Page 26 of Holiday Interference
I nod toward her with my cup. “So, you do event planning?”
“Not just any events,” she says, grinning. “Mostly sports charity events. Football, baseball, soccer, hockey. Which, as you can imagine, means corralling giant man-children and corporate sponsors who think it’s all just a tax write-off.”
I laugh. “Sounds like a nightmare.”
“It is,” she says brightly. “But at least there’s usually alcohol and glitter involved.”
Another beat.
Then, softer, “I used to be corporate. Suits, structure, ninety-hour weeks.”
“Why’d you leave?”
She pauses. Long enough that I glance over. Her gaze is straight ahead, not on me. “My mother died rather suddenly. She was always on me about how much I worked. And I realized—after she was gone—that she was right. It made me rethink what I wanted my life to look like.”
The words land heavy. Not dramatic. Just true.
“I’m sorry.”
She nods, sips her coffee, doesn’t say anything more for a few steps.
“You ever had that moment?” she asks. “Where everything’s fine, until it’s not? And you can’t go back to who you were before it happened?”
Yeah.
It’s on the tip of my tongue to tell her about the call. The frozen weight in my chest when I realized she was gone. How quiet the world got after.
Instead, I say, “Yeah. I know that moment.”
She glances at me, and the look in her eyes says she knows I didn’t say all of it. But she doesn’t push.
We round the corner back toward the building. Her boots—the ones I gave her—are comically large, and the right one slips sideways on a patch of ice I didn’t see coming.
She gasps. Stumbles.
I drop my coffee and reach for her.
My arm wraps around her waist, steadying her as both cups hit the ground with a mutedthunkand a slosh of brown across the slush.
Her palms land flat against my chest.
My breath catches.
So does hers.
For a split second, we’re frozen like that—my arm locked around her, her face inches from mine, eyes wide, mouth parted just slightly.
If I lean in, just a little…
I don’t.
Instead, I pull back half a beat too fast and let her go.
“You okay?” My voice comes out low, rough.
She nods, cheeks flushed. “Yeah. Sorry. Guess I didn’t stick the landing.”
Her tone’s light, but something flickers behind her smile.
