Page 13 of Mashed Hearts
I grab my coat, slip out the side door so I don’t alert the peanut gallery, and close it softly behind me. The cold bites instantly, but I don’t care. She’s leaning on the railing, breath fogging in the air, staring at the tree line like it owes her money.
“Hey,” I say, voice low so I don’t startle her.
She turns, and the porch light catches the snow in her lashes. “Hey.”
I lean on the railing beside her, close enough that our sleeves brush. The flannel dwarfs her, sleeves rolled up to her elbows, and I have to fight the urge to tug her into me and warm her up properly. “Nice night.”
“Mm-hmm.” She doesn’t look at me, just hugs her arms tighter around herself.
Silence stretches, but it’s not the awkward kind. It’s loaded, heavy with four years of unsaid things. Finally, I go for it.
“I’m sorry, Kait.” The words come out rough, scraped raw from somewhere deep. “Not just for leaving. For the way I left. Texts that got shorter until they stopped. Calls I let go to voicemail because I was too chickenshit to hear your voice and admit I’d made a mistake. I was a scared kid who thought running three thousand miles away was the same as growing up. I was wrong. About all of it.”
She’s silent for a beat, “you ghosted me, Josh. For months. I thought—” Her voice cracks like thin ice. “I thought I’d done something. That I wasn’t enough to make you stay. And then, I just stopped waiting, I gave up. We were together for almost three years, three years of happiness that flipped a switch overnight.”
The words hit like a sucker punch. “You didn’t. You were—” I swallow hard. “You were perfect. You are perfect. I was the idiot who couldn’t handle perfect getting complicated by logistics and pride and a scholarship I thought defined me.”
She turns to face me fully, eyes shiny in the porch light. “I waited. For months. Checked my phone like a lunatic waiting for a text that never came. Then I stopped. I had to.”
“I know.” My voice is barely above the wind. “I don’t want a do-over. We’re not those kids anymore. But I want a new beginning. Different people, same heart.”
She bites her lip, and snow catches on the curve of it. “You hurt me.”
“I know.”
“I still care.” A whisper, almost lost in the snowfall. “I never stopped. Not really.”
The world narrows to the space between us. Snow swirls like confetti at a wedding nobody invited us to. I take a step closer, close enough to see the freckles across her nose, the tiny scar onher eyebrow from the time she fell and scraped her face against a tree when she was little.
“Then let’s be idiots who try again,” I say. “No games. No ghosts. Just us, figuring it out like adults who’ve learned how to use their words.”
“There are still hundreds of miles between the two of us. That’s what broke us in the first place.”
“That’s not true. It was me then, not the miles, it won’t be me again. You’ve always been in the back of my mind, no matter what, over the years. You are seared on my heart, it’s always been you. It will always be you.”
She searches my face, eyes flicking over every feature like she’s memorizing me all over again. Then—thank you, universe, thank you, snow gods, thank you, Ainsley’s turkey—she smiles. Small, unsure, but open. And then she kisses me.
Not a dare. Not a memory. A choice.
Her lips are cold from the night air, warm where they meet mine, tasting like red wine and cranberry and the faintest trace of marshmallow. I cup her face, thumbs brushing her cheeks, and kiss her back like it’s the first time and the last time and every time we should’ve had in between. Snow melts on our eyelashes. The porch light flickers like it’s cheering us on. Somewhere inside, Beth probably has binoculars and a live-stream, but I don’t care.
When we pull apart, she’s smiling for real, the kind that reaches her eyes and makes the snow look dull by comparison.
“New beginning?” she asks, breath fogging between us.
“Same heart,” I answer, and lace my fingers through hers.
She squeezes once. “Don’t make me regret this, Surfer Boy.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it, Jamison.”
We stand there until our toes go numb and the snow piles an inch deep on the railing, the cabin warm and glowing behind us.And for the first time in years, the future doesn’t feel like a ghost haunting the hallway.
It feels like hers. Mine. Ours. Wrapped in flannel and forgiveness and the kind of hope that tastes like chocolate and second chances.
kait - 18 years old
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