by Nicole Helm
He couldn’t give in to that. He found his coat and shrugged it on and considered for a second giving her a goodbye kiss. Except he wasn’t strong enough to touch his lips to hers, then walk away. It’d have to wait. Until tomorrow. He walked to the door and grabbed the knob.
“Gabe?”
He didn’t dare look back. “Yeah?”
She paused for the longest time, this endless series of minutes where his heart beat hard against his ribs and a hope for something he couldn’t possibly allow himself to have tried to overtake his body, his brain, his heart.
“Good night,” she finally said.
“Good night,” he repeated, wrenching the door open.
And then he nearly fell over something. Something cold and… Snow. The light from the cabin spilled outside, and all he saw was white. In the air, on the ground. Everything was a swirling, nearly indistinguishable white. They’d been supposed to get a blizzard tomorrow, but tomorrow wasn’t tonight. There had to be a foot of snow on the ground if not more. There was no way…
“I think that’s what they call a whiteout,” Monica said, her voice blank and completely unreadable.
“That would make sense,” he said, staring at the white emptiness in front of him. It was loud and eerie and—
“I guess you’re stuck with me.”
He glanced over at her then and tried not to feel the panic that was bubbling inside of him. Panic. That’s what it was. Not joy. Not anticipation. This was sheer and utter panic.
She grinned the kind of grin she must have copied from him. “We can probably find something to do.”
Panic or joy, it didn’t matter, because he was stuck, and she was here, this gorgeous, sweet woman he couldn’t have.
Later, in the future, he couldn’t have. But tonight, for as long as they were stuck in this storm, he could have her.
Gabe closed the door. “I guess we could.”
* * *
Monica woke up the next morning sure she was dreaming. Because the cabin smelled like coffee and she was sore in ways she wasn’t sure she’d ever been sore and something in her bed smelled like a man.
Not a boy. A man.
Her eyes flew open in a second of alarm before the night’s previous activities rushed over her. Her face went hot, and she pulled the sheets a little closer to her chin.
She was naked. Asleep and naked and her cabin smelled like coffee.
She hadn’t woken up to coffee already made since she’d lived with her parents. She hadn’t woken up naked in far longer than that, if ever. She had never, ever woken up to the smell of a man in her bed who wasn’t a man she was married to.
She blew out a breath, daring herself to open her eyes. She tried to take in her surroundings by only moving her eyes. She didn’t know why, but she didn’t want Gabe to know she was awake until she knew where he was. Until she saw him and could determine…
Something.
“Morning,” he said casually.
She whipped her head toward the kitchen, where he was standing, back to her. She frowned at it. Military men. She should have known. He probably sensed it the moment she woke up in that weird, dizzying second of panic. “Morning,” she returned, peering over the bed to see if her clothes were within reach.
“Made coffee,” he said as she pawed the ground for her discarded T-shirt. “Didn’t see any breakfast food.”
“Cookies,” she said, pulling the shirt over her head.
“You can’t eat cookies for breakfast.”
She glanced at him again, and this time he’d turned to face her. His brown eyes dark and mysterious, his clothes the same as last night—jeans and a rumpled henley that hugged all those impressive muscles and the breadth of his shoulders. But he wasn’t wearing his boots, just socks. As if he were a normal man who would walk around anywhere in socks. Plain white socks.
She swallowed, because now she was staring at his socks and that was weird. She forced her gaze to move back up his body and tried not to catalogue every inch of him. Or think about how much she would have liked to have woken up with him naked next to her.
She cleared her throat. “Of course you can have cookies for breakfast. It’s no different than a donut or a muffin or a cinnamon roll.”
“All terrible choices for breakfast. Breakfast is supposed to have protein. It is the point of breakfast.”
Surely, she had something smart or arch to say to that, but she could only stare at him in her kitchen. There was a too-handsome-for-words man in her kitchen. She’d had sex with this man. Sex. She’d touched his naked body and welcomed him inside her naked body, and it was so surreal to stand here and just have to exist in that knowledge.
His mouth quirked as if he found her silence funny.
She sniffed daintily. “You’ve got a lot of opinions on breakfast food. I’d invite you to eat breakfast elsewhere, but I have a feeling that isn’t an option.”
He nodded toward the window. “Have a look.”
She was still mostly naked, and she knew her T-shirt wouldn’t even begin to be long enough to cover her if she got out from under the sheets. With her shirt now on, she could crane her neck a little farther out. Somehow her jeans were, well, not within reaching distance.
It was silly. She should slide out of bed and grab them. Hell, she should get out of bed and walk calmly and proudly half-naked to her room and change into sweats or something.
But this was the light of day. She could wrap the sheet around her, but that felt childish. As though she were ashamed to be naked in front of a man she’d already had sex with.
Well, ashamed wasn’t the right word. Nervous. She walked a lot, and only around Christmas did she indulge in cookies for breakfast, but she didn’t work out or anything. She was all soft, jiggly bits—jiggly bits that had once grown a child inside of her. He was honed muscle and perfection, day or night.
