I exhale a laugh. “I’m not done with this yet, but I promised myself I’d show you what I have so far. It’s almost there.”
“I can give you two space,” Mrs. Benson says, backing up.
“You can stay,” I say.
She leans down to kiss the top of my head. “I’ll ask you to play it for me tomorrow, Eli. Trust me, I want to hear it.” She frames my cheek with one hand. “Merry Christmas, sweetheart.”
“You too, Mrs. Benson.”
She heads to her room, Widget right behind her. I move over on the bench and pat it to tell Jack to sit beside me.
“You sure? You’re half-off the seat like that.”
“Sit.”
He sits.
And I begin. I’m still not in love with the opening, but I don’t worry about it now. I just let everything I felt as I composed this piece swell through me, pouring onto the keys through my fingertips and swirling in the air around us. Loneliness transitioning to belonging. Indifference warming to love.
It’s my story, from right before Jack and his family entered my life to now, and something inside me shudders to play it before the one who brought out this change in me, trembles in ecstasy that he can hear—that he canfeel—what I’ve felt. Because I know he can. I know it in the way he moves, breathes, watches . . .lives. . . in these notes with me.
He feels all of it.
“Does it have a name?” Jack asks in an impossibly soft voice, once I lift my fingers from the keys and the sound fades.
“I’m calling itCatchingSundrops.”
Jack’s breath is a ragged intake. His blue eyes snap to mine.
“I wrote it for you,” I tell him. “I also wrote it for Mrs. Benson, for making me feel like part of a family . . . that’s the first bit. But the rest . . . I especially wrote it for you.”
His throat bobs. “That’s . . . that’s . . .” he drifts closer with each whisper and seals his lips against mine. It’s slow and sweet, and tastes of the chocolate peppermint cake we had for dessert. He draws back as slowly as he leaned in, as if afraid to move too fast. “You have my heart, too, Elliot James.”
I stand, pulling him up with me. “Walk me home?”
The need I feel is mirrored in him. Need to hold him as close as I can. Need to kiss him when no one can see.
We put on our boots, coats, and hats and step outside, and pause. It’s snowing. Fat, heavy snowflakes fly down around us.
We make it about halfway to my house when I can’t wait any longer, and stop him with a hand on his wrist. I drop my bag on the ground as he turns to face me, and guide him back against an oak’s sturdy trunk. He pulls me by the back of my coat so I’m pressing him to the tree. He pulls me a bit harder than I expect. I stumble against him, and the motion sends the snow on an overhanging branch down on top of us.
The thick, heavy snow curtains down, covering my hat and shoulders, sneaking into the gap between my coat and my neck. Jack’s mouth is opened in stunned amazement. Traces of snow cling to his pale eyelashes. We stare at each other, still covered in snow, and reach for each other in the same instant, locking together. Jack backs against the oak tree again, but there’s no more snow to displace. It wouldn’t matter if there were.
I’m impervious to everything that isn’t Jack’s arms wrapped around me, his frozen fingers framing my face, his lips claiming over mine. Snow, cold, time . . . nothing else exists for an unknown spell of a moment.
Jack’s panting breath is warm on my lips when we do come back to reality, but his nose brushing against mine?
“You’re too cold to stay out here,” I say in a ragged whisper.
“I’m not cold,” he protests.
I take his hands and rub them between mine, and he melts. I pull him away from the tree, keeping one hand folded in mine as we resume walking. “Told you.”
“That was worth being cold—but I didn’t notice till you pointed it out.”
I squeeze his hand.
“Back to normal tomorrow,” he says when we approach my house. “Just us and friends for the rest of break.”
