When I turned back, she was there, too close, too sudden, and before I could put an inch between us, she was standing on tiptoe, arms sliding quickly around my neck in a hug that only looked like a hug from one angle.
Her cheek pressed warm to mine.
“Happy holidays, Benedict,” she said against my ear. Then—fast, practiced,intentional—she turned her head enough that her mouth skimmed the corner of my jaw. Not a kiss, not technically. Just enough contact to read wrong from a doorway.
“Janey,” I said, stepping back, hands gentle but firm at her arms. “No.”
“I know,” she said. “Couldn’t resist saying hello like a local.”
“You’re not a local,” I said, not unkindly.
Her eyes flicked past my shoulder then, and something like satisfaction sparked there, quick as a match to dry pine.
The bell chimed again.
I didn’t have to turn to know.
I did anyway.
Lydia stood just inside the door, mittened hands paused halfway to unwrapping her scarf, expression sliding from “I love snow” to “oh no” in about a blink.
Beside her, Melanie, with cheeks flushed from the cold, hair tucked into her hat, carrying that wary hope I wanted to keep safe in my pocket, had stopped dead.
Her eyes went from Janey’s arms on my sleeves, to the space where our shoulders had just been lined up, to my face.
You can read a lot in a heartbeat. Disbelief, calculation, the fast shuffle a brain does when it’s trying to give someone you love the benefit of the doubt and already building the case against.
“Mel,” I said, name coming out like an apology I didn’t get to finish.
Janey, consummate performer, stepped back with an easy smile and said too-brightly,
“Hi there,” like we were a commercial for small-town friendliness.
Lydia’s jaw worked. “Oh, for the love of—”
I lifted both hands, empty and useless, feeling the whole morning tilt. The song on the jukebox chose that moment to swell into a chorus about mistletoe, which would’ve been funny any other day.
“This isn’t…” I started, but the sentence didn’t know whether to be past tense, present, or a plea.
Melanie blinked once, slowly, as if she were absorbing the impact and cataloging the damage. She didn’t say anything.
The dread that had slid under the door when Janey walked in rose up and settled in my ribs like it had been waiting for this exact beat.
“Hi, Drew,” Melanie said softly at last, voice polite in the way a person goes polite when they’re working very hard not to bolt. “We brought the wreath tags.”
Janey’s smile did that small, satisfied twitch.
“I should go,” she said, like she was doing a kindness.
The door shut. The cold lingered.
Silence pooled, thick and awkward, full of every wrong conclusion a scene like this invites.
“It’s not what it looked like,” I said, hating the cliché and needing it anyway. “Mel…”
Her eyes stayed on mine, steady and unreadable.
“Let’s not do this in the doorway,” she said.
