“Do it,” he said and closed his eyes, head tilted up.
She could kiss him. Just lean down and press her lips to his.
God. This bathroom is so small.
“It’s only hair, Josie,” he said, opening one eye.
“Right! Of course. It’s your head.” The whine of the clippers drowned out the opportunity to talk and filled the tiny bathroom with enough noise that it was actually hard to think. She ran the clippers over his head, the pretty silky-brown hair falling down around his shoulders. She caught some in her hand, trying to keep it out of his eyes.
“Sorry,” she whispered, her breath caught in her throat.
“It’s okay.”
“I just need…” She stepped sideways and he shifted out of her way. Not opening his legs so she could step between them. That, she realized would be…too much. Way too much. As it was, her knee hit his. Her palm skated over his hair, hovering over the shape of his skull.
He breathed out.
She breathed in.
His shoulders gathered hair and she picked it up and threw it in the sink, her fingers registering the warmth of him beneath the towel. Beneath the shirt.
“Can I…”
“I can’t hear you.”
She turned off the clippers for a second. “I need to clean up around your ears. Can I…touch you?”
“Seems like you already are.”
They kept bumping into each other. Elbows. Shoulders. Knees. His thigh. Hers.
She changed the number on the clipper and did her best to dress things up in the back and around his ears. So he didn’t look so much like a prisoner of war.
“There,” she said and turned off the clippers again. “Look at me.”
He did, smiling. And she was distracted by that crooked tooth for just a second.
“That bad?”
“No, actually…I mean, yes. It’s pretty terrible. But it’s not a lopsided Mohawk.”
He stood and she shifted out of his way, but he was so big he filled the tiny powder room. And she stepped back into the doorway to give him the chance to look at himself in the mirror.
It wasn’t a great haircut, but it wasn’t terrible. It made his eyes bigger and his cheekbones and chin sharper. Stronger. He looked, well, he looked beautiful.
“Not too bad,” he said, turning sideways, running his hand over his head. She closed her hand into a fist, wondering if it was actually a bad thing that she knew exactly how his hair felt. “Thank you, Josie.”
Their eyes met in the mirror and she couldn’t pretend anymore. Everything she wanted to say to him and had swallowed and swallowed and swallowed came pouring out.
“I’m so sorry.”
“It’s not that bad, Josie!”
“No. That night. For getting you kicked out.”
She stopped, the words getting crushed under the silence, thick and heavy between them. “I shouldn’t have said anything,” she whispered. “I’m sorry.” She reached behind her for the door and he reached out and touched her hand, a glancing brush of his fingers against her thumb, and she jerked back. Away. All of her was on edge. Electric.
“You didn’t get me kicked out,” he said quietly.
“Cameron, please. Please. For the last seven years, whenever your name comes up, everyone suddenly stops being able to look me in the eye. Alice is still mad at me. I tried to explain. I did, but they—”
He stepped forward and the bathroom was the size of a stamp. She could taste him in the air. If her fingers twitched forward they would touch him.
“They didn’t kick me out,” he said. “I left.”
“Because they kicked you out.”
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.
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.
“You should go,” she said. Please go. “Before Alice comes looking for you. I’ll clean this up.”
“You sure?” he asked, looking down at the hair in the sink.
“Totally.”
She grinned the wide plastic grin her face had grown used to and silently begged him to go, so she could take a deep breath and shake out her hands and remember she wasn’t a girl suffering from the most painful case of unrequited love of all time.
But then, suddenly, he grabbed her hand, the one not holding the clippers, and instinctively her hand grabbed back and it seemed—for a moment—that they were holding on to each other. Him in the hallway, her in the tiled bathroom. Both of them in the now and in the past.
“It’s good to see you,” he said.
“It’s good to see you, too.”
They were speaking in understatements to somehow make this all seem normal. Or simple. When it was anything but. At least on her end.
Though, maybe it was simple on his end. Maybe he ran into old girlfriends all the time and buried his hands in their hair and pulled, just enough to make them…wet.
She couldn’t find the plastic smile so she didn’t even look at him.
He squeezed her hand and then walked away.
When she couldn’t hear him in the hallway or the dining room she collapsed against the sink.
Hearing his side of the story rearranged things in her head. Alleviated some guilt. Changed the position of the blame and responsibility and left it without any place to go. It didn’t take away the pain.
It didn’t change that he’d left without a word.
It didn’t change that part of her remained caught in that night, in those years with him. Measuring every man against the memory of him. Measuring every man against the way her body had lit up for him.
It was why she hadn’t moved on.
It was why she was a twenty-three-year-old virgin.
It was embarrassing. Infuriating. It wasn’t his fault that she was frozen. But it wasn’t not his fault, either. And after that night part of her…shrank. Her confidence, maybe. Her fierceness when it came to her place in this family. She’d taken all that fierceness and put it in her work while her private self stayed small. Withered almost.
It all shuffled in her brain. Some things making more sense. Some things making less.
She understood why he left. Cameron would have been horrified. Embarrassed. He would have felt that he’d betrayed the family.
But it didn’t explain the rest of it. Those unreturned calls. Those unread messages. Dozens of them. Hundreds.
She stood staring at a Christmas wreath on a store’s door in Greenwich Village. It was one of the green ones, made entirely out of plants. And without thinking twice she called him. His number, six months later, still on her favorites list.
“This is Cameron,” his message said. “I probably won’t listen to this but go ahead and give it a shot. If you really need me, text.”
The sound of his voice put a lump in her throat. And she’d tried texting. She’d tried a bajillion texts.
