Last Christmas (Private 0.60)

***"She needs something more," Ariana murmured aloud on Sunday afternoon. "Something he can't give

her."

She swiveled in her desk chair, turning away from her laptop and the unfinished Word document that was

taunting her. She snapped on the Christmas lights she and Noelle had strung around their dormered windows

and watched as dusk began to settle over the campus. It was getting dark earlier and earlier each day. "So is it

really wrong for her to look for romance somewhere else, if she knows she'll never truly be happy with him?"

"Depends." Noelle emerged from the walk-in closet they shared, peeking over the tower of designer threads

she was carrying in her arms. "Maybe she isn't trying hard enough. Have they tried doing it in public?" She

expertly navigated the mess of clothes that littered her half of the room, dumping the stash from the closet

into an open Louis Vuitton suitcase on her unmade bed. "Because whenever I start to get a little bored with

Dash, we go someplace where we know we might get caught. Ups the naughty factor. Or if she has a

camcorder, she could-"

"Not that kind of romance," Ariana groaned, spinning back toward her desk. She tossed an old issue of Quill,

the Easton literary magazine she contributed to, on the floor and typed one sentence into her computer. "And

remind me never to borrow a movie from you without making sure it's not homemade." "Noted." Noelle

opened her top dresser drawer and pulled out several tubes of M.A.C. lip gloss.

Ariana picked up the pomegranate-cassis pillar candle Daniel had given her that morning as an early-

Christmas-slash-sorry-I-got-drunk-last-night present and inhaled its waxy scent. "Anyhow, I'm talking about

real romance. The kind of romance where you feel a burning desire to be with the person all the time." "Who

are we talking about, anyway?" Noelle asked, zipping up her red Vera Bradley makeup bag before grabbing a

pair of caramel brown leather boots near the doorway.

"Emma Bovary," Ariana said. "And don't even think about taking my Michael Kors boots home with you. I

need them for Vermont." She put the candle back down on her desk next to the three silver-framed

photographs. They were her favorite pictures. One was a photo Paige had taken of her and Daniel last summer

at the Ryans' Martha's Vine -yard estate. The second was a black-and-white photo of Ariana by herself, taken

by Daniel at Noelle's house in the Hamptons last summer, as Ariana blew a kiss at the camera. The other was

an old candid of Ariana and her mother on the back porch of the family's sprawling home in Atlanta. They

were both smiling, happy. It had been taken years ago, before her father had essentially checked out of their

marriage. Before all the hospitalizations. Before Easton. Before Billings. It felt like another time, another life.

The girl in the photo might as well have been another person. But Ariana loved the image just the same.