Chapter 26
I have seen the movie Elf no fewer than thirty-seven times in my life, so I can imitate Buddy’s imitation of a New York City radiator pretty freaking flawlessly.
But only upon stepping into Eve’s room do I realize how flawless his imitation was.
Eve’s hisses away against the wall, but I can’t say it’s the actual reason I’m so unbelievably hot now and struggling to breathe evenly.
Aside from the radiator, there’s so much here to take in as Eve looks around for something. Curls of twinkle lights frame her mirror, and there’s a bookshelf with a bunch of philosophy books I’ve never heard of.
There are even a few Yuletide symbols. There are two copies of A Christmas Carol and she has a Happiest Season poster, from which Christmas dykon K-Stew is staring down at me as if watching in anticipation. I could spend hours studying all the little things that make up this beautiful human.
“Okay, come on,” she says, and she actually grabs my hand now, just like she did last night when she led me around that corner, but with more force this time. More urgency. And now my eyes are wide open.
She pulls me out of her room and back toward the stairwell.
“Wait, what? Where?” I stammer, but she shushes me.
We head up, not down, though, and once we reach the top of that flight of stairs, we take another, and by the time we arrive at an unmarked door, I’m seriously sucking wind and totally disoriented.
The air is way colder in the stairwell than her cozy bedroom.
I’m going to have to do some intense cardio conditioning before I move to New York.
“So, I know you guys have to get moving,” she says, putting her palm on the door and turning to me. She’s not at all breathless somehow. “But… I just thought… Well, you’ll see.”
She pushes on the door and it resists a little. There must be snow on the other side. Then she throws her shoulder against it and a layer of ice shatters. She steps through and reaches out to offer me a hand. This feels like a dream, even though I never could have imagined it in a million years.
But then it gets better. On the other side of the door is the most spectacular sight I’ve ever seen.
We’re six stories up on the roof of Eve’s building just before dawn.
The sky is blue velvet. No, blue agate. Was this rich palette of colors specially selected just to soothe my pounding heart?
In the distance, brownstones stand at attention like toy soldiers and those iconic water towers perch above rooftops like sentinels protecting this natural wonder.
When I turn just slightly, the Manhattan skyline comes into view. At this hour, it’s still mostly bathed in shadow, as if it might be frozen just beneath the surface of a lake.
Somewhere, there’s the distant rumble of a train—maybe it’s just started running again—and the grind of an aggrieved snowplow on pavement down on the street.
But for the most part, the noise of this chaotic city is nearly eliminated, thanks to the untarnished blanket of white.
And in this moment, it’s like the whole of Brooklyn is holding its breath, too afraid to exhale and blow all this beauty away.
I am speechless. I would believe I was breathless, too, if not for the fog rising slowly from my own lungs. And even though the sun is clearly starting to wake itself up, gilding the edges of buildings and scattering glittery light across every surface, there is still a very clear view of the moon.
Our moon.
“Eve,” I say, because I cannot come up with a single other word that would explain the feeling in my chest.
She lets out a new laugh, and I somehow know it means she’s up on this cloud too. “I thought you might want to see where I am when I check the forecast,” she says. “So you can imagine it the next time you’re looking too.”
I shake my head, practically soaring.
“You… you get to see this anytime you want, and you’re telling me you don’t believe in magic?” I ask.
“You know, I think I’m being convinced,” she says, looking at me, not the view. Our eyes meet, and then she looks down at my hands, which are empty at the moment.
“Don’t you want to film this?”
“Oh,” I say, but then shake my head. “No. Sometimes a camera just can’t do justice to a scene. It’s too beautiful.”
“Well, when you do get back to filming, and your personal statement, I wanted you to have this.”
She reaches into her bag and pulls out what she grabbed from her room. It’s a book.
Introduction to Modern Humanism .
“It’s one of my favorites,” she says, and that’s evident by the battered cover and dog-eared pages.
She shrugs and puts her hands in her pockets.
I’ve given countless gifts in my life, and there’s always a scary moment—when you know you’ve put a little piece of yourself into whatever the thing is, and you just really hope the person is going to like it.
Gift giving can be such a vulnerable act, and it’s dawning on me that she’s putting herself out there with me, again.
“Wow,” I say, running my hand over the worn cover.
Sometimes it takes me a whole year to land on the right gift. And here Eve is, handing me something so meaningful, so thoughtful and perfect, and we haven’t even known each other for forty-eight hours. It actually makes me tear up, and I work so hard to fight the feeling this time.
“Thank you, so much. Really,” I stammer finally. “I love it.”
She laughs and I look up.
“You haven’t even read a word yet,” she says.
“Well, sometimes you just know…,” I say, and when our eyes meet again, they lock.
“Anyway, lots of good stuff for your project,” she adds. “Or, ya know—whatever it is that your heart tells you to do.”
My heart. What my heart tells me to do.
“Maybe… I’d love to…” I want to tell her that I’d love to discuss it with her after I read it. That I want to hear everything that’s in her head—about humanism, and life, and the future, and anything else she wants to tell me.
But with the way she’s looking at me, with the sparkling stars behind her head that are becoming fainter by the moment against the sunrise, the question that actually comes out of my mouth is:
“Can I… kiss you?”
And oh my god, I might actually choke, because my snack cake heart totally stops and I can’t breathe. I mean, who even am I?
But before I can fully dissolve into a puddle of nerves and humiliation faster than Olaf in summer, Eve looks at me, presses her lips together for a split second, then brings back the smirk I’ve now seen so many times in the last two days.
