Chapter 6
Reeve and Aaron
I don’t like dressing up.
I don’t like doing my hair and putting on makeup.
And Lord help me, but I hate high-heeled shoes with a passion.
But I like Aaron a whole lot, it turns out…which makes it a no-brainer to choose my prettiest outfit for New Year’s Eve at the Parsnip. Since I leave for Anchorage with Harper, Tanner, and Parker in four days, it’ll probably be the last time I see him for a while, too. I want to make it count.
Even a girl who lives on a campground in Dyea has access to the internet and, therefore, to the latest fashions at H&M. The dress I’m wearing tonight is black and sleeveless. It hugs my size eight body in all the best ways—making my cleavage look fuller and my hips look smaller—and because H&M is a one-stop wonder for shopping, I also bought black, high-heeled boots that go up to my knees, a red satin scrunchie holding my blonde hair back in a ponytail, and rhinestone earrings with a matching choker.
Will I be too fancy for the Parsnip?
Lord. Yes.
Most of my friends and family will be wearing jeans and a clean shirt or sweater.
Except for Ivy , I think. My brother’s fiancée (yes, fiancée!) has been known to dress up on occasion. So maybe I won’t stick out like a sore thumb, after all.
When Aaron knocks on my door at a quarter of nine, I grab my ridiculously small purse (à la H&M, of course!) and I’m shrugging into my parka when I open the door to find…my dad.
He takes one look at my outfit and chuckles.
“And here was me, thinking you were spending your last New Year’s Eve at home all alone.”
“Nope,” I say, grinning at him. “I’ve got plans.”
“Clearly. Care to fill me in?”
“Deputy Adams is squiring me to the Purple Parsnip,” I say, joining my father on the tiny cabin porch and pulling the door closed behind me. It’s a crisp, cool evening, with a million stars in the sky and the smell of woodfire wafting on the breeze.
“I approve of Aaron,” says my dad. “You know, he’s liked you for ages. I appreciate it that he waited until you were all grown up to ask you out.”
“I like him, too,” I say, thinking about that time I made a pass at him when I was only seventeen. “But he could’ve asked me sooner.”
“Nah,” says my dad, adjusting and readjusting his hands on the porch railing as he looks up at the stars. “This is good timing.”
“How’s that? I’m about to leave for college.”
“Exactly,” he says. “Impossible for you two to get too serious too fast.”
“You’re the worst.” I shake my head at him. “You, Gran, and Paw Paw having a fire up at the lodge?”
“Of course. And watching the TV. That stupid crystal ball probably just dropped in New York. Half finished with a bottle of bubbly already.” He shrugs. “Might have a couple more in the basement if we need ’em.”
Suddenly, standing on my porch, looking at the stars on New Year’s Eve with my dad, I’m reminded of Aaron’s and my conversation on the car ride to Canada a few weeks back, specifically, my thoughts on how some humans are meant to live life in pairs.
“You lonely, Dad?”
“What? Nah. No way.” He gestures to Tanner’s cabin, which is the only one in the campground with lights on, besides mine. “Your brother and McKenna live here with the baby, and Tanner said he’s going to have an architect come draw up plans for a second floor. They’ll be here long after I’m gone! You’ll be back in summertime. Hunter and Isabella, too. Harper, Parker, and Sawyer are all down in Skagway. Just a stone’s throw, really. More babies seem to be coming all the time. Lonely? Nah…”
“Dad,” I say gently. “I’m not talking about family. I know you have family. I’m talking about—”
“You didn’t know her.”
“What?”
“You don’t remember her.”
“Mama? No, I don’t, but I lost her, too.”
“She was something different, that woman. Something special.”
“And beautiful.”
“Lord, she was beautiful.”
“You miss her.”
“Like crazy,” he says, rubbing the shadow on his chin. “Every hour of every day.”
“That’s torture, Dad.”
“That’s love , Reeve. Real love. True love.”
“It’s no way to live,” I say. “You’re still young…ish. You’re only fifty-six! You’ve got, like, forty or fifty years left.” I smack his arm. “You’ve been grieving her for eighteen years now. Isn’t that enough?”
“I guess my heart’ll let me know when it’s enough, huh?”
His frosty tone tells me if I’m not already overstepping a line, I’m about to. And I guess that’s good timing, because the headlights of Aaron’s approaching truck tell me that my ride’s arriving, and it’s time to go.
