Page 79 of Host for the Holidays
“She’s just testing the limits of your love, making sure it’s genuine.”
“Sounds manipulative. But I love her anyway.”
Why does my mind constantly want to assume that whenever Madi talks about Paris, she’s also kind of talking about me? “You kept so calm in there.”
“I don’t know if I would say calm . . . .” Her cheeks tinge with pink.
Come on, Madi. You can’t be looking at me like thatif you’re serious about just being friends.This is going to be . . . interesting.
I’ll just think of it like a willpower Olympics. Easy. I’m running a willpower marathon. With no training.
It’s a recipe for success.
THIRTY-THREE
MADI
Sleep is for the birds.That’s what my body’s decided. Or my brain, I guess. Every time I close my eyes, determined to sleep, I’m back in the elevator with Rémy, up against him with my hands in his hair and his hands gripping my waist while he kisses me senseless.
No, not senseless. It’s kind of the opposite of that. It dominatedallof my senses, which left zero bandwidth for remembering that we were stuck in a broken metal box five stories above ground.
Pro tip: if ever you find yourself in your worst nightmare, Rémy Scott will turn it straight into a daydream.
And a daydream is both how it feels and how it will remain because we’ve agreed to keep it light, keep it friendly. My whole Monica Geller “I’m breezy” vibe worked about as well as it did for her. Probably should have seen that coming.
Hopefully with both of us sharing the goal, though, it’ll actually be achievable. It’s the right decision. I shouldn’t be mixing myself up in a sticky emotional situation immediately after ending things with Josh, and Idefinitelyshouldn’t do it when I’ll be thousands of miles away soon. Even if kissing Rémy again feels like it’s probably worth the emotional fallout because let me tell you, that. kiss. was. something. else.
I turn over in my bed for the twentieth time, then surrender to my body’s tyranny and accept that I’m not going to sleep. I clamber down the ladder to grab my laptop and camera, which I take to the itty bitty table and chair under the bed. I can edit Laura’s photos and send them to her until my mind and body calm down enough to sleep. It should occupy me enough that my thoughts don’t wander to the elevator, since I can still feel the press of his chest against mine.
I touch a hand to my cheeks. Speaking of breezy, I could use a breeze about now. This whole time I’ve been worrying about the teenage girls in Rémy’s English classes. News flash: Iamthose teenage girls.I’mthe one everyone should be worrying about.
BUT I’m going to be an adult and keep it friendly like we decided. Because unlike a teenage girl, the prefrontal cortex of my brain is almost fully developed, which means I can plan and strategize and control my impulses. In theory.
A call comes in from Siena as I transfer yesterday’s files from my camera to my laptop.Oh dear.This will be interesting.
I answer, trying to keep it light and sound totally normal. But Siena is a bloodhound, and she smells something’s up from literally thousands of miles away, so I end up telling her about the elevator incident.
Siena isn’t breezy either. Not even close. It takes me a few minutes to bring her back down to earth as she hounds me for details.
“Lemme get this straight,” she says. “You, Madison Allred, who is afraid of small spaces, got trapped in a medieval elevator with the most beautiful human in France and proceeded to make out with him until help came?”
“A few things,” I say. “First, I’m fairly certain they didn’t have elevators in the middle ages. Second, there’s no solid proof that Rémy is the most beautiful human in France, though I admit I have no evidence to the contrary. And third, we actually kissedbeforewe were trapped.”
“You’re missing the forest for the trees, Mads. If you got trapped withmein an elevator, do you evenknowwhat would have happened?”
“Well, I definitely wouldn’t have kissed you, if that’s what you’re getting at. But it wasn’t as bad as it sounds.” I shrug, as if she can see me. “Rémy’s pretty good at keeping me calm.”
“If you can stay calm kissinghim, then I don’t know how to relate to you anymore. It would fall under theirreconcilable differencescategory, which means divorce.”
I roll my eyes, but I can’t stop a smile as I tap through the pictures of Laura and Luke in my editing software. “Okay, so I wasn’t calm,per se,but I wasn’t thinking about falling to my death or the walls closing in on me. But we talked afterward, and we both agree that it wasn’t smart, and we’re just going to be friends.”
Siena snorts like an actual pig. “Good one!”
“Itisgood.”
My heart skitters, and I stop scrolling when I come to the pictures Laura took of Rémy and me. And then I stare because this is a new and rare experience, like a blue whale sighting. Laura nailed the pictures. The focus is tack-sharp, the Eiffel Tower is positioned perfectly behind us at one of the rule-of-thirds “crash points,” and Rémy and I are both laughing and looking at each other.
Just friends.
