Chapter 14
Hailey
Idon’t hear from him. Not that night. Not the next morning. Not the one after that.
By day three, I’ve accepted that our hot little fling ran its course and I’ll never have sex that good again in my life. And the worst part? I can’t even be mad.
I’m the idiot who climbed right into his truck like a giddy little elf, kissed him until we fogged up his windows, and then watched him lie to my best friend on my behalf.
I didn’t expect him to tell her about us. There is no us. But I guess I never considered the position I was putting myself in to feel cheap when the truth finally hit us in the face the way it did.
But I’m not Cole’s girlfriend. I’m not even his hookup. I am, and this is the part that really chokes me, the person who is kind of completely off-limits.
So no, I don’t get to be mad. I get to be… whatever this is. Lonely. Defensive. Restless.
I toss my phone on the couch, and it bounces off a throw pillow and lands screen up, taunting me with a blank notification bar.
My living room finally looks like the Christmas wonderland of my dreams. I’ve spent the last three days arranging my village and making sure my ice-skating figurines stay upright.
I even used cotton for fake snow. I stare at it, admiring all the little details I included… and yet I have no one to share it with.
Outside the window, Denver looks like it’s ready for Christmas. Inside, it’s just me and the corny Hallmark movie I’m not watching and the gallery wall he hung for me.
Stupidly level gallery wall.
Everywhere I look, there he is. The coffee table he helped me build. The TV console he anchored. The shelf that almost murdered me before he saved me in one arm and made my brain stop functioning for a solid three minutes.
I groan at my lack of self-control, instead of letting that moment be what it was—a strange man helping me from falling over. I took it as some romantic gesture that now has my brain wrapped around Cole Bristol so tight he’s all I can think about.
I flop down on the couch, tug my blanket over my legs, and stare at my phone again like I can conjure a text through sheer need.
I don’t even have the satisfaction of him watching my Instagram stories, because he doesn’t use social media. He barely texts with punctuation. He’s not out here posting thirst traps with captions like “just another day on the job,” so I can’t even lurk and pretend I’m not missing him.
I press the heel of my hand to my forehead. “God, Hailey. Get it together.”
It isn’t just him. It’s everything. It’s being in a new city where I don’t have a built-in Friday night plan. It’s walking past couples in beanies and matching scarves and thinking I could be like that, if I hadn’t fallen for the one man absolutely off-limits.
It’s the fact that Christmas is in, what, two weeks? And I still haven’t bought a plane ticket home because the airlines have decided my presence in Illinois is worth approximately the GDP of a small nation.
I grab my laptop from the coffee table, our furniture baby, and flip it open, pulling up the airline websites I’ve had bookmarked since October.
Chicago. December 22–26. One adult. I hit the search button again. The spinning wheel of financial doom twirls and the number pops up. I quickly sort them from cheapest to most expensive and practically vomit when the numbers populate.
“Six hundred eighty-four dollars.” I choke. “You have to be kidding me.”
I click around, change airports, change times, pretend I am the type of person willing to take a six a.m. flight with two layovers in cities that aren’t even on the way.
The cheapest option is still over six hundred.
And that’s not including the checked bag I’ll need for presents, the ride to the airport, and the thirty-dollar coffee I’ll need to make my flight on time.
I lean back and stare at the ceiling. “Okay. Okay. You can drive. It’s what… fifteen hours?”
I pull up Google Maps and type in my address in Denver, Colorado, to my parents’ house in Willow Creek, Illinois.
My mouth twists. “Fifteen hours. Alone. In December.”
Fifteen hours of podcasts and bad gas station coffee and me overthinking every breath I’ve taken since the moment I let him kiss me. Fifteen hours of watching road signs tick by and imagining him wherever he is, not thinking about me at all. Or… I could stay here.
I could do the sad, independent grown-up Christmas.
FaceTiming my family from my couch while I eat Chinese takeout and pretend it’s fine that I’m not watching my dad get tangled in lights or my mom cry over a casserole that she burned for the fifth year in a row.
I tell myself I’m an adult now, I have my own life, this is normal.