“You’re not bad-looking, Dad,” I tell him, leaning up on tiptoes to kiss his cheek. “Get back out there.”
“Cheeky,” he mutters as I skip down the steps to meet my date.
Aaron parks the car in front of my cabin and hustles around to open my door. His eyes take a quick sweep of my boots, hair, and makeup, and he smiles at me.
“You look amazing ,” he whispers. Then, looking up at my dad, he calls, “I’ll keep her safe tonight, Mr. Stewart.”
“I know you will, Aaron, and Lord help you if you don’t, because Joe, Quinn, and Sawyer are all at the Parsnip tonight. They’ll be keeping an eye on her, too.”
“Great!” says Aaron. “One o’clock okay for her having her home?”
My dad’s eyes connect with mine through the windshield.
“Reeve’s over eighteen,” he says, winking at me. “When she gets home is up to her.”
“Thank you, sir!” says Aaron, maybe a bit too enthusiastically.
“But one sounds good to me,” he adds.
“One it is,” says Aaron, shutting my door and walking back around to his door.
My dad waves goodbye from the porch as Aaron pulls away from my cabin. He glances at me as we turn left onto the Old Dyea Road.
“You look beautiful tonight, Reeve.”
“Thanks,” I say, feeling a little breathless. “You look nice, too, I’m betting.”
All I’ve seen of Aaron’s New Year’s Eve outfit is his police parka, some dark slacks, and his regular cowboy boots. But I know this guy. I know he wants tonight to be special, and that means he’ll have put effort into how he’s presenting himself.
“Hey!” I say. “I have a question for you. It’s been bugging me.”
“Oh, yeah?” he asks. “Lay it on me.”
“What ‘thoughtful gift’ did you give McKenna and Tanner that impressed them so much? They both mentioned it, and…I don’t know, I guess I’m curious.”
“You are, huh?”
“Yeah. I am.”
“Okay, well, like me, McKenna was an only child, you know?”
“Well, you have two half-sisters in Jamaica.”
“Who I’ve met seven or eight times in my whole life.”
“Right. Okay. Keep going.”
“If you don’t have lots of siblings and cousins, you don’t have built-in ‘memory keepers.’”
“‘Memory’… What now?”
“‘Memory keepers.’ She doesn’t have five brothers and sisters who remember everything about her life. She has Isabella, sure, but my understanding is that Isabella already has a huge family, two living parents, cousins, aunts, and uncles, etcetera. But McKenna only had her grandmother, her Mimi, and no one else.”
“She has us now.”
“Yes, she does,” he says. “That’s for sure. But who you marry doesn’t change the first few decades of someone’s life. Someone who’s gone hungry might always be a little scared of being hungry again, right?”
“Yeah,” I say, wondering where he’s going with all of this. “I guess so.”
“And someone who’s been alone might be afraid that the big days in their life, and in the life of their child, could be forgotten. Another way to look at it? Because she doesn’t have any built-in ‘memory keepers’ from her childhood, it’s important that she has some way to be her own memory keeper. For ‘onlys’ like McKenna and me, it’s important to have a back-up plan that doesn’t rely on anyone else.”
And then it dawns on me. The photos with Santa. The photos of the cousins on their first Christmas together.
“You got her that camera, didn’t you? The real nice one she’s been using all month. You did that.”
He chuckles, looking at me with surprise and admiration. “Yeah. I did. I figured if she had a really awesome camera, she could collect her own memories. She wouldn’t have to worry about any moment of Madden’s life ever being forgotten.”
I stare at his profile for a few seconds as he drives, and it occurs to me that I’m probably sitting next to the nicest guy on the face of the earth. “Thoughtful” doesn’t even begin to cut it.
“You’re amazing,” I whisper.
“So are you,” he says, taking his hand off the wheel and offering it to me.
I take it in mine, lacing my fingers through his for the rest of our drive into town.
***
So, you’d think I’d have learned my lesson about not thinking the worst of my siblings, but I guess I’m still a work in progress.
We park two blocks from the Parsnip because every spot is taken, but when Aaron tries to take my hand, I pull away.
“Let’s not give them an excuse to say something.”