Slowly and so freaking smoothly, she puts one hand on my hip.
She finds my belt loop, and uses it to pull me closer.
My stomach tightens like a drum at her touch.
Even through my winter layers, there’s the heat of her.
With her other hand, she takes mine and it is soft.
And I am certain there hasn’t ever been anything softer in the entire universe.
That is, until what she does next. Because what she does next is put her lips directly on my lips, and now I know for sure that is the softest thing I’ve ever felt in my life.
I sink into her lips so completely, except somehow, even as I’m sinking, I’m also floating. Like a cloud. Like a Christmas ghost. Like a twinkling star hovering above the top of a tree.
Eve obviously knows what she’s doing so I let her set the pace.
The kiss starts slow, but then it’s like we find a rhythm, and everything that seemed to be happening so slowly goes into overdrive, and her hands are on my waist and my hands are in her hair, and I’m smiling and kissing her at the same time.
I am so inside my body but also living outside it, watching the whole scene, observing it like a documentary, taking mental notes so I can rewind and replay later, again and again and again.
The reality of it all is so much more magical than anything in my wildest dreams or scripts.
And just like Christmas, so totally worth the wait.
But then, just as fast as it started, we’re interrupted. It’s her phone, buzzing loudly. Again.
Our lips break apart and I’m trying not to blush too much, but Eve seems to be trying so hard not to smile too much, so I’m pretty sure we are both struggling to have even the slightest bit of chill.
She pulls out her phone and fully laughs when she gets a look at the screen.
“Shit,” she says, and shows it to me. It’s a message from Tía:
Eve! Are you seriously on the ROOF right now? What is going through your head?! Their ride is here, and they’re waiting on you!
I laugh too as she stashes it back in her pocket.
We’re still close. We’re so close and so still that now I can make out the little green flecks in her brown eyes, which I never could have seen before.
Sparkles for days. And then even though we’re both still laughing, we try to manage the business of kissing just a little more.
I wonder if it all still counts as the first kiss, or if now we’re onto a second and third.
“We’d better get back down there,” Eve says against my lips after a moment more.
I’m grinning, but what’s making me grin so hard isn’t even the fact that we just kissed, it’s how hard she’s grinning too.
I want to hang out with her all day and probably all the days after that.
I want to kiss her every one of those days.
And the fact that it looks like she’s feeling the same way? That is blowing my mind.
“So, how can I reach you?” I ask, because I’m not leaving this up to Fate or luck or the divine intervention of my friends ever again.
She takes the book from my hands so I can fish my phone out of my backpack. When I pass it to her, she inputs her details.
“There you go,” she says, returning the phone to me, and her number is confirmation that she wants to see me again too. I feel like Rudolph when he realizes Clarice likes him back. I am ready to take flight.
This is the Christmas magic I knew was out there. This is the proof. It lingers on my tingling lips.
“Thank you,” I say. “Now I won’t have to go on any more crazy missions through Brooklyn just to find you.”
I am already imagining more time like this . Thinking about how I could kiss her again. In fact, I may just do it one more time right now, but then Eve takes a step back. She raises her hand and starts scratching behind her ear with her pinky, chewing her bottom lip.
“What do you mean?” she asks, avoiding my gaze.
Something has changed, so quickly that I’m dizzy.
And then it hits me, what I’ve done. What I’ve said .
“I thought you were here for Audra, and cookies for your mom, and…”
I scramble to explain.
“I mean, yes, but… well, the truth is that the whole thing did kind of start as a way to find you. I just… I felt like we had such a connection at the farm. I thought it had to be magic, right? My friends… they thought so too.” I reach for her hand and add, “And now we know for sure.”
But this time, she pulls her hand away.
“You almost had me believing, Strudel.” She shakes her head, like she’s mad at herself. “But this wasn’t Fate. It was just you forcing it.”
“ Forcing is a pretty strong word,” I say. “We just kind of… helped things along. The magic put us together in the first place. You have to see that…,” I say. Those sparkles are not nothing. This all means something. It means everything .
I thought based on the way she just kissed me that she felt the same way.
But now Eve takes another step away from me like I’m radioactive. A spell has been broken. Her grin is gone, and she looks to the door.
“I don’t have to do anything, Strudel,” she says. “I don’t even know you.”
“Huh?” I stutter. “That’s not true. I have been more honest with you than anyone, ever.” Which is true. Somehow, even in our short time together, I’ve shared the most meaningful parts of me with her. And now she knows how I kiss, too, and what could be more intimate than that?
“None of it was real,” she says. Panic seizes my heart. “And honestly, even if it was, I can’t get caught up with someone right now. I have to focus on my plan for me and Hugo, not some magic whatever. We’re going in opposite directions.”
My life just went from a daydream to a nightmare so fast, I have whiplash.
Another buzz interrupts us. This time, it’s my phone—Izaac’s ring.
He wouldn’t interrupt if it wasn’t getting weird down there. I look at her, and realize I need to leave anyway, otherwise I’m going to lose it and start crying right here in the cold.
“Right,” I say. “Yeah. Well… I guess I’ll go, then.”
I wait for her to stop me, to ask me to stay or at least tell me she didn’t mean any of that. But she doesn’t. The moon is just about gone now, and so are all the sparkles in her eyes.
I head back to the door and the stairway.
I take them as fast as I can without slipping in my wet sneakers.
Then I’m running past her bedroom with her bookshelves and her bed and her mirror and her clanging, hissing radiator, toward the ground floor, and the exit.
Leaving Eve and every trace of our magic behind me.