Chapter 13
Chapter Thirteen
Mia
I went up to my room and took a shower. At one point, I heard Brax rummaging around in his duffel. When I reentered the bedroom, he was gone. And so was the down comforter from my bed. I was relieved to have my room all to myself. Good , I thought. Be like that . It wasn’t any kind of friendship if only one person revealed difficult things. Or feelings. Or…anything.
I climbed into bed, snuggling in between fresh sheets and a blanket that smelled of fabric softener, but I couldn’t rest, and it wasn’t because Brax had taken off with my warmest blanket. Christmas peace evaded me. Things weren’t right, and I couldn’t even pretend that they were.
I threw back the covers, grabbed my plaid flannel robe, and opened the door to the hall.
The house was as silent as falling snow. A slight chill hit me, always the case in winter in the old house, so I ran back into my room and shoved my feet into my fleece-lined slippers.
Brax was nowhere. Not on the family room couch, not in the kitchen. I pulled back the drapes on the front window and was relieved to find his car still sitting in the driveway, covered with a thin coating of new snow. So he had to be somewhere. The grandfather clock struck one.
I’d walked through the kitchen and halfway down the basement stairs—would he really resort to heading down there?—when I stopped myself. What was I doing? How many books had I read where looking for someone in the basement was a very, very bad idea?
As I ran back up the stairs into the kitchen, I rationalized that I was looking for him because I was worried about him. Trapped in a house full of D’Angelos with nowhere to go.
All right, all right, the truth was, I was thinking about those kisses. They were…amazing. Wonderful. Full of hope and promise. They’d been the real thing, I felt sure of it.
The thing was, when you work so closely with someone and lives are on the line, you get to read the other person—their moves. Their thoughts. You anticipate their actions. Some part of you senses what is real and what isn’t.
So here was the real reason I went looking for him: no matter what Brax said, his lips said something different. His words to me were full of passion and longing. And I needed to know why.
I walked over to the antique hutch in the kitchen where my mom displayed my grandmother’s dishes and some photos and searched for one in particular. There sat my sister and I, side by side at the pond, both of us grinning wildly. Two cute twins with identical grins. Gracie had just caught a fish and was holding it up, close to our faces. She’d been so proud of catching that ginormous fish herself.
I’d begged my dad to throw it back in the lake. He’d gently told me that it was big enough to keep, that we didn’t have to toss it back in. Gracie begged to be able to take it home for dinner.
I’d worried endlessly about killing the fish. I asked about its family. I even imagined its mother looking for it. Needless to say, I didn’t eat any fish that night.
My sister had been so bold and unafraid. She’d known what she wanted and she went for it. Whereas I was the overthinker, the overplanner, the one more governed by fear.
I closed my eyes and conjured Grace as I thought she might look today. A little like me, of course, only more stylish, more artsy, more boho, like the free spirit she was.
“I get what you’d want for me,” I said to the photo. To be courageous. To not back down, which I’d gotten really good at, especially after being hurt by Charlie. To realize my power. To make things happen in my life.
Brax’s actions didn’t match his words. Why?
Using my phone light, I pulled out a chair and sat down at the table, a little freaked out that I’d actually started to check out the basement. And I was talking to photographs. But that was better than lying in my bed crying, right?
My phone went off, and I jumped.
Want to talk? the text said.
I was instantly filled with the most intense relief I’d ever felt. Accompanied by something far more dangerous—the thrill that Brax wanted to talk too. That he thought we had unfinished business too. That being on the same wavelength might not be a fantasy after all.
Worst of all, I was buoyed by the wildest hope—that we weren’t done.
Where are you? I texted back.
Where are you? He countered.
The basement stairs.
That’s creepy.
Followed by: So you’re walking around the house in the dark looking for me.
I didn’t answer that.
I’m on the third floor , he texted. Please come up .
The third floor? How had he even found the third floor?
I bolted first up the main staircase and then a more narrow one to a room under the dormers, my mom’s sewing room. It had a peaked roofline and a killer view of the surrounding hills out a big palladium window. It was also completely freezing because the furnace just didn’t do a great job pumping heat all the way up here.
From the landing, I could see a lump on the couch, huddled in my down comforter. Aha! As I shone the light, the lump moved, and hands lifted to shield a face.
“Brax?” I was halfway too full of hope. The kind you feel when things aren’t right with someone you really care about, and you’d do anything to fix them. “What are you doing up here?”
He popped his head up. “I figured going back to your room would be a bad idea, and I wasn’t sure where else to go.” He looked—well, “adorably rumpled” was the descriptor that popped into my head. No. I wasn’t going to think he was adorably anything until I got some answers.
“Can we talk?” he asked, sitting up.
Oh, how my heart jumped at that. “Are you actually going to say something this time?”
“I promise.” He lifted the comforter, beckoning me to come sit next to him.
He didn’t have to ask me twice.
I clicked off my phone light and sat down. The comforter was warm from his body heat. Our shoulders and legs grazed lightly as he pulled it back down over us. And he smelled nice. Well, okay, he smelled a little like chlorine, but it wasn’t unpleasant.
