Christmas At The Riverview Inn

by Molly O'Keefe

  “And?”

  “They’re reviewing my pitch,” she said, smiling a little. And he could tell she was hedging her bets. “But signs look good. It would be for next year.”

  “What’s your pitch?” he asked.

  “It doesn’t…you can’t be that interested.”

  He was interested in everything about her. “Of course I am. Lay it on me.”

  She explained her idea of putting people with different ideas and philosophies and religions and backgrounds in a series of booths so they couldn’t see each other, and instead of answering questions about what made them different, they had to answer questions about what made them similar.

  “Things like their favorite food their mother made, the name of their first pet, what they did on summer vacation when they were young. What they wanted to be when they grew up. Things they’re scared of, things like that.”

  “So they talk about what they have in common, rather than what they stand in opposition to.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “I feel like we’re all so divided.”

  “You’re assuming people have the same kind of childhood,” he said. And he could feel her focus. “I didn’t have a pet. My mom didn’t make me food I loved.”

  “You’re right. I’ve thought about this, but I’m not sure how to resolve the issue. Except maybe to just let it be an issue. Maybe that is how we open people’s eyes to how privilege works.”

  “That’s a lot to ask of reality television. It’s really ambitious.”

  “I think there’s room to ask more of television. We’ve sunk down to the lowest common denominator. I think we can ask more of television and more of our viewers.”

  “That’s the Josie I remember,” he said with a smile.

  “I’m calling it Common Ground. And maybe it is too ambitious or big, but I’m ready for something exciting, even if it means making it on my own.”

  “Josie,” he said and then didn’t know what else to say. Or how to put what he felt about her into words. “It’s a complicated, amazing idea.”

  You’re amazing.

  “I feel like your show manages to bring people of different backgrounds together over food and coffee,” she said.

  “I don’t have a show.”

  “Come on, Five Questions is totally a show. You have, like, a million subscribers, Cameron.”

  “I really don’t know how that happened.”

  “Oh my god, that you somehow stumbled into YouTube success is the most Cameron thing I’ve ever heard.”

  She was smiling at him and he was smiling at her, and for a moment, bright and hot, it was like every moment since she kissed him on her graduation night to now had never happened. And those things that had happened to the two of them over the course of living their lives had been shared.

  She wasn’t a stranger. She was his best friend. Had been. Back when he’d had that kind of thing.

  And he didn’t look away. And she didn’t, either. And his longing for her, for what they might have been, was painful. Excruciating.

  “You’ve really made a name for yourself,” she said quietly into the loaded air.

  “That’s what I’m told.”

  “You know something?” She laughed. “Fuck that.”

  “What?”

  “Yeah, fuck that oh I just stumbled onto something and I’m just lucky and I’m not paying attention to the money.”

  “What are you talking about?” He laughed.

  “You don’t have all those followers without paying attention.” He glanced over at her and she raised an eyebrow. “I’m just saying you can cut the act. With me. You can be honest. I know exactly what that kind of success takes and how hard you have to work to keep it.”

  With me. You can be honest.

  “So?” She knew the drill. The energy around these self-made stars and everyone trying to capitalize on it.

  “YouTube and Netflix keep calling me in for meetings,” he said.

  “They want to do a show?” she asked

  “Yeah.”

  “And you?”

  “I like what I’m doing.”

  Her silence was telling. So was the way she was staring at him. “What?” he asked with a laugh.

  “What what?” She shrugged one shoulder.

  “You want to say something and you’re stopping yourself.”

  “I don’t…” The coyness fell away for a moment. “I don’t know you well enough to tell you your business—”

  He put a hand out, stretched it across the back of the seat and touched her shoulder. Just slipped his hand over her coat, and he could only feel the shape of her beneath that coat.

  She shifted and his fingers, icy cold, touched the hot skin of her neck and they both gasped.

  He pulled away, put both hands back around the steering wheel.

  “You knew me better than anyone else.” He shrugged.

  “That was a long time ago,” she said.

  “Was it?” He glanced over at her. “Because it doesn’t feel like it. Not tonight.”

  What the hell are you doing? This whole conversation felt like it was tempting fate in a way fate did not need to be tempted. The past was the past.

  “Being back,” he said into the quiet truck. “I can still feel that teenager I was when I first got here.” He pressed his hand against his chest as if showing her where that kid was hiding out.

  “You mean Chaz?” she joked. It was the name he tried to get everyone to call him for about five minutes when he first arrived. Max had put the kibosh on that real quick.

  “Yeah, him.” Her grin was bright white in the gloom of the twilight. “All that posturing. All that fear. How badly I wanted Alice and Max to…” He stopped and whistled. But the words he was going to say hung in the air as clearly as if he’d shouted them.

  Love me. Be proud of me.

  “Anyway, I used to be so embarrassed by that kid but now…I’m almost fond of him.”

  “I was pretty fond of him, too,” she said. But she looked out the window instead of meeting his gaze. “It’s true for me, as well. I mean, it feels like part of me is still that girl. And maybe that’s just how people feel when they get older. Like they keep adding to the person they were, piling versions of themselves on top of each other.”

