Snow in Love

by Aimee Friedman

  TITLE PAGE

  SNOW AND MISTLETOE BY KASIE WEST

  WORKING IN A WINTER WONDERLAND BY AIMEE FRIEDMAN

  THE MAGI’S GIFTS BY MELISSA DE LA CRUZ

  GROUNDED BY NIC STONE

  ABOUT THE AUTHORS

  OTHER BOOKS YOU’LL ENJOY

  COPYRIGHT

  DECEMBER 22, 4:50 P.M.

  A sleepy Christmas song played on the speakers overhead as I finally stepped up to the next available rental car clerk. She didn’t even try to put a friendly smile on her face. I supposed a day like today would take the customer service out of anyone.

  “Hi,” I said. “My flight was canceled. I need to rent a car.”

  “Credit card and ID, please.”

  I pulled out my license and slid it across the counter. “I don’t have a credit card.”

  Well, technically I did. My parents had given me an emergency credit card but I knew if I used it now, a purchase text would flash on my mom’s cell phone screen. It would say something like: Amalie is in Denver when she should be in Italy—you know, that place she begged to go for an exchange year? The place you paid for her to go? The place she ran away from after four months instead of the scheduled nine because apparently she’s not as strong as she thought?

  “Doesn’t the airline pay for my rental since they canceled my flight?” I asked the clerk.

  She laughed, but when she realized I was serious, she added sadly, “Oh, honey, no. They don’t, not when it’s weather related.” She picked up my license and showed it to me as if I didn’t know what was on it. “But you can’t rent a car. You’re only seventeen.”

  “Right … so I take it the airline won’t pay for a hotel either.” I had exactly nineteen dollars left after buying my plane ticket with the earnings from a side job I wasn’t supposed to have. I could feel the rolled-up wad of cash in my pocket, digging into my thigh as if mocking me about how little it would buy.

  “Next!” the lady called over my head and then handed me back my license. “Good luck.”

  Tears stung the back of my eyes as I gathered my things and walked away from the counter. Bing Crosby crooned overhead about snow and mistletoe, and for some reason that made me want to cry more. I had been in an airport or on a plane for the last sixteen hours. Denver was my second layover; I was only supposed to be here for forty-five minutes. Now, with the snowstorm, I’d already been here three times that long, and counting.

  I tucked my wallet into my backpack and slung the bag onto my shoulder. I’d checked my suitcase back in Milan, and it now sat on a plane, apparently unable to be removed before the plane reached its destination. Hopefully, the weather would soon clear, and my suitcase and I would both fly that plane home to California.

  I found an empty spot against the wall and slid down it until I sat on the floor. Would I be allowed to sleep in this rental car place? I pulled out my phone and stared at the screen. For the millionth time, I thought about texting my mom. But I wasn’t desperate enough yet. A text message wasn’t going to be how I told my mom I’d left the program in Milan early. I needed to show up on her doorstep in person and explain things. The magic of Christmas would save me from her wrath. She loved Christmas.

  “Hey, I think I know you,” a voice said above me. The statement surprised me, because I knew nobody in Denver, Colorado.

  I looked up to see Sawyer Harris: my high school’s senior class president, and winner of last year’s best smile award. He was staring at me, proving why he had absolutely deserved that award.

  “Hey,” I managed after too long of a pause. “What are you doing here?”

  “You know, just hanging out,” he said, his eyes sparkling with humor.

  “Right, you’re stuck too.” Just put your foot in your mouth, Amalie, and wait for your brain to reinhabit your skull. I wasn’t even sure why I was acting so starstruck. I had never had a crush on Sawyer, unlike half the girls at school. Sure, he was cute and seemed nice, but he was completely out of my circle and I didn’t have the desire to change that.

  He nodded. “The weather was great for snowboarding, not so great for leaving. You heading home for Christmas?”

  “Yep. Yes.”

  “You went somewhere for an exchange year or something, right?”

  “How do you know that?” I blurted.

  He flashed me the famous smile again. “Not too many people venture quite so far.”