But I can already hear Maddie’s voice. “It’s Christmas, Hails. You have to come home.”
I close the tabs and toss the laptop beside me. My shoulders feel tight, like I’ve been bracing for something since that night in the truck. Since he looked at me in the dark and we both said… nothing.
I drop my head back and stare at the ceiling. “I shouldn’t have acted like that toward him.”
Because I did play a part. I kissed him back. I invited him out. I texted first. I am the one who let it get blurry, and I did it knowing the line was there.
And yet… when he lied, it was like a knife to the heart. I felt cheap, like someone’s dirty little secret. God, I hate that it hurt.
I scoot down on the couch, grab my mug of now-cold cocoa from the coffee table, and take a sip anyway. It’s lukewarm chocolate sadness. Fitting.
My phone lights up with a notification and my heart leaps so fast I almost spill it. But it’s just a weather alert. I wheeze out a humorless laugh as I read it aloud. “Cool. Blizzard warning. Love that for me.”
Another alert pops up right after, this time from the airline I was looking at.
Hailey, finish booking your trip home for the holidays!
“You pay for it, then,” I tell the screen. “You book it.”
This is stupid. I’m spiraling. And when I spiral, there is exactly one person I talk to. The one person who doesn’t make me feel like I’m being dramatic for feeling things. I pull up Maddie’s name and stare at it.
If I call her, I’ll have to pretend it’s just about flights and missing home and how Denver is “so cute but weird” and not at all about how her brother did tricks with his mouth and hands that turned me into a water fountain.
I hover over her name but the phone buzzes in my hand with an incoming call. It’s Maddie. I stare at it for half a second, heart climbing right up into my throat, and then I swipe to answer.
“Hey, girly,” I say, forcing brightness into my voice like I haven’t been moping on my couch for forty-five minutes. “I was literally picking up my phone to call you.”
“That’s because we’re soulmates. Duh. We have that connection.”
I pull my blanket tighter around me and sit up, laptop still open to those stupid, expensive flights. “Good. Because I need to complain, and I need you to tell me I’m being ridiculous.”
“Oh, perfect,” she says. “My specialty. Hit me with it.”
“I’m going to have to rob a bank.”
“Mmm, okay. So, I’m going to guess this is about plane tickets?”
“How can they charge this much, Mads? It’s a two-and-a-half-hour flight! You barely even get a snack; it’s four mini pretzel twists and a warm soda if you’re lucky.”
She sucks in a breath. “Ohhh, how bad is it?”
“Six eighty-four. And that’s the cheap one.”
“Ew.”
“Right? I would love to come home for Christmas, but United apparently thinks I’m a millionaire.”
“Okay, yeah, no, that’s rude. That’s highway robbery.
That’s… airway robbery.” I snort. “But like… you have to come home,” she says, instantly dramatic.
“I literally refuse to do Christmas without you. Who’s going to sit on the counter and make fun of Dad’s sweater?
Who’s going to bring the good hot cocoa mix and not that chalky stuff Mom buys?
Who is going to purposely sing off-key when your dad inevitably forces us all to join in with his weird neighbors who like to sing carols? ”
“Tell your mom to buy the good stuff.”
“She won’t! She thinks it ‘all tastes the same,’ and I’m like, no, Linda, it does not.”
I smile, because God, I miss them. I miss their loud kitchen and the way her mom kisses my cheek like I’m just another Bristol kid, and her dad’s ugly ornaments, and Maddie narrating Christmas movies like she’s doing a director’s cut.
“I miss you,” I say quietly.
“We miss you more,” she fires right back. “So. Solution time. You drive.”
“I was literally just looking at that. It’s fifteen-plus hours, Maddie.”
“You drove twelve once, remember?”
“I had you with me,” I point out. “And we sang ‘All I Want for Christmas’ until we almost crashed.”
“Because you can’t hit that note.”
“No one can hit that note.”
“Mariah can.”
“She’s not human.”
We both laugh, and for a second the ache eases. Then I picture myself in my car, snow blowing sideways across Nebraska or wherever, alone with my thoughts and a very real chance of texting her brother something reckless from a Love’s gas station.
