26. Lacie
LACIE
The hair raised on my nape. I reared into the couch cushions, affronted at the accusation, and yet, he had a point. It was the whole reason why I hadn’t brought the matter up again.
I had meant to wait until we got back home.
“That’s why I didn’t push you to talk after we kissed,” he said. “I was going to suggest we go home and see what happens. I was going to ask you to examine your feelings, to see if you might…”
I hung on his words. “Might?”
“If you want to keep on keeping on with me. You and me. Jared and Lacie. Only this time, we could be what everyone thinks we are. Not because everyone thinks we should be a thing. But because it’s what we both want.”
What we both want.
Jared went on while the words filled the air around us like snowfall. “What if Wyatt breaking up with you, what if this whole radio mess that happened here, was some kind of meant-to-be situation?”
“I—” I didn’t know what to say.
“This is how I’ve always felt about you, it’s just that—” He broke off, as if uncertain how to finish. “It’s just that it took a fake marriage to get me to open my eyes to how much you mean to me. I love you.”
I couldn’t move. The pain left my ankle. The chill in the air didn’t exist. I didn’t notice anything but him.
“Jared,” I said on a breath.
“I’m serious.”
“I—I don’t know what you want me to say.”
Last week, I’d loved Wyatt. And while I’d been sad about his harshness, that was all it was.
But I’d always loved Jared. I just hadn’t seen that love for what it really was.
I supposed that was just the problem—what kind of love was it?
I wished I could move. Look at him directly, see the truth lingering in his eyes.
But my ankle wouldn’t allow much right now, and the room was cold. Leaving the blanket meant I’d get cold, too.
Instead, my hand roamed down his arm, chills shimmering along my skin as my palm opening against his. He flattened his hand, and we looked at the differences in our hands.
His fingers had always been longer than mine.
I could hardly breathe. I was dazed, floating, and yet completely grounded with him keeping me in place.
His chest lifted in one long breath. Was his heart thundering like mine?
In one gradual, deliberate motion, I fanned out my fingers just enough to find the spaces between his. The heat between us expanded as well, curling around my heart. I was settled. I was home. Because I was with him.
For a fleeting moment, I worried he’d pull away, but his fingers curled together, fitting right back with mine.
I took heart in that.
“Don’t tell me we haven’t had enough time together for me to know this,” he said. “I love you. I’ve always loved you. It’s always been you . And even though I’m fighting all this confusion inside, I’m glad I finally told you.
“I wish I’d told you sooner. I wish I’d done so many things differently. But at least I told you before it was too late.”
His fingers tightened, fisting around mine, making my blood pulse even more noticeably.
“When I married someone else, you mean,” I said.
He let our hands drop. “I don’t know what happened with that snowman. I don’t know who posted those pictures of us. I don’t?—”
I couldn’t take it. We couldn’t have this conversation if I couldn’t see his face.
As if he sensed as much, Jared adjusted, resting his arm on the back of the couch behind my head. He created a cage around me, locking me in. His eyes were black pools in the darkness, and they glimmered as they fastened right on me.
I was locked into his glance. Heat built between us, tacking onto the air itself. I could hardly breathe.
Shuddering, I placed my hand on his chest. Sure enough, his heart was pounding, matching mine beat for beat.
He didn’t pull away. Gradually, a millimeter at a time, they trailed to my lips. And even though it was dark, I could see the torment taking place inside those depths. The inner conflict, tearing him between doing what was right and doing what he wanted.
At this point, what was right and what he wanted were both the same thing. Yet, I couldn’t move past his worries about being a rebound.
Because this kind of was—if someone were looking for the technical definition. And I didn’t like that fact.
But just because that may have been true, my feelings were more than that, too.
“If you don’t love me back,” he said in that low, gravelly tone of his, “that’s okay. But according to this new reality, we’re married. What if things don’t change? Have you ever thought about being with me like this? Being with me as more than friends?”
“I have,” I said, hoping the statement came out lighthearted.
