Heating Up the Holidays 3-Story Bundle(73)

I’m not sure what to say. The pictures are gorgeous, erotic even, but I feel let down. I look at the pretty dips and shadows of his pictures, then the overexposed, raw composition of mine.

He’s curated himself, and the perspective is too close-up to see anything.

In my picture, it’s just me, tall and smiling and kind of naked.

Those aren’t pictures of you. Those are just pictures.

Then I shut the lid of my laptop.

Tears burn in angry drips from my eyes—in the middle of my new resolution to say yes, here was somebody, something, that was a no.

I lost him, or he lost me.

I was ready to tell him he was beautiful, and he didn’t give me anything to look at.

I don’t have any patience for anyone who would keep me in the dark.

Not even myself.





Chapter Seven


Let It Snow


I call Evan’s office first thing, and I’m told he’s out of the office. When I leave a message, to call me, the person on the phone tells me she’s sure he’d want to hear from me and asks if it’s okay if she passes on my message for him to call me personally.

For the first time, ever, it makes my heart race, sharp, painfully, to talk to him, but he tells me he’ll meet me for lunch.

It’s early, so I have to occupy myself until then, and since I’ve turned over a new snowflake, I decide to leave the house for the entire morning, before meeting Evan for lunch.

So I am crunching over the salted sidewalks in a little neighborhood between mine and campus where all the good shopping and eating is, and I am buying Christmas presents to send to friends, and to have ready for my mom when she comes on Christmas Day, and you can already feel the snow in the air, ready to fall.

It’s perfect, and finding a beaded curtain for my mom made with hundreds of teeny mirrors and SOMEBODY IN OHIO LOVES ME T-shirts for my friends and letterpress stationery for Melissa, who’s obsessed with all things handmade, makes my whole world feel a little bigger, in a not-scary way.

Plus, the day is sunny, the drifts of snow extrawhite where they pile up away from the street, and the city’s decorations are so pretty.

Then I find the coffee shop Bob recommended to me a million years ago, that I told Evan to meet me at, called Shelby’s House of Sprouts and it reminds me of home—equal parts caffeine and things organic and aggressively wholesome.

I pile all my shopping bags around my feet and sit down with a soup-bowl-sized mug of coffee and a scone as big as my head and all I am missing is a view of Puget Sound and my mom scribbling lines of poetry into her notebook.

“You found it,” says the voice at my table and then I remember, suddenly, that it wasn’t Bob who recommended this place to me.

Evan recommended this place to me.

I look at him, and he’s holding a bag from the bookstore, and his coat, and a giant mug of coffee, and somehow, a plate with a sandwich.

I hadn’t even seen him come in—the only table free is blocked from the rest of the coffee shop by a divider of houseplants.

“Okay.” I sigh. “You can sit.”

He smiles. “That’s good,” he says. “Because you’re at my table.”

He sits, all arms and legs and that weird grace he has that has lately made me want to lick some part of him, any part of him.

“You’re not going to believe me, but I thought it was someone from my lab that had told me to check this place out.”

He arranged his sandwich plate and mug for what seemed like a long time before he looked up at me. “Actually, I do believe you.”

“Oh.” I watch him bite into a sandwich that looked like a Seattle shade garden between two pieces of bread. He watches me watch him while he chews. “Why do you believe me?”

“Why do I believe that you’d think that someplace you’d like to go was recommended to you by someone you trust?”

“Oh. Right.”

“Yeah. But do you like this place?”

“I do.”

“I thought you might. It seems like something you’d find back home in Seattle.”

Why is he so nice? It makes it difficult to get him to do things that aren’t so nice. With my mind, I mean.

“I’m sorry, I am. Thank you for meeting me here.”

“You’re not going to believe me,” he says, “but it doesn’t bother me at all that you’d forget I recommended this place. We’ve had a long way around and I’m really glad you called.” He takes a big bite of his sandwich.

I watch him chewing, trying to figure out if this is one of his Yoda-like moments, where he means to preoccupy me with one thing and then I end up having an epiphany about another.

“Also,” he says, “I feel like I should apologize to you.”