“Cameron,” she said after the beep. “It’s…well, it’s me. Josie. It’s Christmas. Though, you probably know that. I just…” She looked at that wreath, the pine needles and the sage. Someone bumped into her. Slush covered the toes of her boots.
“Move on,” someone yelled at her and she laughed. Exactly. Move on.
“Wanted to wish you a Merry Christmas. I hope you’re well. Call…you know…if you want to.”
He’d never called and she wished she could say that was the last time she’d called him. He hadn’t returned one of her texts and now he stood there and had the gall to tell her he had felt what she had felt.
Bullshit.
She was stunned to feel…anger. Real anger. It exploded in her. Out of the boxes where she’d put it. Where she’d hidden it.
Leaving the clippers and the hair, she went to get some answers.
10
CAMERON
His hand burned. He flexed it, spreading the fingers wide, and then clenched it into a fist. He could feel every strand of her hair that he’d touched.
What was that? he wondered.
Well, he knew what that was. That thing between them that made her breath break and her eyes dilate. That made his blood burn. It was what had always been between them. And what a goddamn kick in the nuts that he’d never felt that same burn with any other woman. That same chemistry.
In Thailand he’d met Paanit, a chef who worked out of a beach cave, and Paanit served him spicy Khao soi and grilled meat from a smoky fire with an oily, bright-green condiment he’d never had before. It was so delicious, the perfect combination of sweet and salt and heat with bright herbaceous tones, that it had blown his mind. Paanit, the bastard, wouldn’t tell him what was in it and Cameron had spent years trying to recreate the taste.
He’d come close, but finally had to admit that the difference between what he could make and what Paanit had made for him was the magic that came from the experience and the person making it.
This powerful desire he felt for Josie was exactly like that. He’d spent years trying to feel for another woman what he felt for that girl he met when they were both too young.
And never came close.
His bag was at the base of the steps and he stopped beside it. How easy it would be to leave. He wanted to leave because there was no way to keep things separate with her. To keep it clean. Neat. His desire for her was a desire not just for her body—but for all of her. Her secrets and their past, who they’d been. If he stayed—with her—things were gonna get messy.
“Cameron!”
He whirled at the sound of her voice, the furious stomp of her feet.
Brace yourself, he thought. But what exactly he was bracing himself for he wasn’t sure. The sight of her, her red hair slipping out of that bun, falling in fat curls over her shoulders - her eyes narrowed, her cheeks pink -- it lit him up.
Oh, he thought. She’s so fucking amazing when she’s mad.
“I called you every day,” she said, coming to a stop a foot from him. He could see the pound of her heart right there in the fragile skin of her neck.
“For a month. I know.”
“I emailed. I messaged.”
“Everyone did.” He tried to smile. But she was not having it.
She shook her head. “Why? Why couldn’t you answer the phone? Send one text? One message from you and…”
“What?” he asked. “One message from me and what?”
“I would have moved on.”
“No.” He stepped forward, narrowing the distance between them. “One message from me and then it would have been another one. And then another. And then I’d call you some night from a hostel in who the hell knows where and you’d call me from New York and then we’d never move on. Never. I needed to cut all ties, Josie.”
She opened her mouth as if to blast him again, but Alice came shouting through the door from the kitchen.
“Cameron! Oh.” She lowered her voice. “There you are.”
He turned away from Josie, broke that connection between them, and sucked in a breath.
“Everything okay?” Alice asked, looking between them.
“Fine,” Josie snapped, and he nearly smiled. The woman with the fake smile and the eyes full of tears, those weren’t versions of Josie he was familiar wi
th. But this version, angry and spitting fire…yeah, he knew that girl.
He loved that girl.
“I’ve got the focaccia dough rising,” Alice said.
“You want me to start assembling the lasagnas?” he asked, walking forward, eagerly ready to get away from this girl who made his skin burn and spine tingle. And made him remember…
“We’ve got some time,” Alice said. “But I need to run into town to Knapstein’s to get the turkeys and roast.”
“I’ll go,” he said.
Alice blinked. “Well, Mateo would love to see you.” She tossed the truck keys she had in her hand, and Cameron snagged them out of the air.
“And I’d love to see him.”
“You might…” Alice looked over his shoulder at Josie. “Need some help.”
“Absolutely,” Josie said, enunciating every part of that word. And he could feel her dark-eyed gaze like knives at his back.
“What about work?” he asked her, turning back around.
“It can wait.”
Alice made some kind of strangled, surprised laughing sound but swallowed it quickly.
“Let’s go,” Josie said.
The old truck smelled like a thousand school lunches and something else on top of it. Something funky.
“What is that smell?” he asked.
“Dom’s hockey stuff. Apparently, Max uses the truck to take him back and forth to practice.”
“Oh god, I’ve never been so glad not to play hockey,” he joked. She didn’t laugh.
Their breath made smoky plumes in the cold air of the truck. “I see the heater is still top notch,” he said, cranking the thing as high as it could go. Half the time the truck wouldn’t be warm until you got to you destination. “I can’t believe it’s still running,” he said to her silence, because he was a rambling fool at the moment. He put the truck in Drive and they were off down the road. Josie buckled into the passenger seat with her pink cheeks and the red knit hat she’d pulled on over her hair.
She was prickly with anger, and the perverse thing about him was…he liked it.
Sexual tension sat on the bench seat between them. Where it had waited since she turned sixteen and he could no longer pretend she was just some little kid following him around.
Christmas At The Riverview Inn Page 10