Page 93 of Holiday Romance
“Yeah. Just a few checks because he’s an early bastard.”
“An attention seeker like his mother. It’s nothing we can’t handle.”
She watches me as I brush the hair back from her forehead, her face softening with each movement. “Sorry I freaked out before,” she murmurs.
“I think you’re allowed to. Plus, you’re right. Christmas birthdays are the worst.”
“I know.” She groans. “It’s going to be so freaking expensive. And when he grows up, he’s just going to complain that he doesn’t get any attention.” She sighs. “He’s going to have to get a fake birthday too, isn’t he?”
“Maybe Mam and Dad were on to something.”
“Hmmm.” She tilts her head away and pats the bed beside her. “Get up.”
“What?”
“Get up!” she commands, tugging at the blanket. “I need a hug. All those hormones.”
I roll my eyes but there’s more than enough room in the bed for the two of us, so I do as requested, climbing carefully onto the mattress and twisting into her body, flinging an arm around her. We used to sleep like this when we were children and Mam first put us into our own rooms. It was a necessity, she claimed. She said we were too clingy and that we needed to learn to be independent. She wasn’t wrong. Zoe and I were inseparable back then and those first few days I didn’t know what to do without her. But Zoe especially found it hard. She started getting nightmares and eventually Mam let her come into me when she woke up (I think she only did it so that Zoe wouldn’t go intoher) and more often than not I’d wake in the morning to an elbow in my stomach.
Still, after all this time it feels natural to snuggle in next to her and lay my head on her shoulder. I think it always will be.
“Hey,” I whisper, setting her present on her lap. “Happy Christmas.”
“Oh no.” She grimaces, poking it with one finger. “Perfume?”
I nod.
“Yours is at the house. Ugh.” She lets the tissue paper fall to the bed as she turns the glittering pink bottle in her hands. It looks even worse than it did at the airport. “I can smell it already.”
“No sniffing,” I say as she brings it to her nose. “That’s cheating.”
“Alright. Alright.”
I watch with a smile as Zoe scrunches her eyes shut and sprays it a few inches from her chest. She immediately starts coughing.
“Oh myGod.”
“It’s good, right?”
“This can’t be healthy for the baby. I smell like a twelve-year-old girls’ magazine. From 2004.”
“A vintage bouquet.”
She winces again. “Don’t try and make me laugh. It hurts my vagina.”
“How does it—”
“I don’tknow,” she moans. “It just does. Don’t question me, I’m a new mother.” She burrows deeper into me and I wrinkle my nose at the perfumed smell of her. “Andrew seems nice,” she says after a minute.
“Smooth transition.”
“You want to tell me what’s going on there?”
“How did you—”
“Please,” she scoffs. “It’s obvious.You’reobvious.”
“We kissed.”
