His head turns toward me.
And helaughs.
It’s not the short huff of amusement I usually get from him. Not the restrained version. This is real laughter, warm and unguarded and bright, the laugh I get to see occasionally on good days with Penny. It knocks into me harder than the fall did.
For a second, neither of us moves.We’re just lying there in the snow like idiots, laughing, faces turned toward each other.
“You keep calling me that.”
“Calling you what?”
“Gray.”
Heat climbs into my face so fast it almost burns worse than the cold. “Have I?”
His grin kicks a little wider, genuine and boyish and unfair on him. “Since yesterday. When I was getting the bags out of the car, before you ate shit on the bunny slope, then just now.”
I let out a horrified laugh. “Wow. Thanks. Very supportive. Do you tell Penny she ate shit when she falls?”
“Dodging my point,” he says, still looking right at me, his grin fading into something softer. “Sounds nice when you say it.”
His hair is mussed and sticking to his forehead, his cheeks pink from the cold. There’s snow clinging to one shoulder of his jacket.
And he is looking at me. There's no irritation, no restraint right now. He's just... looking.
My laughter fades, and the world narrows strangely— down to the distant scrape of skis, kids giggling and laughing, wind moving through the mountain, the trees shivering.
But here, in this little pocket of body-imprinted snow and bright sun, it feels like there’s only him.
And the heat suddenly building low in my stomach.
And the way his eyes flick to my mouth.
I don’t think either of us decides anything. It just happens. The slow shift, the way he lifts himself up onto his elbow, the hand that pushes a stray wave out of my face.
I don't know which one of us leans first. I just know that one second we're looking at each other, and the next we're moving closer, pulled in by a lack of common sense and the mutual forgetting of last night's argument.
His mouth is a breath from mine, so close that I can feel the warmth against my freezing lips, that I'm breathing in his puffed breaths.
“She fall?”
We jerk apart so fast it’s almost violent.Cole skis up alongside us looking smug enough that I immediately want to pelt him with ice.
I clear my throat and sit up too quickly. “Yeah.”
Grayson is already pushing himself upright, all traces of laughter wiped clean off his face. “She's fine.”
Cole’s eyes move between us once, taking in way too much. “Mhm.”
I want the mountain to open up and swallow me whole.
Chapter 24
Grayson
I’m not thinkingabout the almost-kiss.
That is the lie I tell myself all morningbecause the alternative is admitting I had her under me in the snow, laughing, looking at me like that, and I almost kissed her anyway. I barely even believe my own bullshit.