“Reeve,” he says, putting his hands on his hips as I stand across from him on the sanded boardwalk, dreading our entrance into the Parsnip. “Your family has known me for four years. Joe has known for every day of those four years exactly how I feel about you, and he’s your brother-in-law. Now, I don’t expect that he keeps a whole lot of secrets from Harper, do you? So, it’s highly likely that your family already knows there’s something going on between us.”
“Something going on ? This is only our second date!”
“Reeve.” He gives me a look. “I didn’t meet you last week. I didn’t fall for you yesterday. This may be our second date, but—”
“Wait…what?” I lean closer to him. “Fall for me?”
“Fuck, Reeve,” he sighs, leaning against the car. He stares at me like it hurts a little. “Fall for you? Hell, yes. I have been head over heels for you for years, woman.”
For whatever reason, this makes me giggle, but my laughter stops when he snakes an arm around my waist and pulls me up against his body.
“I’m crazy about you, Reeve,” he murmurs, his face close, his eyes scanning mine. “You cannot be in any doubt about that.”
My heart thunders in my chest and though there are two parkas, a slip of a dress, and at least one shirt between us, I swear to God I can feel his heart thundering back.
Something going on.
Head over heels for you.
Holy shit. It’s New Year’s Eve.
“You can’t kiss me at midnight,” I blurt out. “Not with all of them watching.”
“Then I guess I’d best kiss you now,” he says, lowering his lips to mine.
I haven’t been kissed by that many guys.
I am probably a late bloomer, owing partially to the fact that I was the youngest of six, and partially to the fact that I was raised by my dad…but suffice it to say that this feels like the very first real kiss of my entire life.
He holds me with one arm, so his palm is free to cup my jaw, to keep my face angled to his and steady as his lips touch down on mine. I feel his index finger behind my ear and the pad of his thumb close to the corner of my mouth. I smell him all around me and taste him as he parts his lips and slides his tongue against mine. There’s this soft smacking sound as his lips leave mine for a moment— I almost panic that it’s over —before they land on mine again.
This time I close my eyes, winding my arms around the back of his neck as he holds me close. I open my mouth to his, welcoming the warm, wet velvet of his tongue against mine, knowing that something is happening between us that can’t be swept aside or overlooked. I hold him tighter, digging my heels into the moment, because I don’t ever want for either of us to be able to deny that this happened—that once upon a time, on New Year’s Eve in Skagway, Aaron kissed Reeve, and Reeve kissed Aaron, and everything between them changed. I want this to be a beginning, not an interlude, and not an ending. I want to kiss Aaron Adams a million times under the night sky. And then I want to kiss him a million more.
That’s when I know—whether I like it not, and whether or not the timing is good or bad—I’m crazy about him, too. I think maybe I have been for a long, long time.
He tries to pull away, but I jerk my hands forward, grabbing at his cheeks and pulling him back. And I’m not sure, but I think he laughs into my mouth, and I swallow the sound whole. I tell my heart to keep it. It’s the sounds of Aaron being kissed, and the sound of me loving him exactly the way I want to.
The hand that was on my face lowers so that both of his arms are around me, holding me close, holding me tight. We are flush, but frustrated by layers, and our kiss is wet and wild and abandoned to make up for what we want. We want skin. We want skin (all of it) against skin and all we have is lips against lips.
When he finally breaks off the kiss, he presses his forehead against mine, panting softly. I leave my lips open so that his huffs of breath fall into me.
I can’t believe I’m leaving so soon.
“I’m visiting my dad over MLK weekend,” he tells me, his voice gritty and breathless.
“That’s soon,” I pant.
“Can I call you?”
“I already told you that you could.”
I let my hands fall from his face, but he doesn’t let go of me. He holds me closer.
“Close your eyes and ignore me for a second,” he says.
“Okay.”
“Wait for me,” he whispers.
It’s so soft, I guess I could have heard him wrong. But I’m pretty sure he asked me to wait for him. And every beat of my heart promises that it will.
“Ready to go to the party?” he asks, pushing me away gently and taking my hand with one of his.
“Ready,” I tell him, and here’s something interesting:
I don’t care who’s there.
I don’t care who sees us.
I don’t care about anything else except for the fact that there’s a future for me and Aaron Adams. Someday, we will belong to each other.
We walk to the Parsnip, hand in hand, ready to usher in a brand-new year.
THE END