Page 14 of Christmas Crisis
“You can call your parents while I take a shower. I smell like an armpit.” She sniffed her shoulder.
“You do not smell like an armpit. I’m the one who’s been sweating at a jobsite all morning. I’ll call my folks and then shower when you’re done.”
“Hopefully they aren’t pissed at us.”
“I doubt they’ll be upset.”
Miranda grabbed a towel from the linen closet before hesitating outside the hall bathroom. “Leo?”
“Yeah?”
“It’s oddly okay, isn’t it? This thing we’ve set in motion. Once we’ve told everybody in our lives, all we have to do isdate. It seems too easy.”
“Miranda, you of all people know it’s not going to be that easy for me. I can stand next to you, take you out, hold your hand, and even put my lips on yours if you think it’s necessary. But I don’t know how to make it look real. Being with someone.”
Anchoring the towel over her shoulder, she approached and looped her arms around my neck. As my hands raised instinctively to grab her hips, she lifted on her tiptoes to kiss me on the cheek. “I’ll help you, Bear.”
I felt it again. The twinge. It raced through me, hiding and dipping and diving between the usual nothingness. I’d held Miranda in my arms like this dozens of times. But now, as she stepped away and sauntered into the bathroom, it was there. Not just a twinge. A lingering awareness.
Not so long ago, that feeling had been a revelation.
Now it taunted me.
Yesterday, Miranda worried things might be awkward between us because of leftover tension from our fight. She didn’t know it, but she was only half right.
23 MONTHS AGO - DECEMBER
Miranda and I didn’t stop talkingthe entire way back to Seattle. She hooked a playlist up to my truck, but we’d barely made it out of Coleman Creek before we turned the volume down to hear each other talk.
Getting to know her had been the highlight of my holiday, which was saying something, considering my brother James had just made it official with the love of his life. But no one could blame me for falling under Miranda’s spell. By the time she told me her three all-time favorite TV shows,Game of Thrones,Mad Men, andStranger Things—of which I’d seen all and includedMad Menin my top three—I realized how long it had been since I’d felt so relaxed and open with anyone.
I kept my acquaintances and work relationships surface-level. A quick coffee. The occasional movie or ball game. Things were just easier that way. An effective strategy for avoiding questions.
Being with Miranda reminded me that sometimes it was worth the discomfort of getting past the surface to forge a closerconnection with someone. I’d missed having that in my life since James moved to Coleman Creek.
Unfortunately, a tight bond wasn’t likely to happen with Miranda either, considering she was twenty-five and lived in California. But the thought of playacting at it with her for a few days lit a spark inside me.
Truthfully, it didn’t feel like playacting at all.
More importantly, by the time I turned my truck onto I-90, I had solved the question of the nickname.
“Panda?” she said incredulously, making a face. “Four days to think about it, and that’s what you come up with?”
“What? Itrhymes,” I declared, as though that settled the matter. “Plus, it’s generic enough to be meaningless.”
“Other than the rhyming?”
“Other than that. Obviously.”
“It makes zero sense.”
“Miranda-Panda, or just Panda to keep it simple. Because you’re cuddly and sweet, but you are also rare and exotic and precious.”
She stuck a finger in her mouth and made a gagging noise.
“It’s decided,” I said, grinning at the windshield.
She puffed up her cheeks. “Alright, then. How about I return the favor?”
