Page 17 of Snowed In
“Some of those were intentional.”
“And the socks. With the—”
“Pom-poms.” I sigh, passing him one of the bottles. “Yeah.”
“How did we not bully the hell out of you?”
“Because knitting needles can stab,” I mutter.
“Do you make sweaters? Christmas ones, that kind of thing?”
“I mean, I can,” I say, and he nods as if storing that piece of information away for the future.
There’s a moment of silence, one broken only by the wail of a siren in the distance, and then he clinks his bottle against mine. “Cheers.”
I murmur it back, taking a sip at the same time he does and all the while pretending that I’m not studying the strong column of his throat, the full curve of his lips. With the long nose and hint of cheekbones, he looks the same as he did back in school. Just older now. Better. The unruly hair has been tamed and styled, the boyish face grown into something sharper and stronger, traits that usually aren’t my type, but tonight, definitely are.
He’s studying me too, though he’s being much more obvious about it, his dark eyes wholly on me until it becomes a bit of a game. Neither of us looks away. Neither of us blinks. When he takes another sip, I do too, and when he starts to smile, my mind starts to race, focusing in on those long fingers wrapped around the bottle, and imagining all the other places they could go. Imagining—
“You’re buzzing.”
“What?” Oh.
I wriggle out my phone from my back pocket, flustered. My mother is calling me.
“Let me just— Hello? Mam?” I point at the thing as though explaining to him what a phone call is. “You okay?”
“I’m fine!” She chirps down the line. “Can you talk?”
“I— Yes?” Christian’s already moving away, taking another swig of beer as he takes a seat at the table. “One second,” I say to my mother before going into my bedroom and closing the door behind me. One look at the place makes me extremely glad I did, and I put her on speaker as I move clothes from the floor to the laundry basket. “What’s up?”
“I got an email from Aidan just now. He’s back on the fifteenth.”
“That’s early.”
“Said he’s going to make a month of it. He can work from home, apparently. You know how it is these days.”
“I do,” I say, making the bed.
Aidan didn’t come back for Christmas last year because of a deadline, and the year before that, Mam and I flew out to Melbourne to be with him for the novelty of it. And at the time, it was a novelty. He was only supposed to be gone for a few months, but every time the topic of returning home came up, he’d make some excuse, or he’d get a promotion or a new girlfriend, and he’d push it back. No one expects him to return permanently. No one that is, except my mother, who still talks about the whole thing like he’s gone backpacking for the summer, and not, you know, emigrated ten thousand miles away.
“So, what day can we expect you?” she asks now. “I think it would be nice if you were here when he was.”
“Uh…” I re-tuck my fitted sheet, checking for errant socks as I go. “I guess I haven’t really thought that far ahead.”
My mother makes a disapproving noise, letting me know that that was the wrong answer. “You said that last month.”
“And I’m saying it this month. Christmas is weeks away.”
“You’re still coming home, aren’t you?”
“Of course, I am,” I say, feeling a twinge of guilt at the suspicion in her voice.
It’s not like I don’t understand it. I was telling the truth to Christian earlier. I haven’t stepped one foot in the village since I ran out on my wedding. Of course, she doesn’t believe me.Iwouldn’t believe me.
But while Aidan may be covering the physical miles, I’d be covering the mental ones, ones I’d happily cross a few oceans to avoid. I didn’t think about the repercussions at the time, but it wasn’t just my fiancé I left behind at the altar. It was everything.
I was fifteen years old when Isaac first asked me out. He was the first boy I ever dated. The first boy I ever kissed, and we became the kind of couple where you didn’t hear one name without the other. Where you didn’t exist apart.
