I smiled. “Maybe that’s what you like about it.”
“I didn’t say I liked it.”
“You didn’t have to.”
Her eyes flicked up to meet mine, something unguarded flashing there. For a moment, I thought she might actually say what she was thinking.
Instead, she laughed softly and shook her head. “You’re impossible.”
“You said something like that already. I think you said annoying?”
“And it’s still true.”
She turned to go back to the tree, but I caught her hand—not tight, just enough to stop her. Her fingers stilled in mine. “You don’t have to keep running, Mel.”
“I’m not running.”
“Then why do you look like you want to bolt every time I’m in the room?”
Her throat worked, and when she finally spoke, her voice was barely above a whisper. “Because you make it too easy to forget why I should.”
That one hit.
Deep.
For once, I didn’t have a smart remark. I just looked at her, at the reflection of the lights dancing in her eyes, and wondered how the hell I was supposed to pretend this didn’t matter anymore.
She slipped her hand free. “We should finish decorating.”
“Yeah,” I said quietly. “We should.”
We turned back to the tree. I hung an ornament. She hung another. Neither of us spoke, but the air between us stayed charged.
Outside, the snow kept falling.
Inside, the silence said everything we wouldn’t.
Melanie’s words hung in the air long after she said them, like smoke you can’t quite wave away.
You make it too easy to forget why I should.
That one had teeth.
Was it my past? Who I was now? I didn’t know.
She went back to hanging ornaments on a second tree in the corner, pretending to study every branch like it held the secret to world peace. I stood there, ornament in hand, brain stuck somewhere between wanting to apologize and wanting to kiss her until she stopped talking in riddles.
I hung the ornament crooked just to do something with my hands. It clinked against another, and she sighed, stepping over to fix it.
“You have no sense of symmetry,” she muttered.
“Never been accused of that before.”
She leaned in, adjusting the ornament. Her hair brushed my jaw…soft, faintly citrus, enough to short-circuit the rest of my logic.
“You did that on purpose,” she said.
“Maybe.”
