Imaginary Lines (New York Leopards 3)

But I’d underestimated him. Abe was strong and limber, and able to twist and slide with grace and power that my body couldn’t command. Soon, he was sitting on my bed, and I was trying to cover my fit of giggles. I’d checked three times to make sure my door was locked.

He dragged me down onto the bed as soon as he’d finished closing the blinds. “Much better,” he murmured after he’d discarded his shirt and lifted off mine. I didn’t respond, just ran my hands over the planes of his chest.

And then I remembered. “Oh. I called it.”

He didn’t stop kissing me, and spoke softly against my skin. “Hmm?”

“My mom asked if we were getting married.”

He laughed silently. “Actually, I think I called it.”

“What?”

He just smiled at me, and then I stopped being able to think when his hands were making me crazy. “Do you promise to stay quiet? Otherwise I’m going to have to stop.”

“I promise,” I said immediately.

And I did. But it wasn’t easy.

Chapter Twenty

America turned into a giant Christmas mall after Thanksgiving.

I liked Christmas. There were sparkly lights and festive trees and those ever-present carols. I liked carols, Rudolph and Frosty and chestnuts roasting on an open fire.

Hanukkah, festival of lights and holiday of impossible transliteration, had songs more along the lines of being assailed by raging foes and terrible sacrifices. And suffering. Most of our holidays were about the suffering.

Loved those songs.

Still, I liked carols and Christmas too, and it never really bothered me unless I was trapped in a mall with the songs on repeat and the tinsel everywhere and the Christmas villages and the relentless advertising. Then I was like, Whoa, calm down, America. Don’t worry, we haven’t forgotten to be consumers. We’re fabulous at consumerism. Wasn’t this a religious holiday once?

I mean, I guess I’d prefer having people shove merchandise in my face rather than their religion, but still.

I woke up one week after Thanksgiving to weird sounds and the faint smell of pine needles, and padded out of my room to see Lucy wrestling a small, round tree into the corner. There was some contraption at the bottom, and pine needles everywhere. She saw me looking and beamed. “I got us a tree!”

Sabeen and Jaz also trailed out into the living room. Jaz lifted her brows. “Uh, you know Tamar’s Jewish and Sabeen’s Muslim, right?”

Lucy’s face underwent a transformation from joy to surprise to crushed regret. “Oh.”

Sabeen glanced at me with one of her lurking smiles. “I’m cool with a tree.”

I shrugged, wondering if anyone had made coffee yet. “Me too.”

The next day, however, I discreetly place the menorah my temple had mailed me one year at college in the windowsill.

When Lucy noticed the new addition, she shook her head. “We are so

fucking multicultural.”

I laughed. “Gold star, team.”

Even the office was festive. Staff kept bringing in leftovers from holiday parties, and readers and advertisers and remote employees sent in gift baskets. The holiday party was scheduled for the seventeenth, by which point I was sure I’d have turned into a giant ball of packaged sweets and baked cookies.

The first real snowfall of the year came the first week of December. My childhood had been filled with snow, men and angels and days, but ever since we moved to California it became a rarity. We went to Big Sur and Tahoe for skiing occasionally, but it was less a matter of weather and more a matter of travel. We didn’t wait for the snow; we went to it.

Here, it was different. The light flurries brought an air of excitement from the skies. Everyone walked around with a faint smile on their faces as the flakes floated down from above. It was soft and light, fine and powdery, and though everyone said it had no staying power, it formed a dusting of white along the sidewalks. Children spun in circles with their tongues stuck out, and instead of pulling them along, their adults actually laughed.

Hanukkah came two weeks into the month, when the sun hit its lowest point and the wind howled through the city like a wolf that’d lost his mate. I shivered constantly, except when I lay beside Abe, whose heat stayed even the fiercest breeze.