I sigh. “I just don’t want to do it alone.”
“Yeah, that would suck,” she says, and there’s a little pause, like she just remembered something. “Oh my God. I forgot to tell you.”
“What?”
“Cole’s coming home for Christmas. Why didn’t I think of that in the first place!”
My spine snaps straight. “What?”
“Yeah!” She sounds annoyingly casual about it, like she didn’t just drop a live grenade into my living room. “He texted me like two days ago and said he’s probably coming. I was gonna tell you earlier but then the ornament thing happened and—whatever, point is, he’s coming. So just ride with him.”
Just ride with him.
Like it’s that simple. Like he hasn’t been so deep inside me while whispering wicked things in my ear as he chokes me.
“Oh,” I say, aiming for indifferent and probably landing somewhere in the vicinity of strangled. “He is?”
“Mm-hmm.”
“What made him change his mind?” I try to sound bored, like I’m not waiting with bated breath to hear her say he fell in love with someone out here and wants to tell us about her.
“I don’t know,” she says, and I can hear cabinets opening.
“He just said he wanted to be with us this year. Honestly, I was shocked. You know how he is about the holidays. I figured he’d do the whole ‘I have jobs lined up’ macho thing.
But he said he’s driving home, and he wants to bring this surprise he made for Mom.
So he’s definitely driving. You should just come with him. ”
I blink rapidly, trying to think up any excuse not to that would make sense. “Yeah…” I drag the word out, twisting the blanket between my fingers. “I mean, that would… save me a ton of money.”
“Seven hundred dollars,” she says, scandalized. “You could buy so many presents with that. Or pay so many bills.”
“Thank you for reminding me I’m poor.”
“You’re not poor. You’re just a baby engineer starting her dream job in a very expensive city,” she corrects. “Seriously, though. Ride with him.”
I stare at my Christmas village. At the tiny skater couple perfectly posed, like love is as easy as just finding your person.
“Yeah,” I say slowly. “I don’t know. I kind of… hate long car rides.”
“No, you don’t. You’re the one who wanted to go to Maui for spring break our senior year just to drive The Road to Hana.”
“I get car sick.”
“You do not.”
“I might.”
“You literally slept the whole way to Nashville junior year, got out, ate hot chicken, and went to a concert where you drank two giant limearitas.”
“Okay, but this is different,” I insist, voice going high and weird. “This is winter. And like… what if we hit a storm? Or a deer!”
“Then you’ll literally be in the best hands because Cole hunts deer.”
“He’s going to hunt a dead deer we hit on the highway?”
“What? No, I just mean—why are you being so difficult about this? Do you not want to come home or something?” She gasps and it sounds like whatever she had in her hands drops and clatters to the floor.
“Oh my God, you met someone, didn't you? And you don’t want to leave your little lovesick sex den? Hailey, you dirty girl!”
I swallow, laughing along with her joke even though she has no idea she hit the nail on the head… kind of. “I just… don’t want to be a burden.”
“You wouldn’t be a burden.” She says it like it’s the dumbest thing she’s ever heard. “He offered to help you move. He literally fixed fifty of your things. He always pretends he’s busy, but he gets weirdly happy when I tell him you’re doing good—”
My heart stops. “He what?”
“Huh?” she says too fast.
“Yeah, he said he could tell you were super nervous about being lonely out there, and when he saw you at the market thing, you looked like you’d made some friends,” she says, as if she didn’t just accidentally open a door and then slam it shut.
“Of course I had to practically rip any information out of him because he has such a wall up.”
“I…” My brain is doing cartwheels. He does think about me.
“Plus, he’s a control freak so you know he’s gonna drive the entire way. You can nap. You can watch Christmas movies. He’s leaving the twenty-second, I think? I’ll text him to make sure.”
“No!” I yelp way too loud. “I mean—no, don’t… bother him.”
“Why would it bother him?”
I force my throat to relax. “I just mean… he’s probably working. I’ll… text him.”
“And tell him you’re riding with him?”
I pinch the bridge of my nose, knowing damn well I’m not going to win this fight. “Fine. I’ll ride with him.”