Christmas at the Riverview Inn

He shook his head. And again, she got caught up in the years. The time since she last saw him. A man still carrying his awkward teenage self in his eyes and hands. Who’d become this man standing here now. So solid. So real. And she knew that all of those changes would have happened had they stayed in touch. Had they lived the life she’d fantasized about. He would have grown those shoulders. That beard. The long hair. He would have gotten tall and lean and utterly competent.

But maybe in a different way.

Or maybe, somehow, not at all.

Maybe he would have become some other different version of himself entirely.

Better. Worse. Hard to say.

“I’m so sorry I kissed you.”

Impossibly he reached for her and brushed her cheek, and as if that wasn’t enough, he cupped her cheek in his hand, his thumb touching the edge of her mouth. She gasped, pulling in air because she was drowning in this little bathroom. Drowning in all the things she hadn’t felt with another man. All the things she hadn’t felt for years. It was like he touched her and her body came roaring back to life.

“I’m not,” he said.

9

JOSIE

She jerked away, unable to bear his touch. It felt like he was laughing at her.

“Don’t say that,” she said. Don’t say it if it’s not true. Don’t say it just to make me feel better.

“What do you remember from that night?” he asked.

Everything and nothing.

“I remember you didn’t want to kiss me. You kept trying to get me to stop. I pulled you onto the bed.” The memory was excruciating.

“Do you remember what we said?”

“No.”

“I wanted to kiss you, Josie. But not like that. Not when you were drunk. I’d been waiting years to kiss you.”

“Years?”

He gave her a sideways glance. “Are you going to pretend you didn’t know?”

“I’m not pretending anything, Cameron. I spent years nursing an unrequited crush on you. I worked up enough courage and did enough Jell-O shots and kissed you and you vanished.” She was getting angry.

“The summer you turned sixteen, remember?”

“What about it?”

“What did we do?”

“You and I ran the 10K race with Jonah in town and then came home for cake and presents.”

“After the race, what did you do?”

“Cameron, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“They had that rain tent, because it was so hot, and you took off your shirt and went into the rain tent in your shorts and sports bra and you came out…” He stopped, shook his head, his eyes wide like he still couldn’t believe it. “I could never look at you the same again. You were sixteen and had been like a sister to me, and suddenly the way I was looking at you was so wrong.”

Wrong. She flinched at the word.

Everything she’d felt for him had seemed so right and for him it was wrong.

“You were a kid,” he said. “And I was an employee, and Max…”

“I get it,” she said. Because for Cameron so much of everything came down to Max.

“We were young. But I loved you, too.” He’d said we were young like it mitigated their feelings. Like their love had been less real instead of more. And maybe that was true for him. In fact, clearly that was true for him.

But that love, that young love, had been the most real thing she’d ever felt.

“I…I didn’t know,” she said. “I honestly thought it was just me.”

They were whispering in the tiny bathroom. That they were standing so close after all these years was actually hard to grasp. She nodded because words were too hard to form.

“I held on to your graduation night,” he whispered. “That kiss. The way you felt against my body.”

Something was happening. Time was an accordion and folding in on itself. It was now, yes, seven years later, but it was also that night and like not a moment had passed. And her body suddenly came out of the deep freeze where she kept it, woke up and yearned.

Watching her the whole time, he cupped the bun at the back of her head in his palm and squeezed, and she gasped at the pleasure–pain of it all. Her head tilted back, her throat bare to him.

But all he did was look at her, his hand clenched in her hair.

It was shocking.

What is happening?

What would I do if he asked? What would I give him?

The answer bubbled up unchanged from the past—anything. Everything.

The clippers nearly slipped out of her numb fingers.

This was too much. Way too much. She stepped back, hitting the toilet. He stepped back, too, bumping into the doorframe.

Her sigh was broken and strained, and she wanted to haul him close and push him away all at the same time. She was torn right down the middle of her extremely uncomfortable desire for the man she’d loved as a boy.