  “Like those Russian nesting dolls?”

  “Yeah. I mean, I can still feel that scared little girl who first arrived here, so angry at her mom. So worried about her dad. Confused about everything. She’s still…” She put a hand to her neck. “Here. Her voice still comes out of me.”

  “You had a pretty traumatic event,” he said. “With your dad.”

  “Thank god for therapy,” she joked but he didn’t laugh. They were getting closer to the inn, the glow of the main lodge visible over the trees.

  Thank god.

  “I think about my dad sometimes.” Her voice was barely above a whisper. “About the kind of man he was and what parts of him are in me.”

  “Josie,” he said. “You’re nothing like your father.”

  “Well, I’m not a murderer.” Again she tried to make things light but Cameron was not having it. He knew how she was trying to deflect. “But I have his height. And his skeptic’s nature.”

  “Stop,” he said as they pulled into the back driveway. The truck bounced over the snow and potholes, and the inn, even from the rear, was so pretty. He’d forgotten how pretty it was. Particularly this time of year.

  “And he was a person who tore things apart, you know? He loved destruction. It made him feel strong and in control. And sometimes I’m scared that I have that part of him, too.”

  He slammed the truck into Park and then, shockingly, he grabbed her hands where they were clenched in her lap. His skin was warm, his palms rough with calluses. And then, maybe because she didn’t pull back, he touched her face, her cheek, the edge of her lips.

  Her lips parted on a broken breath and his thumb touched the damp of her mouth and it was so fucking exciti
ng he couldn’t stand it. It was too much and not nearly enough.

  “You built me up,” he said. “Knowing you gave me the confidence to do everything I’ve done. You are a builder. Like Max. Your mom. And I can’t thank you—”

  “Cameron,” she whispered, shaking her head.

  “Let me thank you, Josie. Please.”

  “Look at what I did to you. That night—”

  “I owe my life to you and to that scared girl who befriended that scared boy so full of attitude. I do. It’s a fact. That night didn’t change that. And it made what happened next possible.”

  The words I love you almost slipped out. Because he did love her, like the dearest friend he had. But the words were loaded between them. Dipped in other feelings, complicated by what might have been.

  A kiss hung in the air. The possibility of them. He wanted her with something close to pain. An ache.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered and got out of the truck.

  12

  CAMERON

  Look. Sex was easy. Sex was the easiest thing in the world. Sex, in Cameron’s purview, was always the end. The goodbye. It was the thank you and take care between two people. It was the exclamation point on an evening of flirtation. A weekend of banter. Not that he didn’t take it seriously. He did. Of course he did. But sex made everything simple. Biological. It left out the brain and it left out the heart.

  The brain and the heart were where things got messy.

  And everything with Josie was messy and the last thing he needed was to think about sleeping with her. And it was all he could think about.

  He watched her that night with the family as they ate dinner. He watched her laugh with Helen and tease her brother about his hair. She and Delia sat back with glasses of red wine and talked, the Christmas tree lights reflected in their hair and eyes.

  What a shock to realize he still wanted her. He’d chalked up all the feelings he’d had for her to boyhood. To young love and constant proximity. But a day alone with her in that truck and he was feeling it all again. But sharper. Fiercer.

  The breaking of her breath when he pulled her hair in the bathroom. It would have been so easy to tug her closer by that bun. Against his body. He could have shut the door and pushed her against that sink. Or at any point today he could have pulled that truck over on the side of the road and kissed her in all the ways his teenage self had dreamed of.

  That list was in his head, the carefully crafted list with all the places on her body he wanted to touch and kiss and bite.

  Yep.

  Maybe this was how they could have the goodbye they should have had. Without the shame. Without the anger. And all the years of silence. Maybe this was a way to rewrite their ending.

  It had a kind of poetry to it. A do-over in the best possible way.

  And it had the added benefit of putting everything in order. His feelings. His thoughts about what she’d said in the truck about being a person who tore things down rather than building them up.

  He didn’t understand how she could be so wrong about herself.

  “They make a pretty sight, don’t they?” Max asked Cameron as he cleared dishes from the table. He and Alice had served Mateo’s smoked ham with green beans and Alice’s legendary Gratin Dauphinoise.

  Cameron felt himself blush, uncomfortable to be caught by Max staring at Josie with these thoughts in his head.

  “Hey,” Max said, his hands full of dishes. “You want to give me a hand in the kitchen?”

  Yeah, Cameron was no dummy. He knew what waited for him in that kitchen, and there was no way he was going in there for a heart-to-heart.

  “I’m not your employee anymore,” he said, as cold as he could be, and he got up to join Helen by the fire.

  The next morning was much the same as the day before had been.

  The smell of coffee pulled him from his bed and down into the kitchen with Alice. Who greeted him with a smile, a mug, and a list of things they had to do.

  “We’re supposed to get a storm later today,” she said, looking out the windows at the low sky.

  “Then we better get moving,” he said.

