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Rea pulled her coat off, shuddering as the warm air hit her. She shot Katie a serious look. “So, do you want to spill?”
Katie chewed her lip as she took her own coat off and hung it deliberately over her chair. “I’m… not sure.”
That wasn’t exactly right. She did want to, it was more than she didn’t know how.
They both knew her well enough to understand her, though.
Malik tilted his head, wiping his fogged-up glasses on his shirt. “It’s about Maggie, obviously.”
Katie spluttered. “Whyobviously?”
He laughed. “Because you never get nearly this worked up about anything else.”
“That’s not true.” Katie wanted it to be untrue, but even she knew it was. She’d been doing a lot of soul-searching since almost kissing Maggie and she’d learned a lot.
“It definitely is,” Rea said, shaking her head. “So, what happened?”
“You two went on your annual Christmas tree thing, right?” Malik replaced his glasses and leaned across the table towards Katie.
She nodded. “Yeah. It was great until…”
For several moments, they waited patiently while Katie’s brain and stomach felt like they were being flushed down a toilet. Nothing good was going to come from that sensation.
Eventually, Rea ran out of patience. “Until?”
“I almost kissed her.” Katie grabbed the menu placed behind the condiments at their table, needing something other than their faces to look at.
Still, she could feel their eyes on her.
“Almost?” Malik said after a beat too long. “As in, didn’t actually do it?”
“Yep.”
“Why not?”
Katie sighed. “Well, honestly, I suppose, because we were interrupted. Tree farms are public places. There were other people there.”
“Okay. Coached. Explain.”
Katie’s face burned in a way that had nothing to do with the changes in temperature between the hospital, the outdoors, and O’Sullivans. “It’s not like it would be a good idea, is it?”
Rea snorted. “Why not?”
Katie scowled at her. “Because we’re best friends and that’s not something we do, and clearly the universe was sending a sign that it was a terrible decision and I needed to make better ones.”
Rea rolled her eyes in exasperation. “You’re in love with her. She’s in love with you. The only potential issue I see is that you’ve been building up to it for so long that you might have lost all sense of time and place and gotten caught having sex.”
“Hell of a thing to find under your Christmas tree,” Malik said, barely holding his laughter in.
Rea laughed freely while Katie looked between them, dismayed.
“How are you not taking this more seriously?” she asked them.
Malik reached out to pat her hand. “Because Rea’s right. You two are so painfully in love with each other that kissing can only ever be a good thing, and now you’re overthinking it, overworking yourself to try hiding from it—and Maggie, too, I’m guessing—and you’re only perpetuating the problem.”
Katie’s heart throbbed painfully again. She’d tried to ignore it when Rea said they loved each other, but now Malik was saying it too. And neither sounded like they were simply exaggerating.
It wasn’t great that they both felt that way, but it was worse that they were speaking what Katie had been trying not to all week.