  It didn’t really answer my question, but I accepted it. “Yes … I ventured. Now I’m trying to get home. So, snowboarding? Here in Colorado? Or is this your layover?” There, finally some understandable words.

  He pointed over his shoulder to nobody in particular. “Yeah, me and some friends were here snowboarding. You probably remember them from school. Logan Thompson and Wes Chan. Oh, and my older sister, Heather.”

  I started to nod. I did remember Logan … sort of. Then I shook my head with a laugh. “Not really. Sorry. We were in completely different friend pools. I’m actually surprised you remember me.” Finally, my brain was all the way back. No more stumbling stupidly over words. I blamed it on being tired and frustrated. I would blame this day for everything if I needed to. It was completely ruining my life right now.

  “Of course I remember you. Your voice is like …” He trailed off.

  “A car without a muffler? Heralding angels? Your sentence could’ve gone either way.”

  He laughed. “Sorry. It sounded cheesy in my head.”

  A guy with spiky black hair and brown eyes came up behind Sawyer. “S … U … V,” the guy said, slapping Sawyer on the back with each letter. “With four-wheel drive. Let’s do this thing.”

  Sawyer nodded down at me. “Wes, you remember …”

  “Amalie,” I finished for him. So Sawyer didn’t remember me as well as he claimed.

  “Amalie,” Sawyer said. “I was getting there.”

  Right. I nodded a “hi” up at Wes. At this point I felt like it was too late to stand but my neck was starting to ache.

  Wes shook his head. “Don’t remember you at all.”

  “Don’t feel bad,” I said even though it was obvious he didn’t. “I don’t remember you either.”

  “No?” Sawyer said to Wes. “She goes to high school with us.”

  “Well, not this year,” I said. Although I was about to change that. I wanted to finish out senior year back home.

  Sawyer added, “You’d remember her if she sang.”

  “If she sang?” Wes frowned.

  “I’m not going to sing,” I said, seeing exactly where this conversation was headed.

  “Fine. But her voice is like …”

  After several seconds I said, “One day you might finish that sentence.”

  Sawyer laughed.

  A tall and lanky guy with a crop of bright blond hair walked up, joining our group. “Let’s go,” he said to Sawyer and Wes. “We have a vehicle.”

  “Logan, this is Amalie,” Sawyer said.

  Logan nodded down to me.

  “How did you guys get a car?” I asked. “The lady wouldn’t rent me one.”

  “My sister,” Sawyer explained. “She’s twenty-one.”

  “Oh, nice.”

  Logan jerked his head toward the exit, and he and Wes left. I looked out the window, where snow was falling pretty heavily now. It was probably better that I didn’t get a car; I wouldn’t have felt confident driving in that.

  “Be careful,” I said to Sawyer, who was lingering behind.

  He followed my gaze out the window. “Right now, the worst of the storm is north of here and headed this way. We think we can beat it.”

  “Utah’s not just as bad?” They’d have to drive through a lot of Utah on the way home.

  “It’s a lot better than
here. A day and half and we’ll be home.” He turned his phone toward me. Some weather app was open. It showed severe snow for the next four days in Denver. Then he swiped his finger across the screen and Utah weather appeared, with four days of only clouds. He shrugged. “All I know is that if I’m not home by Christmas my mom will kill me,” he said.

  My chest was tighter than ever. “This storm is going to hang around for four days?” I could be stuck here through Christmas?

  “You could come with us,” he said.

  “What?”

  “To Fresno. In the SUV. There’s room.”

  “I’m sure your friends would love that.”

  “They wouldn’t care. Trust me. And Heather would probably appreciate the company. She said something about our maturity level yesterday.”

  You shouldn’t get in a car with someone you hardly know, I told myself. No matter how desperate you are. I didn’t even know three facts about this guy. “I think I’ll pass,” I said.

