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Morgan stomped over to his closet and pulled out a shoe box. Inside were a few different letters and postcards, a tiny plastic dinosaur and a few other little trinkets that were obviously mementos, and…
A letter, addressed to me, with Pike’s name on the return address.
Morgan pulled it out and handed it to me. I found that my hands were shaking as I took it. They shouldn’t be. I knew how Pike felt about me. He had just said that he loved me in front of my brother, bellowing it like he’d fight the entire world if it tried to keep us apart.
But I still felt, oddly, nervous. What had he said about me, about us? Why had he written to me? And why to me but not to Morgan, his best friend?
I took the letter, not bothering to thank Morgan, and went back to my room, closing the door behind me. Let him think whatever he wanted. It was his issue, not mine. I was going to be with the person I loved and if he couldn’t get over it then he could go and be alone and lonely in his big fancy house with his big fancy job.
Dear Billie, the letter began.
He must have written this right after he left, judging by the postmark on the envelope. As I read, my heart melted all over again and I felt tears pricking my eyes.
He had wanted to give us a chance. He’d wanted us to write to each other. To keep up a correspondence and see where that took us, if the thing that we felt between us the night of the Christmas kegger could be turned into something more.
This whole time, I had thought he’d abandoned me. But instead he had wanted to start a relationship, or at least try. And all this time… I’d had no idea.
I wiped at my eyes as tears of frustration slipped free. We could’ve had so much more time. We could’ve been corresponding. We could’ve been four years into a great relationship. And Morgan had stolen that from us—stolen that choice and that knowledge from me.
Well. He was going to get a bombshell like he wouldn’t even believe.
31
Pike
I hadn’t spoken to Morgan since that Sunday.
And so I had no idea how tonight was going to go.
It was Christmas Eve, and I wanted to feel the cheer in the air, to relax and enjoy the magic of the night, but my stomach was admittedly in knots over the Morgan thing. Billie had invited me over to spend Christmas with her family, and her parents had seemed enthusiastic about it, or at least that’s what she’d told me. We were going to announce our relationship and I was nervous as fuck about it. Having Morgan against us was bad enough, but what if her parents—people that I had always looked up to and considered family—disapproved as well? Billie wouldn’t want to go against her whole family for me, would she? And was it even fair of me to ask her to?
Wearing a nice sweater I’d just bought for the occasion, and a pair of my nicest jeans, I rang the doorbell. Gifts were in my hand. My hair was done, I’d showered, I was ready to go.
Georgia opened the door, smiling warmly at me. “Pike! Come on in, we’re so excited to have you.”
I stepped inside and she pulled me in, hugging me tightly. I hugged her back, a bit surprised but mostly relieved and grateful. “Where should I put these?” I asked, holding up the gifts I’d wrapped. Jones had helped, since I couldn’t wrap gifts for shit.
“Oh, you didn’t have to bring us anything! You can just put those under the tree with everything else.” Georgia waved me on into the living room, where sure enough a gigantic tree was standing, all decked out. I grinned as I saw several ornaments that looked like they’d been made by little kids.
Despite being Morgan’s best friend and spending every other day at his house, I had never spent Christmas with the Adams family before. I’d always had to be at my house, and I’d put up with it, hiding out in my room watching Christmas movies.
But now… now I was standing in a house that was actually lovingly, warmly decorated. There were stockings hanging on the fireplace mantle, and wreathes around the windows, and decorations scattered everywhere.
Wait. Actually.
There were five stockings on the mantle.
I walked closer and saw that someone had bought a dark blue plaid stocking with the name Pike embroidered on it. It seemed to be made out of flannel.
“Billie insisted on getting one for you. She sewed it herself,” Georgia told me, walking up behind me.
I’d known that Billie had a habit of making her own clothes. She was big into fashion even though she didn’t want to make a career out of it—she was going into finance for her actual career, once she found a job opening after the holidays.