Then he was exiting her small kitchen and walking right toward her, and all she could think about was she finally knew what all that man looked like underneath his clothes. She knew what it felt to be skin to skin and breath to breath with him. She knew what it was like to feel him surge inside her and—
She seriously needed to get a grip.
He bent over a few paces from the bed and picked her jeans up off the floor. He held them out toward her, but just before her fingers grasped the material, he pulled them back and held them farther away. She couldn’t reach them without getting off the bed, and though it was more than possible to pull the sheet with her, she couldn’t get over the idea that it seemed rather cowardly. Somehow more cowardly than staying put on the bed.
So she held out her hand and donned her most imperious voice. “George Bailey, give me my robe.” He looked at her as if she’d grown a head, and she sighed gustily. “It’s a Wonderful Life?”
“What’s wonderful about it?”
“You’ve had to have heard of It’s a Wonderful Life.”
He shrugged.
“You really are a grinch,” she muttered.
“The grinch I’m familiar with. George Bayfield—”
“Bailey.”
“Sure, whatever. Never heard of him.”
“That does it.”
“Does what?”
“We’re going to make the couch, and then we’re going to get a big plate of cookies, and then we are going to watch It’s a Wonderful Life.”
“I was planning on digging myself a tunnel out of here.”
“Sorry. No shovel.” She smiled sweetly up at him. “You’re stuck in the hellish depths of Christmas doom.”
“God save me,” he muttered, tossing the pair of jeans at her.
She caught them easily, cheered by the prospect of breakfast cookies and company to watch her favorite Christmas movie. She’d tried to force Colin into a viewing last year, and he’d complaine
d so long and so loud about it being black and white that she’d finally shoved his handheld video game at him.
Monica shimmied into her jeans under the sheet. “God can’t save you here, Gabe.” She slid out of bed, then patted his cheek. “But if you’re a good boy, Santa might bring you a very, very nice present.”
He didn’t move, arms crossed over his chest, staring down at her with one of those unreadable expressions she’d never stop wanting to figure out.
“That sounds suspiciously dirty,” he said, some tiny hint of humor in his voice if not his face.
“There’s only one way to find out how dirty.” She walked over to the TV stand, where she had all her Christmas DVDs piled up. She pulled It’s a Wonderful Life off the top and held it up so he could see it.
“Oh, God, black and white? I’m not sure it’s worth it.”
“Just be thankful I didn’t make a White Christmas joke. You don’t strike me as the musical type.”
Gabe grimaced. “That would definitely not be worth it.”
She raised an eyebrow at him until his mouth curved.
“Maybe,” he amended.
She had to turn away from that smile because she didn’t know how to react to it. There were too many big, warm, smooshy, and oh-so-vulnerable feelings fluttering around her chest, and he would see them. Probably squash them if he could.
Squashing might be best, but she wanted to revel in some smooshy feelings before she had to go back to being Monica Finley, therapist and mother…and sexless automaton.
She began to strip the bed, something to occupy her thoughts with. Strip the bed, fold up the bed, make it a couch and a living room again, and not think of all that symbolism.
“Well, if I’m stuck here for the foreseeable future, at least I can rest easy in the fact the Christmas-themed sheets are gone.”
“Don’t be silly,” Monica replied. “I’ll replace these with candy cane ones.”
“Well, at least those don’t have faces.”
She looked at him over her shoulder, affecting her most serious face. “Oh, no. They do.”
Their gazes held for the longest time, till it turned hot and heavy. Till the room seemed to shrink into this little pinpoint of vision between them. She suddenly felt as if she’d run a mile, and still they stood frozen, staring at each other.
“Monica,” he said, slow and sure and some dark, edgy thing in his voice.
“What?” she said, her voice a silly, breathless whisper.
“Don’t take off the sheets.”
Chapter 17
The movie was horrible. Absolutely, horrendously awful. Gabe kept telling himself to talk her out of her clothes again, make her forget about the relentless tragedy of George Bailey’s life. But he never could find the words, the moves, and the movie trudged endlessly on until a whole crowd of people were singing “Auld Lang Syne” and Gabe wanted to scream.
No man is a failure who has friends. What utter bullshit. All the crap about a man’s life touching too many to count? He supposed it made some sense Monica was all sniffly over it. She had a soft heart for all her pragmatism. More, she did actually help people, loath as he was to admit it.
She sighed happily as the movie ended, and Gabe figured he should pretend it was fine. He should definitely ignore the claustrophobic feeling that the cabin walls were closing in on him. That the air was too heavy to breathe and everything…
“Isn’t it the best movie?” Monica sighed happily.
“You’ve obviously never seen Die Hard,” he managed to choke out, sounding mostly like himself instead of a dying frog.
“Die Hard is fine enough, but it doesn’t alter lives.”
“Now, you just don’t know that,” he said, pushing off the couch. He needed some air that didn’t smell like her or cookies or…life changes.
Nothing was going to change in his life, especially some sad sack old movie. Worth and meaning were fine enough on a movie set, war heroes could toast their heroic home-front brothers, and everyone could be so damn happy you wanted to smash in a TV screen.