  “Okay.” He gave me a small wave. “Hopefully you beat us home.” He spun around and walked away. I watched him join up outside with Wes and Logan, and a girl who must’ve been his sister. She had his same sandy-brown hair and expressive brown eyes. I watched as she tied her wavy hair back into a ponytail. My own long dark hair felt matted and messy from all the travel.

  My gaze drifted to Sawyer, who laughed at something Logan said.

  Okay. He liked to snowboard. That was a fact I knew about him.

  I bit my lip and played with the strap on my backpack as the group moved toward the sliding doors that led to the parking garage.

  Oh, and he won that award for his smile last year. Fact.

  I laced my fingers together, then pulled them apart again. “His last name is Harris,” I whispered. I totally knew three facts about him. I jumped up.

  “Sawyer, wait!”

  DECEMBER 22, 6:15 P.M.

  “You look skeptical,” Sawyer said as everyone piled into the SUV.

  “I am.”

  He smiled. “A road trip can’t be harder than a year in Italy.”

  I met his eyes and let out a little chuckle. He was right. The last four months had been hard.

  Sawyer opened up the back of the SUV and threw in his large backpack. When I handed him mine he said, “Wow, you pack light.”

  “My luggage is on the plane. They wouldn’t get it off for me.”

  “Was your life in there?” he asked.

  “Pretty much.”

  He looked down at the jeans I was wearing and then my tee and hoodie. “You’re going to be cold.” He reached for his backpack, unzipped it, and pulled out a big ski jacket. “Here. You can use this.”

  “Is this all you packed?” I asked. “Because there is no way anything else can fit in that bag if this was in there.”

  I silently added low maintenance to facts I knew about Sawyer. Although maybe this meant he just never changed his clothes … or brushed his teeth.

  “It has the ability to squeeze into small spaces.”

  “Thanks.”

  He slammed the hatch and opened the car door.

  Heather, Sawyer’s sister, was driving and Wes had claimed shotgun. Logan sat on the middle bench, his backpack taking up a seat and his long legs stretched out onto the other.

  “I’ll take the back,” I said. Maybe that would make them feel better when I was the only one not contributing money for this ride.

  I climbed in and Sawyer followed after me, to the last row.

  “I can sit back here by myself,” I said.

  “Logan doesn’t share well, so I’d already claimed the back,” Sawyer explained.

  I wasn’t sure if he was saying that to be nice, or if he really did claim the back (who claims the back?), but I didn’t feel like I could argue about it.

  The second I was sitting down, with my seat belt on and my headrest adjusted, I knew quite definitely that I was not going to be good company. I was T-minus five minutes away from being dead to the world.

  “Let’s beat this storm!” Wes said from the front.

  The others cheered their agreement.

  “I’m sorry,” I said to Sawyer.

  “Why?”

  “I’ve been up for almost twenty-four hours.”

  “Oh, is that what the slightly glazed look is in your eyes?”

  “That or the drinks I stole from the bar cart on the last leg,” I said, my eyelids going heavy.

  “Really?”

  “No, it was a joke. I don’t mess with airport security. They’re like their own sovereign nation. A nation of tyranny and chaos.” I wasn’t sure what I was saying anymore. I was rambling.

  “Tyranny and chaos? Aren’t those the opposite of each other?”

  “I think you might be right. One is absolute rule, one is a lack of order. But somehow, the airport brings these two together and makes them coexist in complete and utter disharmony.”

  He smiled. “You are tired.”

  My eyes went to his bright smile. “I think you do brush your teeth.”

  Now he laughed. “I have a feeling I could ask you anything right now and you’d tell me the truth. This could be trouble.”

  I leaned my head against the window. “I am about to be in a huge amount of trouble.” At home, that was. And I had a day and a half to prepare for it.

  DECEMBER 22, 9:45 P.M.

  Something smelled good. Like pine or soap or clean. It must’ve been the laundry detergent from the pillow I was sleeping on.

  No, because I was on a seat, my legs on the floor, but the rest of my body twisted awkwardly across cold leather. In a car, I suddenly remembered. I felt wetness on my cheek and realized that was from me … drooling. My eyes flew open. I was lying on someone’s legs.

