Page 69 of Cold Mercy

“Yes, thank you. Like you said…nothing serious,” I say much too calmly.

He smiles but glances over my shoulder, and his expression drops.

“Oh, you’re expecting someone.” He nods toward the table. “I should probably go.”

I turn to look at the table behind me, and I instantly understand why he thought I was expecting someone. Two plates, glasses, sets of silverware lined up perfectly, like a dinner for two instead of one lonely girl trying to salvage a holiday.

“No”, I say quickly, stepping toward the table. “I’m not waiting for anyone.”

My fingers brush the edge of one plate, embarrassed by how intimate it suddenly looks.

“In my family, we always set an extra place on Christmas Eve for a lost traveler, or someone who might need a warm meal. It’s a stupid tradition meant to make us look kinder than we ever were.” I force a small laugh.

“Since I planned to eat alone, it ended up looking like this. But trust me, I wasn’t expecting company.”

He studies me with that soft, devastatingly warm expression of his, the one that always feels like it’s peeling back the layers I’m desperately trying to protect.

“So…” he murmurs, “whether you meant to or not…you called me to you.”

My breath catches. My first instinct is to deny it, to tell him it was Mrs. Gonzalez who called, not me, that I would’ve survived the night perfectly fine without him sprinting across half the town. But the way he says it…it sinks into me.

And for a moment, I don’t have the strength to argue.

He glances down at his sweat-soaked shirt, at the dirt on his hands from climbing my gate, and forces a crooked smile that doesn’t quite reach his eyes.

“Look, before anything else…can I shower? I’m not sitting at your table like this.”

Relief washes through me, relief that he wants to stay, that he isn’t backing out.

“Of course,” I say quickly. “You can use my bathroom.” I meet his eyes, steady for once.

He hesitates, pulling at his damp collar. “Shit, I don’t have any clothes.”

I pause as my mind flashes to the shopping bag hidden deep in my closet. My moment of weakness from two days ago, when I walked past a holiday window display and felt a pang of loneliness so sharp I bought something stupid just to feel normal.

“I have something,” I say, trying to keep my voice casual, though I can feel the heat rising in my cheeks. “But you have to promise not to laugh.”

He raises an eyebrow, intrigued. “That bad?”

“Wait here.”

I run upstairs, grab the bag, and come back down. I pull out a thick, knitted sweater. It’s dark forest green, with a pattern of a grumpy-looking reindeer stitched across the chest.

I shove it toward him.

“I walked past a window display the other day and…I don’t know, an impulse took over. I thought it would be funny to gift it to James.”

Fake, fake, fake. For heaven's sake, you bought it just to see him smile. You’ve been pathetic for a while.

Thomas takes the sweater, holding it up against his chest. The sleeves are long, the shoulders broad.

He looks at me, a slow grin spreading across his face.

“James would drown in this, Sophia.”

I bite my lip, trying not to smile.

“I might have overestimated his size. Just…take it.”