But that was not real life, even when the words felt a little too real. A little too revealing. “I think I’m going to go…try to dig us out.” Anything, anything to find some air.
“Those drifts are almost as tall as your shoulders. We’re lucky we have power. I don’t think you’re going to get anywhere.”
Gabe shrugged, trying to smile at her. “Can’t sit around in here twiddling my thumbs.”
He ignored the little flash of hurt that chased over her face before she smoothed it out. He focused on finding his coat, his boots.
“I didn’t expect the movie to bother you,” she said quietly.
Oh, he hated that quiet, hurt voice women could wield, far better than any man he’d ever known. Alex and Jack might get stoic, silent, but it was never that quiet quavering infused with hurt.
Becca had laid that on him a time or two, and it had been enough to eat him alive then. Coming from Monica, it felt like razors cutting his chest to ribbons. But what might happen if he gave in to that feeling? If he said he was sorry, if he told her all the things that bothered him?
He knew how those stories ended. He wouldn’t go there again. Not with her. Not in this place where he’d found the closest thing to home he was ever going to get.
“It didn’t bother me,” he ground out as he shoved his foot into his boot.
“I told you not to lie to me,” she said, and it was laced with all that hurt.
“I don’t know what you’re trying to do,” he grumbled, shoving the other boot on.
“I’m trying to understand.”
The look he gave her probably wasn’t fair, but at least he bit back the words Stop trying to be my shrink. He knew she wasn’t trying to. He understood that to an extent, after the conversations they’d had, but it was easier to lash out with that, make her back off with that, then try to understand this panic in his gut.
“I thought we’d gotten over this,” she said quietly. “I…I know I said I used it as armor, but that’s not what I’m doing. Not even close.”
“Then what are you doing, asking if that movie got to me? Just being friendly?”
“I didn’t ask. I observed it. Not because I’m your therapist or want to be, but because I’m your… We’re…” She huffed out a breath without finishing. It made him sick to his stomach that he was desperate to know what she’d call them. What she wanted them to be.
Nothing. You can only ever be nothing.
“When you’re friends with someone,” she began again. “When you have a care for someone, you want to know what’s wrong.”
Gabe wanted to inure himself to that tremulous note in her voice, because there was no shield or armor, not when she was showing her emotions too plain. On the surface and vulnerable. He never, ever wanted to see her vulnerable.
“I don’t know, you want to be there. Understand. Offer a shoulder. And, yes, maybe I’d fix it if I could, but because I care.”
“Don’t need a shoulder or understanding. Definitely don’t want it.” He got to his feet and shrugged his coat on. He’d go out that door and shovel his way back to Revival with his two bare hands if he had to. Anything would be better than this hell where emotion clogged his throat and feelings ripped at his insides and this awful, stupid part of him wanted to give in.
To her. To the hurt. To the change.
He reached for the door, and she all but leaped between it and him. She swung out her arms, slapping them back against the door as if she could actually block him.
“You think you’re going to stop me? I could have you off that door in five seconds flat.”
“When you see Jack or Alex hurting, do you ignore it?” she demanded, ignoring his threat. Ignoring every damn warning she should heed.
“I’m not hurting,” he
said, and those words seethed out of him, that boiling emotion likely undercutting any chance he had at having her believe him.
“Then maybe that’s what I’m trying to understand,” she said, her voice breaking.
God damn it all to hell, why did she care this much? He didn’t want it. “Monica, I will give you five seconds to get out of my way before I physically remove you from blocking that door.”
But she went on as if he hadn’t spoken. “Maybe I’m trying to understand why it seems you are so often hurting when you claim you’re not.”
“Claim. Isn’t that undermining my feelings? As if I don’t know what I’m thinking or feeling?”
“You don’t, or worse, you just don’t want to feel those things, so you think you can fight them by being an asshole to everyone who cares about you. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but no one at Revival, including me, takes it very seriously. No one, no one, believes that’s who you really are.”
He stepped forward, the tide of fury sweeping through him so hard and fast he slapped his palm hard against the wood of the door, right above her outstretched arm. “Of course it’s who I really fucking am.”
She dropped her arms from the door and reached out to him. She reached out to him, pressing her palm to his heart, splaying her fingers out right there in the center of his chest. His breath was coming too hard, his heart beating too fast.
“I can’t believe that. Do you remember what you said to me after we kissed that night? Out by the car?”
He remembered everything. Every second of that kiss, every roiling, traitorous hurt that had swelled inside of him, and every word she’d uttered in response to him. It haunted him.
“You said my actions had to back up my words. Well, yours don’t. You are one of the kindest, most generous and giving people I’ve ever met in deed. Sometimes in words too, but then you cover it up with that surly attitude, and it isn’t you. That isn’t you.”
But he wanted it to be. He needed that to be him. At least on the outside, at least in those actions. He needed to protect himself, and he’d learned how. He’d finally learned how. He couldn’t let her undermine that, even with words like care.