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I pretend not to notice the way Jake goes still beside me. I’m grinning from Jesse’s words. “What do you think he should’ve done?”
Jesse hesitates, lifting a hand to scratch the back of his neck. “I’m just saying, theoretically, if your bride runs off on your wedding day… it’s weird to be okay with it.”
I relax a little, and Jake seems to as well. “Yeah, well, there’s nothing like a big ceremony to force you to take a good hard look at what you’re about to do, right?”
“I guess so,” Jesse says.
Looking at him makes my thoughts go straight to the way he felt in my hand last night, and the feeling of his fingers inside me–his mouth on mine and his hot breath all over my body. Suddenly, I don’t feel so cold anymore, even if the world is covered in white.
Jake is giving us that look again. I know he suspects something, but he is at least controlling what must be a nearly overwhelming urge to stick his nose in my business and demand to know what’s going on. Again.
Jake clears his throat. “Come on,” he says to Jesse. “Going to help me get the rest of the tables or are you going to paint your nails and talk more about weddings? Carter said they’re going to watch the Christmas movie back at the cabin. If we hurry, we’ll be there for that popcorn Nolan makes.”
“Shit,” Jesse says.
“What is ‘the Christmas movie’?” I ask.
“Jingle All the Way,” Jesse says. “They love Arnold Swartzeneger movies. We watch Predator on Valentine’s day, Terminator 1 and Terminator 2 for Thanksgiving, and Commando for April Fool’s. Traditions,” he says, shrugging as if none of that is really that weird.
It is.
I just nod as the guys jog back outside together to get more tables. I find Caroline walking slowly between the gingerbread houses with a clipboard, making notes and checking the tags to see who built each one. She heads outside to look at the houses we haven’t brought inside yet.
Most of the crowd from the event has moved across the street to a little bar with outdoor seating. There’s a game of Bingo going on that is at war with karaoke being held a few houses down. Both are incredibly loud, but the sounds are happy, and I don’t mind.
“So?” Caroline asks.
“I think it went well,” I say. “Everybody seemed to have a really good time.”
She smirks. “I was asking about Jesse.”
I pause with a handful of graham cracker, then drop it in my trash bag. “Oh. It’s fine. He’s a really nice guy.”
“Mhm.”
I can tell she’s using the old “stay quiet and they’ll spill their guts” trick on me, and I try really hard to not let it work.
A minute of the most uncomfortable silence passes. Then two.
“I mean, I do like him. Obviously,” I blurt. “I’m guessing there probably aren’t many girls who meet Jesse and don’t like him.”
“He doesn’t usually like them back, though.”
I hesitate. She’s probably just guessing, but her suggestion makes my heart pound. Stupidly, of course. After what we did last night it shouldn’t come as some kind of revelation that he might “like” me. He certainly liked touching me, at least. I guess I just want more than that. Shocker. “What happened with Sarah? He has hardly said anything to me about it.”
“You only got here what, like a week or two ago? The fact that he has said anything at all is impressive.”
Now it’s my turn to try the silent treatment.
“I don’t really know anything about why it ended,” she says as she scribbles something on her clipboard. “I do know they dated off and on since he was in college. Sometimes, they had fights about him traveling for hockey. More than once, they took breaks apart and I know she fooled around with other guys, but I’m pretty sure Jesse didn’t get with other girls during the breaks. He always took her pretty seriously.”
I listen quietly and try not to let this information sting. It’s stupid to let any of this bother me. Jesse had a life before me. He has been very careful to make sure I know he’s also going to have a life after me, too. We’re not even supposed to officially like each other, anyway. The idea that he took this girl so seriously shouldn’t bother me, especially considering I was about to get freaking married right before I met him.
It shouldn’t bother me, but it does. It makes me wonder if the reason he’s keeping me at an emotional arm’s length is because he’s waiting for this girl to come back–that he’s fighting his urge to be with me because he knows he’d drop me in a heartbeat if Sarah was back in the picture.
“And one day they just broke up for good?” I ask.
“Not just that. One day they were living together at that cabin. The next, she had already flown back to Connecticut to live with her parents before anybody knew they had split up.”