My heart was softening. Make that melting. I’d tried so hard to prevent that, but it was just like left-out butter. Inevitable.
“I have something to say,” he began.
“Okay,” I said cautiously. I wanted him to share his heart with me. Tell me what he was thinking, like during the hundreds of conversations we had at work, when we had downtime, and when we weren’t pretending to be dating. Except even with all that talking, he’d rarely mentioned his past.
He rubbed his neck, taking a long time to choose his words.
“You had a long relationship with that guy,” he said.
“Charlie,” I confirmed. “Yes.”
He cleared his throat. “My longest relationship lasted eight weeks.” I could feel his eyes on me more than I could actually see them in the dark. But I could sense that he was struggling, and I could hear the emotion in his voice.
I knew all about his lack of steady dating, how popular he was with all women everywhere. But I wanted to know who the real Brax was.
He grabbed my hand. A pleasant shock that I didn’t see coming in the pitch blackness. His long fingers closed around mine, warm and secure. Like someone I could count on. Yet everything he was saying was the opposite. “I want to explain,” he said. “I understand why you don’t trust me. I just want you to know that I always thought you were different from anybody else I’d ever met. But I felt it was a mistake for us to keep going.”
“Because of the working-together thing?” I asked.
“That was an excuse.”
Aha! I knew it. “An excuse for what?”
He gripped my hand more tightly. “I was protecting you. From me.”
I grabbed a pillow from the couch and swatted him with it. He protected himself with his arms before he grabbed it from me and tossed it aside. “Hey! Why’d you do that?”
“Because that’s the most arrogant thing I’ve ever heard.” I realized I was sort of shouting, so I dropped my voice. But not my indignation. “What are you, from the ’60s? I don’t need protection.”
“Trust me, you don’t know my upbringing. Listen to me,” he said in a whisper-yell. The moon must have peeked out from behind a cloud, suddenly throwing silvery light everywhere, illuminating the crumpled comforter, the sewing machine, and the man in front of me.
He got up and paced, raking a hand through his hair. “I should have stopped this before we slept together.”
“So why didn’t you?”
He halted in front of the window. From the moonlight flooding the room, I could see his eyes spark. “You blew me away. You were the whole package—smart and fun and kind and pretty. I couldn’t stop.”
“I chose to sleep with you,” I said. “I knew what I was doing.” That sounded mature, but it was only half-true. I really had no idea what I was doing with Brax. I was crazy about him. And did he say that he thought I was kind? Yet I tilted up my chin to brace for a blow that I felt sure was coming.
“Mia, you need to hear what I’m saying.”
“I’m listening.” My stomach was flipping. We might finally be getting somewhere—or he was going to tell me something terrible. I couldn’t tell what was coming.
“My mom was addicted to meth, and my sister and I were put into foster care. I was twelve; she was eight. She got adopted. I didn’t.”
“Oh, Brax.” That horror seeped into my bones and made my heart ache. My impulse was to hold him, to hug him, to try to take away the unfathomable hurt. But I wasn’t sure he would want that.
He was standing in front of me, still spotlighted in moonlight, speaking so emphatically, it was breaking my heart. “This isn’t something I talk about—to anyone. But I need you to know that I’m not a good bet for a boyfriend. For your own good. I’m not the kind of guy anyone takes home for Christmas.”
I shook my head, seeing this in an entirely different way. “You are that guy because you’re here now. You came when no one else would.” Well, except for Drake, but he didn’t count.
That was when I swatted him again with another pillow to knock some sense into him. And for some comic relief, because, man, we could’ve surely used some.
“Would you stop with the pillows already?” He sounded a little irritated as he sat down and grabbed me by the arms, causing the upcoming pillow to hit the floor with a pffft.
His hands were warm, his grip firm. And his gaze was drilling into mine in a way that raised goose bumps on my arms.
“You know what I hate the most?” Even as I spoke, I was getting lost in his eyes. He was so intense, so conflicted, so loveable. The opposite of what he thought he was. I didn’t see a person unworthy of love. I saw someone full of it. “You didn’t give me a chance to decide about us,” I said. “You decided for me.”
“It was an easy decision,” he said stubbornly. “I don’t know how to…how to do this.”
“How to have sex?” I feigned a puzzled look, desperate to make him laugh. “I thought you were pretty good at that, actually.”
He didn’t laugh at my terrible joke. “How to be with somebody. As in—really be with someone. I spent too many years only being able to trust myself. No one else was reliable enough.”
My heart was thrumming, thrilling, threatening to beat right out of my chest. I tried to comprehend. He’d stayed away because…he felt like he didn’t have the skills? He was dead serious.
What had he endured that he would say such a thing? I pictured a lonely, sad, very handsome boy, left entirely on his own. If that were the case, then look how he’d thrived. I was awestruck at his strength, his fortitude, his endurance.
Also, I was aware the universe had somehow given us this strange, miraculous do-over. A Christmas miracle of sorts. This time, I wasn’t going to accept what he said without a fight.
