“No one else picked you. I thought I was doing something good. I was doing a decent thing. The decent thing.”
My lips parted, but no words came out.
Because what did you even say to that?
The room was still warm. The dryer still hummed. But all I could feel was the sharp sting of embarrassment crawling over my skin.
So, that was it. The moment I’d waited for, dreamed about, built up in my head for years. It hadn’t been something. It had been pity.
Pity!
It stung more than if he’d just laughed in my face.
I struggled to swallow as the heavy burn of emotion started to crawl its way up my throat.
No one else had even known that I was coming to Christmas until I showed up. In Gina’s words, it was for a surprise. In my world, it was because I was forgotten and likely more unwanted than wanted.
Again.
“I didn’t even want to …” He drifted off. “Fuck. I didn’t want …”
He was lying.
He had to be.
Somewhere deep inside, I knew it. I knew that no one could look at me the way he just had, touch me the way he had, without some kind of feeling. He had been leaning in. His handhad moved to my neck. He was teasing, laughing, looking at me like?—
No. He was just messing with me. That had to be it.
Except another voice—a quieter, meaner one—whispered something else entirely.
Of course he didn’t like me.
I was younger.
A kid.
Some desperate little loser who had mistaken five minutes of closeness for affection.
I felt sick. My mouth was dry, my cheeks hot with humiliation I couldn’t scrub off. I couldn’t even look at him as he turned, shoved open the laundry room door, and disappeared.
He got found five minutes later. One of the first people out.
I stayed.
Tucked behind the dryer, knees drawn up to my chest, I waited in silence for nearly half an hour. I “won” the game. But I’d never felt more like a loser in my entire life.
By the time I wandered back out, Gina was already scanning the room for me. She spotted my face and pounced.
“Why are you a sourpuss?”
“I’m not.”
She narrowed her eyes. “Your hair’s a mess. Oh my God. Did you hook up with someone while hiding? Is that how you lasted so long? You have to tell me who.”
She grabbed my hands like she could pull the answer from my palms, then dropped them with an actual gasp. “It was Nick, wasn’t it? Nick found you. Ew. Oh my God, it was Nick.”
Her face scrunched up in theatrical disgust. “Nope. I don’t even want to know. If it’s someone vaguely related to my brother, I’m opting out. I’ve already reached my lifetime quota of Josh-adjacent nonsense.”
