shit and anxiety? Lamely, he glanced toward the food counter, hoping that one of the line cooks would take pity on him and lob him onto the griddle along with the bacon and eggs.