This time, I didn’t hold back. Without thinking, I wrapped my arms around his lean waist and laid my head on his chest. The soft, warm cotton of his gray T-shirt grazed my cheek. His heart thumped, strong and regular in his chest.
Such a nice chest. So wonderful to be here next to him. And for the first time, I felt that he was happy to be next to me too.
Except he was stiff. When I looked up, he looked wary. But also like he wanted me too. “You came home with me because you knew how important to me this was. You sacrificed your time with your sister for me. What you did means a lot to me. And I don’t…I don’t need anything else.” I paused. “Except…except if you might want to try again, I’d be willing. I mean, I could work with you, you know?” I smiled. “I heard you’re a quick study.”
Then I reached up and kissed him. Brief, quick, but wham .
Wow, he had great lips. Soft and full and really, really nice.
I rarely did anything without thinking. That made me chuckle a little.
“What? What is it?” he asked.
I shook my head. “I’ve never kissed someone who’d dumped me and was maybe trying to do it again.” But he’d looked so forlorn. More than that. He looked—well, miserable. Like he really believed what he’d said about being a liability. And that made me hurt for him. And created a million questions I desperately wanted the answer to.
But right now, I did what my heart was compelling me to do.
And that was cover his lips with mine.
To show him that maybe we hadn’t been a mistake.
He didn’t fight it. He kissed me back tenderly, slowly, seeming to savor every second, moving his mouth over mine, drawing me into his arms.
I backed up far enough to say, “We could take it one kiss at a time, you know?”
When he stopped my chatter by kissing me some more, I felt only absolute relief. Now we were getting somewhere.
He smoothed my damp hair away from my face. “You’re so beautiful,” he said. I could see in the watery light from the window that his eyes were full of warmth, his touch light. And then he held me. “I don’t want to dump you. I just want to deserve you.”
I went boneless. Tears welled in my eyes. What he’d just said—was it real? Was any of this real?
Then he kissed me hard, and thoughts ceased. He felt so good, his mouth so clever, his hands wrapping around me, stroking my back, our bodies pressing together as we desperately sought each other in the darkness.
It was pure magic, the kisses, the connection, knowing that I was wanted back. I’d never experienced anything like this during all those years with Charlie. I wanted to take all of Brax’s pain away. I wanted to show him that love was something freely given, not given to someone because they are worthy.
Brax drew me down to the couch. Or maybe I pulled him down. I wasn’t really conscious of space or time. I lay back and tugged him over me, and there he was, his weight over me, his warm, strong body on mine, his kisses ardent and all-encompassing. I ran my hand along his shoulders, his back, feeling the strong planes of muscle, thinking how long I’d yearned to do this, to touch him, to learn all his angles and lines. I kissed him hard and drew him to me when I suddenly heard a soft whimper.
I froze. “That wasn’t you, was it?” I whispered into his neck.
A low, soft woof was the answer, as Cooper, sniffing and chuffing, poked his cold, wet nose between us.
Cooper, who’d somehow jumped between us just at the right time. Or rather, the exact wrong time.
Who knew my old dog would become my chaperone?
I made a strangled sound, halfway between a laugh and a groan.
“Hey, Coop.” Brax gave me a shrug and welcomed the dog, petting him the way guys do, a kind of roughhousing rubdown that the dog adored so much, he immediately rolled over on his back between us and begged for more.
And with that, Cooper was won over.
I couldn’t be too upset when watching Brax love my dog was so much fun. I loved how he took the interruption in stride, without a trace of irritation.
And then the stairwell light flicked on.
“Cooper?” My dad’s voice. Then, my dad himself, in a flannel robe and wool-lined slippers.
He took a look at us, and oh lordie, what must he have seen? Us, tangled in the blanket, the dog between us, our disheveled appearance. Disaster.
His brow lifted. He let out a surprised “Oh.” Followed by a pause that spoke volumes. “Hello.” He looked from me to Brax to Cooper, his face politely blank. “I was looking for the dog. He needs to go out one more time. Trouble is, I thought I heard a coyote out there.”
Brax immediately flipped back the comforter and stood. “I’ll take him, sir.”
I’ll take him, sir? I wanted to slide back under the comforter. Brax might as well have said, We were about to get naked in Mom’s sewing room, sir.
But in typical chill-dad form, my dear dad didn’t say a thing. He just smiled and turned toward the stairs.
“Good night, kids,” he called over his shoulder.
“Now what?” I asked as Brax put on his shoes.
He grinned. “They didn’t have coyotes in Philly. At least that I know of. If I happen to run into one, I’m screwed.”
Someone cleared their throat. I turned to find Caleb standing at the bottom of the stairwell. Cooper tore down the stairs to greet him. “Hey, Brax,” Caleb called up as he petted the dog, “I’ll join you, if that’s okay. We can take a little walk—together.”
“Be right there,” Brax called, tying his other shoe. He smiled at me. “Coyotes, big brothers…all good.” Then he kissed me on the lips and left.