  The events that led me here came back in a flash. I wiped at my cheek and sat up. The car glowed red from brake lights in front of us. Aside from that, it was dark. The day had passed to night with me asleep on Sawyer’s legs. The rest of the car was quiet, except for some news station Heather had on the radio. Wes and Logan were sleeping; maybe Sawyer was asleep too. Maybe he had no idea I had drooled on his leg for the last however many hours. I bit my lip and turned to check.

  He wasn’t asleep.

  “I’m sorry about your leg,” I said.

  He gave me a half smile. “Wes once spit in my soda. That was worse.”

  My mouth dropped open.

  “I mean, way worse,” he said, backtracking. “That wasn’t a good comparison.”

  I laughed. “It’s fine. I deserve it.” I nodded toward his leg. “Thank you for letting me sleep.”

  Heather turned in her seat. “We’ve gone sixty miles in three hours.”

  “What?” I asked. “That’s not good.”

  “No, it’s not. I’ve been following this semi because it’s making really good tire tracks in the snow for me, but it’s slow going. And it’s ten o’clock and I’m about to die of boredom, so someone needs to entertain me before I fall asleep.”

  “So about that one and a half days to get home …” Sawyer said.

  “Is it too late to go back to the airport and wait it out?” I asked.

  “Absolutely,” Heather said.

  “I still stand by my claim that we will beat your airplane,” Sawyer told me. “We are actually moving.”

  Heather let out a breath between her lips as if protesting that statement.

  “Do you want me to drive, Heather?” Sawyer asked.

  “Funny,” she said darkly.

  “It wasn’t a joke,” he said.

  “There is no way I’m going to let any seventeen-year-old drive this car. It is a rental. There is a snowstorm outside. You will wreck it, and I will have to pay thousands of dollars I don’t have because I let someone not allowed to drive, drive.”

  Sawyer held up his hands. “I was just offering.”

  “Even if you were allowed to drive, I wouldn’t let you. I saw how you drove that snowmobile this weekend. You we
re horrible. Not as bad as Wes, but I’d be crazy to trust you with my life.”

  “Amalie can drive,” Sawyer said. “I bet she is an excellent driver.”

  “Amalie, are you older than seventeen?” Heather asked me, glancing in the rearview mirror.

  “No,” I said.

  “Then my original statement still applies.” She reached down and turned up the radio. A story about the storm had just come on. “Shhh. Hold on.”

  I turned to Sawyer. “You would place a bet on my driving skills when you know nothing about me?” I asked quietly.

  “I know a few things about you.”

  He didn’t even know my name before today, so I doubted it. “Like what?”

  He started to answer and I interrupted with, “Aside from the singing thing.”

  “And the Italy thing?” he reminded me.

  “Right.” Those were two big public things that people had probably talked about at school.

  “What are you guys saying back there?” Heather asked.

  “We’re talking about how Amalie knows nothing about me,” Sawyer said.

  “I can fix that. I know everything worth knowing about Sawyer.” Heather smacked Wes on the arm, waking him up. “We’re playing a game.”

  “We are not playing a game,” Sawyer said.

  Wes sat up from where he’d been sleeping against the window. He ran his hand through his already spiky black hair, making it spikier. He looked around in confusion before saying, “What?”

  “I need entertainment so I don’t fall asleep,” Heather told him.

  “What did you have in mind?” Wes asked in a flirty voice.

  She put her hand up. “Not whatever you’re thinking. It’s time to share Sawyer facts.”

  “What are those?” Wes asked.

  “It is not time to share anything,” Sawyer said.

  Heather ignored him. “We each say something true about Sawyer. Wake up Logan.”

  Wes started throwing things at Logan: the rental car pamphlet, a sock, a beanie. Logan first kicked up one of his legs, as if that would stop the assault. When Wes didn’t give up, Logan’s blond head finally appeared above the seat, the only thing I saw at first, before he dragged the rest of his body into a sitting position.

  “We’re sharing facts about Sawyer,” Wes said.