  They began to assemble the lasagnas and pulled the focaccia out of the fridge where it had been kept for its second rise. The cold kept the rise slow and created a better flavor.

  “Hey,” Alice said. “I want another shot at Five Questions.”

  He thought of what Josie’d said about him and people with whom he had chemistry. “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. So when can we do it?”

  “Well, we’re a little busy right now,” he said, hedging.

  “I won’t bring up your mom,” she said, and he glanced up at her. She looked as contrite as Alice ever looked. “I’m sorry I did last time.”

  “No,” he said. “It’s okay. I mean…it just surprised me is all.”

  “We can pretend like we don’t even know each other,” Alice said in a cheery voice that made his soul cringe. “We can—”

  “Alice,” he said quietly, needing to put a stop to her so cheerfully vowing to pretend she wasn’t the person who’d put him on this path with food. “Let me just…think about it.”

  “Sure,” she said, her voice in some strange octave. “Let me know.”

  They worked in awkward silence until the back door flew open and there was Josie, wild-eyed and wrapped in cables, holding her laptop.

  Her phone was pressed to her ear and she waved at Alice and Cameron as she walked through the kitchen to the living room. “Yeah,” she said. “That sounds fine. But does it have to…okay. But if the optics are bad, isn’t it just bad? Like, can’t we try for good optics? Fine. Yes.”

  The door closed behind her, and he and Alice shared a knowing look.

  “That girl is wasting herself on that stupid show,” Alice said.

  Cameron tended to agree, but kept his mouth shut. He thought of her new idea and he hoped it would happen. She deserved to be proud of her work.

  “She helped me do a Five Questions with Mateo yesterday.”

  “Mateo gets five questions and I don’t?” Alice cried.

  “I’m thinking about it,” he said with a laugh.

  “Was it nice? Working with her?” Alice asked, spreading ricotta mixture over the noodles in the silver pan in front of her.

  “Different,” he said. “I mean, working with anyone would be different, but she’s so smart, you know? And insightful.”

  Alice nodded and the conversation faded because she wasn’t going to push and he wasn’t going to say anything else.

  Three hours later the foil-wrapped bread and pans of lasagna had been loaded into the back of the van. The bread was still warm from the oven and he could feel it through his gloves. Smell the garlic and basil and tomatoes through the wrap. His stomach growled despite his having just eaten a giant slab of lasagna for lunch.

  But he’d reverted to his teenage self here at the Riverview—he was hungry. Hungry for food and for the girl he never got to have.

  He’d spent the last three hours looking for reasons to go out into the living room to see her. Talk to her. He took her coffee and fresh focaccia. A piece of lasagna for lunch. And each time he’d gone out, there she’d been, on the phone, but her eyes were warm with thanks and…awareness.

  It buzzed between them.

  And having her now felt inevitable.

  It was the most logical thing. And the idea made his blood leap and his dick hard, and there was a kind of righteous symmetry to the whole thing.

  They would have sex and say goodbye to the kids they’d been.

  It was enough to make a guy smile.

  She was not, he could tell, opposed to the idea. He’d learned a thing or two away from the Riverview. And he knew when a woman was interested in him as a man. And every time he got close to her—setting the coffee cup down, his fingers brushing hers when he handed her the focaccia—her interest practically sparkled and fizzed in the air.

  Yeah. As plans went, he liked it
.

  With the van full of the food for Haven House he went back into the kitchen, where Alice was finishing up the dishes. “You got everything?” she asked.

  “Yep.”

  “You sure you don’t want help?”

  Oh, I want help. Just not yours.

  “I’m good,” he said. He left the kitchen and went back to the dining room and the chair and table where Josie had set up camp. Working, it seemed, nonstop. Empty cups of coffee. A plate with smears of lasagna left on it. She’d put on glasses, those big, thick black ones that a certain kind of woman wore.

  That certain kind of woman—bookish and serious—was his catnip.

  The tree was on, the fire was lit, and she looked like a Christmas angel sitting there.

  “Hey,” he said, coming up on her side.

  “Hey,” she said with a careful smile.

  “Can you take a break?”

  She looked at him like she’d never heard those words before.

  “All right. You clearly need a break.” He picked up the laptop that she used as a barricade and set it aside. “Let’s take a ride.”

  If there was a person on this planet who needed to relax, it was his old friend. She was wound tight and holding herself so still and so carefully she was about to crack.

  Did she know that? he wondered. Could she feel it under her skin, the way her sharp edges were grinding together?

  “Where are you going?” she asked.

  “Alice needs me to deliver the lasagna down to Haven House,” he said.

  “Times have not changed, have they?”

  “Not at the Riverview. Not with Alice.” Make the food and deliver the food had been a way of life for him at the inn when he and Helen and Josie were organizing the lunch program at the elementary school. That felt like a lifetime ago.

  “You want to come with me?” he asked.

  From her half-shut laptop came a chorus of muffled chimes announcing messages and emails. The never-ending pressure of her job.

  Say yes, he thought. But she was silent.

  Clearly, the weight of that laptop was heavier than the temptation of what might happen between them.