I may not have thought about it as often as he probably did, but the thought had crossed my mind.
My hand was still on his chest. His closed over mine, and I watched the muscles in his throat move as he swallowed.
“I used to think about it every day,” he said.
Every day? He wanted to be with me?
“How come you never said anything?”
“You wouldn’t have listened.”
I chuckled but didn’t deny it.
“It’s taken you so long to get the hint. If you’d cottoned on before, we wouldn’t be in this mess.” He added a small smile to the taunt.
I straightened my spine. “You can’t tell me you’re blaming me for being with Tia. Is that what you’re saying?”
“I don’t know what I’m saying.”
Various scenarios presented themselves, and with every single one, I knew something I hadn’t known before?—
He was right. We could never go back to being Lacie Sorensen and Jared Kingston.
Friendship was impossible now. Any time we were together, I would always want more. Jared had said as much the night I’d stormed out of our room.
This fake marriage had ruined everything. We could never be what we were.
From this point on, it had to be all or nothing between us.
He would go on selling security systems. I’d go on arranging events. We would have to call it quits. Meet new people—or he’d make up with Tia and convince her to date him again.
The thought of that reality was more bizarre than magic radios and disappearing reindeer. Because I couldn’t picture my life without him in it, not now that he’d kissed me. Now that he was holding my hand and touching me like this.
I couldn’t picture us acting any other way.
Which meant he wasn’t a rebound after all.
I summoned every ounce of courage I had. “But if you love me, we can go home and make this real. We can do the wedding for real. We can do it all. The pictures, the dress, the tux. We can be the Kingstons, the package deal. We can?—”
In a tender, calculated motion, a motion packed with the sense of acceptance and admiration and emotion I couldn’t put words to, Jared’s warm hand slid past the hair curtaining my face and cradled my cheek.
The touch blazed across my skin. My eyes were captives, lost in the gleam in his.
“I love you,” he said.
My mouth was suddenly dry. “You love me as in I’m the sister you never had? Or you love me as in…”
He didn’t let me finish. His thumb stroked across the fulness of my lower lip, and my heart stopped.
I held my breath, waiting for him to lower his face, to press his lips to mine.
To fall, dive, to float. No longer cold. No longer confused.
I bunched his shirt in my fist and tilted in, feeling his breath stroke my mouth while longing pooled within me.
“Jared,” I breathed.
“I love you, but I can’t kiss you. Not again,” he said.
I stilled, holding a final grasp on the hope that had built up moments before. “Why not?”
Conflict warred, taking over his expression. “Because this is all I can give you.”
“What kind of ‘this’?”
“Friendship. Someone to lean on. I can’t be more than that for you right now.”
I stared at his face. “Jared. We’re—we’re married now.”
He stroked my cheek. “But we’re not. Look at your left hand. I never put a ring there. I never proposed to you. I never broke up with Tia, and I never?—”
I sat up—and winced. For a few blessed moments I’d forgotten about my ankle, but it throbbed with the tiniest movement. Stupid sprain. If only I could pry myself away from this couch, don my boots, and brave the storm back to the inn.
“Never what?” I said. “Finish it.”
“I never should have done this.” He took my hand in his again. “Please don’t take that the wrong way. You mean more to me than anything. But we can’t act like we’re married now, not when we don’t know what’s going on, not when we don’t know how long it will last.
“I do love you, and I always have. I want to be with you because it’s something we choose. But not like this.”
My mouth hung open. I searched for an argument to counter his protestations, but he was right.
We hadn’t chosen this. I couldn’t justify it away.
His heat left my side as he stood. He adjusted his shirt and crossed to the window.
“It’s still snowing, but the wind has settled. You want to try making it back to the inn now?”
The inn. Harper’s Inn.
I felt listless and defeated, hollowed out like a jack-o-lantern with a carved, fake leer.
What was happening? What if things never went back to normal? Would he keep his distance from me from now on?
“And then?” I asked.
“Then what?”
After this, everything between us would end. He was willing to give up our entire life-long friendship for Tia.
