Heating Up the Holidays 3-Story Bundle(64)

He looks at me with his eyebrows raised, his arms crossed and his hands stuffed in his armpits.

“It does snow, but not a lot, and it tends to shut everything down. Of course, there’s lots and lots of snow in the Olympics and the Cascades.”

I watch him clench his jaw against chattering. “It’s pretty, coming down so fast and heavy like this.”

“Dude, go inside, you’re freezing, and I wait for this bus all the time. I’m wearing ten times more coat than you.”

He grins and pulls his hat down lower. “I’m good. Lusting after your coat, but good.”

Evan saying the word lusting makes something unfair happen in my underpants.

I take a deep breath and look right at him. There’s snow on his collar, his shoulders, his hat. “Do you …”

“I get it,” he says. “I always did, actually, in a lot of other ways, but I want you to understand that I get that I’m not going to be able to adapt the entire field of microbiology so that it feels good to you, in the same way, whatever the progression of your changes are.”

“I could stay just like this, forever. Be able to do everything but drive at night and avoid people’s sneaking up on me.”

“You could.”

“Or I could end up with a dog for the first time in my life.”

“Yeah. Though you’d work with a cane for a long time, first.”

A laugh kind of forced out of me in a cloud of cold breath. “How I am supposed to live with that kind of uncertainty?”

“You tell me, I guess.”

I look at him then, and he laughs at whatever look is on my face. “Help me out, sensei.”

“You’re a postdoc, a researcher, in science.”

“Right.”

“So, you know, better than anyone, that you could plan and work for something and at any time it could go sideways.”

“Sure.”

He just looks at me.

“But,” I say, “I’m always doing everything all along the way to adjust for change and screwups and ways the data come out that weren’t anticipated. I mean, a five-year project will be as much about discovery as it is about hypothesis. So, we basically expect it to all go sideways. It probably means we’re doing something right if it goes all sideways.”

He looks at me some more. Doing that almost smiling thing.

I look at the snow falling on the trees and street signs. “Right. Okay.”

“I’m just here to help you adjust and discover.”

“Yes, thank you for driving that point home.”

“Anytime, Grasshopper.”

He nudges me with his shoulder. So I look up at him almost smiling at me. When I look too long, his smile fades away, and we’re both just looking, now.

And then I reach up and grab his shoulder and brace myself on my toes and I kiss his cheek, which is cold and stubbly, but his breath is so warm along my ear that I kiss him again, still on his cheek but it’s a spot closer to his mouth.

I hold my kiss there, the location innocent, but the duration indecent, my lip turned out against his skin where I can feel it warming up, where I can feel snowflakes landing and melting.

His shoulder eases in my hand, and so I slide over it, holding him close.

I finish the kiss, but release him slowly.

He whispers, “Jenny,” just as the bus roars up along the stop.

I turn away fast, but feel his naked, mitten-free hand brush my cheek, barely.

I get into a seat that’s opposite the seats closest to the stop, but I still see him. He’s already headed toward the parking garage, his head down.

I keep my fingers on my mouth all the way home.

At home, I turn on all the lights, for once, even though it makes it harder to see the snow. I’m worried that all of this wanting to kiss Evan that’s developed from working hard to avoid and thwart Evan is some kind of delayed reaction to my diagnosis.

Like, I worked so hard, at first, to reassure everyone that I was going to be okay, just so I could do what I wanted to do, so my mom could continue having her life in Seattle, that now I’m just breaking apart and Evan is conveniently there and so hot in his long-limbed sort of way and doesn’t seem to hate me despite my efforts.

And here in Lakefield, other than lab buddies and confusing surprise cybersex with the anonymous former tenant, all I have is Evan.

Although it must be some kind of against the rules to even longingly almost kiss your occupational therapist. And vice versa. I mean, when he held me in the lab it didn’t feel entirely therapeutic.

I would call and ask my mom about all of this, but she would probably tell me to marry Evan, so I elect for a weird conversation with C.

Who is not on, but he’s posted at least two dozen pictures since we’ve talked, mostly of snow and snowflakes—a tiny drift on a mailbox flag, a clump of falling snow glowing midair and backlit by a streetlight, and one so close and sharp you can see each point of a single flake.