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Rex lifts me easily, dropping me on the counter and barely missing the gingerbread. He steps between my knees and kisses me deeply.
“We have time,” he says. He’s looking at me so steadily. I can tell he doesn’t just mean time when I get back from Philly.
“Oh, I almost forgot. I have one more present for you,” I say. I jump down from the counter and grab it from the closet. Rex is back on the couch and I hand the gift to him, leaning over the back of the couch. He hefts it in his hand and gives me a strange look, then undoes the paper. Inside is my worn copy of The Secret History.
He looks at the book uncertainly, then opens it and looks at the text.
“I—Daniel,” he says regretfully. “No. It’s your favorite book; I don’t want to ruin it with my shit reading. The print’s so small and it’s long and—”
I shake my head, climbing onto the couch with him.
“I thought, if you want, I could read it to you.”
Rex looks sheepish.
“Yeah? I tried to order the audiobook after we met that night in the woods,” he says.
I can feel a tightening in my groin just thinking about that night. Rex’s powerful body pushing me against that tree. Then it resolves into a warm feeling in my stomach at the thought that Rex went to that much trouble when I thought he wasn’t even interested in me.
“I didn’t know what it was, but I thought any book you loved that much had to be worth reading. I only saw the author’s last name—only read it, I mean. I asked at the library, but they didn’t have it.”
I brush his hair back and smile at him.
“So, what do you think? I’ve never really read out loud to anyone before, so I don’t know if I’ll be any good at it, but….”
“You have such a sweet voice, baby,” Rex says, nuzzling my throat. “I think you’ll be good at it.” He kisses my ear. “Can we start now?” His voice is eager.
I nod, feeling almost drunk with contentment.
“One sec,” he says, and a minute later he’s back with a huge piece of gingerbread and some wine.
He sits back on the couch and I lean back against his chest, cradling the worn paperback. From this vantage point I can see the whole living room. The Christmas tree with our new ornaments gleaming among the green branches. The lights twinkling. The crackling fire and the snow falling softly outside, covering anything dirty or broken or sad with a thick blanket of clean, pure white.
It smells like wood smoke and cedar and Rex and gingerbread and, as I open my favorite book, adding the dusty smell of worn paper to the mix, I find I’m almost too choked up to read.
As if he senses how overwhelmed I feel, Rex tightens his arms around me.
“You okay?” he asks, his hand splaying across my chest. I nod, but can’t quite get the words out.
“It’s….” I look around us, then back at him. “It’s… perfect.”
“Too good to be true?” Rex asks, stroking my hair away from my face.
“No,” I tell him. “Just good.”
Epilogue
December
GINGER’S SHOP window looks like some kind of insane Victorian-era Chanukah circus exploded in a burst of needles and lace. Blue and white velvet ribbon tacked up with tattoo needles spells out “Tattoo Bitch” in scrolling cursive. The Bud Light can angels hover in the corners of the window and old tattoo machines are stacked on top of each other to make a metal tree. Everything is dusted with blue and silver glitter. It actually looks kind of awesome.
“Yaaaay!” Ginger calls as I step into the shop. “It’s Chanukah!”
“Well, technically, Chanukah’s over, but—”
“Shut up. Chanukah is never over. The oil will burn for eternity!”
Good thing no one’s in the shop because Ginger is clearly in giddy mode. I can’t help but grin into her hair as she launches herself at me for a hug.
“Okay, you can tell me everything while we go get the food.”
I stow my bags behind the counter and Ginger leads me back to the door, her elbow linked in mine.
“Everything about what?”
“Everything about how you look stupid happy.”
She squeezes my elbow in the crook of her arm and grins at me.
“Huh. So do you,” I tell her. “I hope we don’t get hit by a bus to even it all out.”
“Pff. On South Street? As if the traffic ever moves fast enough for that to kill us. Golden Empress?”
“Of course.”
As we get our takeout, Ginger tells me about going to Christopher’s parents’ house for dinner and how she made a mostly good impression until she accidentally laughed in his dad’s face when he said he loved Neil Diamond because she thought he was kidding.
I tell Ginger what Virginia said about the Temple job and about Rex asking me to move in with him. What I don’t tell her much about is that Rex and I talked a lot about the future last night. About our options. About how he’d feel leaving Holiday. I don’t tell her that last night, when we went to bed, I put the key to Rex’s cabin—our cabin, now, I guess—on the bedside table so I could see it until I drifted off. Or that, when I fell asleep in Rex’s arms, his big hands all over me, I felt certain that he would be there in the morning. That I wouldn’t wake up to find that the world had disappeared.
