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I nearly swallow my tongue, brought back to the present only when he calls out happily in my ear, whooping and laughing as we really start flying down the slope. There’s none of the uncertainty I feel sledding with Dad, none of that unbalanced sensation that we could tip at any time. With Andrew behind me I feel safe, balanced, and centered. I want the ride to last forever.
“You good?” he shouts above the whipping wind.
“Yeah!”
A small pause, and even though we are surrounded by the screams of other sledders, the sound of wind, and the ski lift, I can almost hear his breath catch.
“I’m gonna say something,” he calls above the fray.
I squint into the bright sun, and we lean to the side in unison to steer our sled around a sapling. “Okay!”
His mouth comes right up beside my ear. “After what you said last night, I thought you were going to kiss me back there. Really kiss me.”
It’s my turn to lose my breath. I can’t turn around and look at him, can’t read his tone.
“Like on the mouth?” I call out over my shoulder, but my voice disappears into the wind as we go screaming down the mountain.
Andrew leans forward, spreading his hand across my side, pulling me closer into his body. When he speaks, he sounds breathless. “Yeah, on the mouth.”
I stare ahead of us, and the figures on the slope start to blur. My eyes water with the cold wind.
His voice is quieter, but everything else has fallen away somehow, and I can hear him perfectly. “You’ve never been for me, Maisie. I never knew you were an option.”
“What do you mean?”
We hit a bump and veer to the left, and his fingers tighten at my waist. When we straighten out, he doesn’t let go; if anything, he tightens his grip, pulling closer and wrapping more of his arm around me. His fingers curl, brushing just under my jacket.
His breath comes out warm against my neck, voice shaking: “It never occurred to me that you might be mine.”
chapter sixteen
Two hours later and the impact of that first ride down the slope still hasn’t dimmed; I hear it—It never occurred to me that you might be mine—as clearly as if Andrew’s said it again right into my ear, even though he’s sitting next to me at the basement card table and not holding me tight as we sprint down a mountain.
For the first hour of the sledding trip, I didn’t feel even the slightest bit cold. I was a campfire inside, a roaring inferno. Eventually, though, my fingertips went numb and my butt was almost dead from the chill of the wooden sled beneath me. Now back in the cabin, we’ve holed ourselves up in the basement—Theo, Miles, Andrew, and me— to escape the cloying heat of the roaring fire upstairs, as well as the roaring cackles of our parents engaging in some preholiday day-drinking and catching up.
Theo shuffles a deck of cards absently while we all decide what we’re in the mood to play. Under the table, a socked foot finds mine, and the other foot comes around it, gently trapping me in a foot-hug. A careful peek belowdecks tells me it’s Andrew, and I suddenly feel like I’m wearing a wool sweater in Death Valley. Clumsily, I reach down, tugging my sweater up and over my head. It gets tangled in my hair clip, and Andrew has to shift forward to help extract me.
It means that he pulls his feet away, and once I’m free, I catch him biting back a knowing smile.
“Thanks.”
He holds my gaze. “You’re welcome.”
I take a few deep drinks of my sparkling water to cool this ridiculous fever. You’d think I’d never been touched by a man before, good God.
Looking at me from beneath his lashes, Andrew reaches up, scratching the back of his neck.
“Today was fun,” Miles says, and tries to take Theo’s beer, but is instantly smacked away. “I’m glad you talked Dad into just heading for the lodge. If I had to ride with Mom this year, I think I would have bailed.”
“Thanks for taking one for the team and sledding with Mae,” Theo says to Andrew, and then smirks at me. “Worst sled steerer ever.”
I glare. “Hey.”
Andrew gives a magnanimous shrug. “I’m a humanitarian.”
I smack him. “Hey.”
His eyes sparkle when they meet mine, and the smiles fade into that same buzzing awareness. I finally blink down to the table. We rode the slope about six times, and I guess I’m grateful that nothing was as loaded and heavy as that first ride down, because I probably would have had some internal combustion issue and ended up back on the plane from a heart attack. There was plenty of Andrew being Andrew: he sang terrible opera on one trip, swore he closed his eyes the whole way down on another, and said hello to every other sledder we passed on a third, but it was just normal again. Which I loved, and hated.
