Page 24 of Bossy Bride: Emma and Jesse

“Cherry vanilla in a souvenir cup.” He winks. “Wanna share with me?”

“You bet.”

He orders. The girl—a teenager, just like I was that first afternoon when Jesse and I first met on this very island, just a few blocks away—smiles at Jesse like he’s the best thing to happen to her in her whole life.

I know the feeling, chickie. Trust me. I know the feeling.

She turns to us, handing the pink cup over, but then stops and gets a weird look on her face.

“Everything OK?” Jesse asks.

“Um… uh…” the girl stammers. And then she turns the cup around and points to the picture on the front.

It says ‘Dumas Street Tree Lighting’ and there’s a picture of me and my whole family on the front. Only this year Jesse’s face is on the cup too.

Jesse laughs. “Will you look at that?” Jesse says, taking the cup. “I’m family.”

“You’re family,” I agree.

We take the shaved ice and walk back over to our cottage and share it as we sit on the top step of the porch and watch the people all around us.

We sit in silence for a while.

Not that anything around us is silent. It’s nothing but noise, actually. But it’s the peaceful kind of noise. The bustle of happy people. The shouts of excited teenagers at the top of the Ferris wheel and the squeals of sugared-up kids as they chase each other in the grass of the cottage front yards.

“I can’t believe this is your life,” Jesse suddenly says.

“What? What do you mean?”

“It’s all just so…”

“Over the top?”

“No.” He shakes his head. “But… yeah. In the best way though. It’s so… different than how I grew up.”

Which gets me curious. Jesse hasn’t talked about his childhood much. Not since that first night we reconnected and ate ice cream at the Tastee-Freez after the bachelor auction. “How did you spend Christmas Eve eve?”

He inhales deeply and holds his breath for a moment, then lets it out slowly. “We didn’t.”

“Oh. Well, that’s understandable. Most families don’t have a tradition like this.”

“I mean, we didn’t celebrate Christmas at all after I was like… ten, I guess.”

I frown. I do remember him saying something like that before. “But when you took me down to the family floor in the Bossy, you pointed out where the tree was.”

“In front of the windows.”

“Yeah. So you must have some good memories from that time, right?”

He sighs, looking out at all the people in the street for a moment. Then he looks at me. “No, Emma. I don’t. I mean, there were a few years when we got presents and had a tree. The only real tradition that I even remember from that time is the stockings we had over the fireplace. And that’s only because Johnny wrote our names on them in red glitter glue. But most years? It was just another day.”

Now I frown. “Oh. I don’t think I realized that.”

“But…” He smiles at me and takes my hand. His is cold from holding the shaved ice cup. “There were a few years when Johnny tried. Once he chopped down a little evergreen shrub out in the Bossy courtyard and hauled it upstairs.”

“What?”

“I swear to God. He chopped down what was basically a bush, hauled it upstairs, and then we went on this massive hunt for Christmas shit so we could decorate it.”