“What do we do when we get back to the inn?”
He crossed to where his boots sat and stuffed one foot in, then the other. Then he bent to tie them. “Then we do what you suggested. We go home and find some normalcy.”
An uncontrollable flush of panic crashed over me. “And Tia?”
“She’s still on her cruise.”
Was she, though, in this alternate universe?
“I can’t—” I choked on the words. “I can’t go back to normal after this.”
He rose and stared at me a few moments before the sound of his steps broke the silence. His clothing made creasing noises as he knelt in front of me.
“I can’t make you any promises right now, not when we don’t know more. I do love you. But I can’t be more.”
“What about that paper?” I said in a flash of desperate inspiration. “The one we found on the reindeer’s antlers. Do you still have it?”
If it were true that Santa was really behind this mess we were in, maybe that page had some insight about what would happen next.
“Yeah,” he said, adjusting and pulling it from his pocket. It had become a wad, but he unfolded it and held it up to the light for me to see.
I read aloud:
“December 13 th
Their confusion is to be expected. This is the radio’s first run, after all, and any number of reindeer got turned around during their training rounds after I enchanted them to fly. Why wouldn’t a radio?”
I stopped reading and looked at Jared. “Is he saying the radio makes mistakes?”
A line appeared between Jared’s brows. “Is that all it says? Keep going.”
“What they don’t know is that I’ve implemented a failsafe. Something within the radio itself to ensure it reads the hearts of those who hear it. A puzzle piece, if you will. A map that leads to secret places, one that can only be found if the seeker is the right person to find it.
The bottom of the page had been torn. The words were cut off. And a sense of anticipation gripped the tip of my tongue, making me want to read more words when there were none.
“That’s it,” I said, feeling the anticipation in my chest deflating like a punctured tire.
“There’s no more?”
I fanned the paper at him. “What nonsense. What was the point of giving us that?” I didn’t mean to be bratty about this, but what did this have anything to do with our current situation?
Santa was off his rocker. Maybe the radio was evidence of that and had made a mistake after all.
He hadn’t just made a mistake.
He’d ruined our lives.
My stomach hardened. I sifted through the hurt, anger, shock, and betrayal all scrambling for precedence inside of me.
“Let’s take it to Junie and see if she can decipher anything we’re not seeing,” he said.
“Yes,” I said, breathing hard. “Because I’m so done.”
The worst part was, Jared had it right. Of course, he did. We were lost in the woods, unable to choose a direction until we had a pin drop to tell us exactly where we stood.
There was no other option now but to admit defeat.
“Do you think you can get your foot back into your boot?” he asked.
Amazingly, my voice made it through the barrier building in my throat. “I—I don’t know.”
“Try your good foot first.”
I did so. Easily.
Crouching near my side, he helped with my other boot. I clamped my teeth down, holding in the cry that tried to escape. The pressure against my ankle was too much.
With Jared’s help, we got the boot on over my swollen ankle.
I refused to let him carry me down the stairs this time. Slowly, one hobble at a time, I made it to the main floor.
We managed to push back out into the snow. While heavy drifts created white waves down the center of the road, the barnyard’s elevated position had left the snow fairly level.
The night sky had cleared. Moonlight shone down, and I felt like it was mocking us.
I paused, keeping one hand propped against Jared for stability, and stared up as I’d done many times before. I remembered winter nights from my childhood, times I’d imagined Christmas and thought I’d pictured Santa Claus drifting across the sky, appearing before a moon just like this one.
Stupid, childish fantasies. Just like my feelings for Jared.
We’d never been quite this emotionally transparent before—not about one another, anyway. Was he going to act weird around me now? What were we going to do?
It took much longer to make it back to the inn than it would have if I could have walked on both feet. The inn’s cinnamon-scented warmth was never so welcoming, nor so sad. I was eager to get up the final set of stairs, to settle into the room we never should have shared, to finish out the night and get what rest we could.
Because the instant I could, I was calling the airport.
We were going home, leaving Santa and his mistake behind.