Page 60 of Host for the Holidays
Rémy nods, and I reluctantly leave my cozy place under his arm to show them how to flip the camera around.
“Oh!” the lady says. “I thought that was a recycle button.”
“Totally understandable,” I say, wondering what exactly she thinks recycling means in the context of a digital camera picture.
When I turn back around, Rémy and I share amused smiles. He puts his arm up, ready for me to take my place again, and my heart goes berserk. Maybe I’ve lost my ability to be a normal, friendly human, because my heart seems programmed to assume more.
I brace myself for the lady to tell us to scoot closer or say something like,Come on! Act like you like each other.
But I did her wrong. She’s way too focused on handling the technology she’s holding. She presses the shutter button, squeezing the phone with her other hand while she does it like it’s a gun and she’s bracing for the recoil. And then it’s done, and Rémy and I have no reason to stay in our totallyplatonic pose.
We break away from each other, expressing our gratitude to the couple as the woman hands me my phone. I resist the urge to look at the photo immediately and see whether my suspicions are correct and I’m now the proud owner of a twenty-photo burst of Rémy and me.
The couple thanks us and, just before they turn to leave, the lady shoots Rémy a look. “She’s beautiful. Inside and out. A real keeper.”
There it is, folks. I guess once you’ve lived five decades and been married thirty years, you’ve earned the right to make comments like that. This lady is probably on her way to ask some poor, very unpregnant woman when her baby is due.
“She is, isn’t she?” Rémy says. “Happy anniversary.”
I wave, glad it’s fully dark now so my red cheeks and glassy eyes aren’t quite as visible. Does Rémy really think I’m beautiful? Wait. Was he confirming thebeautiful inside and outpart or theshe’s a real keeperpart?
Chill. Out.Madison.He was being polite. He couldn’t very well say, “Nah, she’s average, and I’m sending her home in a couple weeks.”
He turns to me. “Well,shereally liked you.”
“Yeah, and all it took was showing her how to recycle a photo.”
TWENTY-FIVE
RÉMY
Madi swipes toopen her phone, and I watch her as she navigates to an app. The lady is absolutely right. Sheisbeautiful, and sheisa keeper, and I’m feeling insanely jealous of Josh that he’s the one who actually gets to keep her. Where is he, anyway? It’s hard for me to believe whatever he had to do (instead of proposing to Madi?) still has him busy.
But Madi doesn’t seem to be preoccupied wondering about that. Her hand shoots up to cover her mouth, but I can see from the way her eyes crinkle at the sides that she’s smiling underneath.
“What?”
She moves next to me and puts out her phone so I can see the screen. It’s the picture the lady took. Madi is cut off at the side, and I’m dead center.
I stop a smile. “Ha! Look who the beautiful keeper isnow.”
Madi looks up at me with an eyebrow cocked. “Don’t get too big a head now. Given the quality of her eyesight, I’m not sure how much of a compliment that is.”
Her expression is so teasing and—dare I sayflirtatious?—that I can’t help but react by tickling her.
She immediately squeezes her arms to her sides to stop me, but how am I supposed to stop when her laugh sounds like that? It must continue.
She grabs my coat with her free hand, begging for mercy amidst breathless laughter, and I reluctantly relent because Madi’s efforts to get away from me have migrated us across the floor so that we’ll be running into people any second. In fact, we’ve attracted attention, and the lady we nearly ran into is looking at us with anything but amusement on her face.
Yeah, I might have gotten a bit carried away. That’s what happens when you have a lot of pent-up attraction. But Madi doesn’t seem to mind, even though she notices the look the lady is giving us. She glances at me, clenching her teeth with a look that says,Yikes. Then, she takes out her phone and pulls up the picture again.
“She took a burst of photos,” she says, “so now I have . . . yep, thirty pictures. With you in the middle of them all. Oh, nope! Look. You’ve migrated away from the center in some of these last ones.”
The final photo isalmostcentered. The way it affects my heart to see Madi and me next to each other is wild. There is officially a digital footprint of us—or thirty footprints, I guess—and I have never liked a footprint more than I do now.
I glance over at her. She’s looking at the picture with her head tilted to the side. What is she thinking? There’s no way she likes it as much as I do, and it makes me sad to think she’ll probably delete twenty-nine of the thirty.“Should we ask someone else to take a picture?”
“Absolutely not.” She turns off the phone, leaving all of them intact. “These have so much character. They capture the moment perfectly. What would we even do with a normal photo?”
