Page 39 of The Best Christmas Choir Ever

“Perfect timing!” one of the women said. “This contraption has dials instead of buttons. I don’t know what’s going on. Could you just put these bags through the microwave for Heather?”

“Sure,” Charlie said. The volunteers hurried off, leaving her and Julian alone. She occupied herself taking the plastic off one of the popcorn bags and shoved it in the microwave. She frowned at the dials, cranking one.

The microwave turned on. Charlie eyed it suspiciously.

“I don’t think it’s going to spontaneously come to life,” Julian joked lightly.

“We’ll see.” She leaned back against the metal counter and took him in. He looked…confused. A line appeared between his brows. Maybe he was wondering how he’d gotten roped into Gram’s schemes. “Everything okay?”

“Good, you?”

“Yep.”

“Great,” he said again, leaning over to look into the microwave. “I don’t think this is working.”

Charlie leaned over, too, accidentally brushing his arm, her skin flushing with goose bumps at the contact.

This was getting them nowhere. But where exactly did she want to be? A couple weeks ago he’d acted as if he didn’t even remember who she was. Now though, things felt different. No, not different exactly. Familiar. He was still Julian. Still that sweet guy she’d fallen so hard for. If she was being honest with herself, she was the one who changed. She’d become a different person since losing Tom. Could she really blame him for not recognizing her?

He didn’t know her anymore.

But I want you to, she caught herself thinking before she could stop herself. She wanted someone to see how hard she was trying to hold herself together and tell her that it was okay if she slipped. That if she let in a little light, the darkness wouldn’t come flooding back with it. The popcorn bag jumped, the kernels exploding, and they both startled, glancing over at each other with awkward laughter.

Charlie cleared her throat, straightening up. “I’m sorry.”

Julian rose slowly. “For what?”

“Kissing you the other day.” She couldn’t find any other way around the tension but to cut right through it. “Encouraging it the way I did. Especially at your place of employment. I don’t know what came over me. That was a boundary I shouldn’t have crossed.”

“Do you really not know what came over you?” he asked quietly.

She shrugged, a blush creeping up her neck. “The past maybe. Being back in Elm Springs. Seeing you again. And I guess…it felt like the right thing to do in the moment.”

He laughed as the microwave beeped. They both ignored it. “The right thing to do?”

“Yes.” Because despite how hard she’d worked to keep from feeling anything, he’d made her feel something. And as terrifying as that still was, as much as she wanted to bolt, she couldn’t deny that the laughter and the flutters in her stomach and the music had felt so, so good. Julian was making her unearth those things again. But he was also making her unearth Tom.

She usually held Tom close to her chest, but she’d told Julian because she’d felt safe. She was sinking back into him like sinking into the melody of a favorite song, and with everything else around her changing—losing Tom, moving Gram into Glendale—something easy was very tempting.

“Do you regret it?” he asked.

“No,” she said, the truth of the word catching in her throat. “Do you?”

“It was unexpected,” he admitted. “But not…unwanted.”

She sighed. “I don’t understand you.”

“What do you mean?”

“You go out of your way to assure me you don’t remember our summer together, but then you mention something and I know you have more than vague memories of that time.” She huffed, blowing her blond hair from her eyes. “So which is it? Did you really not remember me? Or did you not want to remember?”

“I remembered,” Julian admitted. “The moment I saw you in that hall, I remembered.”

“You did?”

He nodded, staring at the wall. “I remember the way your hair had these almost copper strands in the sun. And I remember Tom teasing you the first couple of times I showed up to pick you up. And I remember Doris’s coffee cake. The way it crumbled if you didn’t eat it quickly enough. And I remember lying out next to the river with you, hearing nothing but bees and the rush of water.”

Charlie swallowed the bubble of emotion in her throat. He remembered so many details. So many of the things she’d packed away. “Then why did you lie that first day?”