Page 121 of How My Neighbour Stole Christmas
Cole:No, because I don’t really know how I feel. I mean, today was a one-eighty. I was driving to Clayton intending to show her up, but then when I found her on the side of the road, that all changed. And all those old feelings came back. Now, fuck, now I don’t know what I’m doing.
I stare down at my phone as I hear a crunch in the snow. I glance to the left where I catch Storee walking toward me, thermos in hand. I set my phone down to the side. “What are you doing? You’re going to freeze.”
“You have a blanket. I’ll be fine.” She crosses over into my yard, and then walks up the porch steps and takes a seat next to me. “I brought hot cocoa.” She hands me the thermos, and I uncap the top and pour us a cup to share while she takes some of my blanket and drapes it over her legs.
“Why are you out here?” I ask her.
“Because I saw you and figured I’d join you. Taran’s talking to her boyfriend and doing God knows what in her room while Aunt Cindy is asleep. And, well…I thought things were weird when we left the truck, and I didn’t want it to be weird.”
“It’s not weird.”
“Yes, it is,” she says. She takes the cup from me and sips the hot liquid before offering it to me. “Sometimes, I feel like I don’t know how to act around you because you make me nervous.”
“I make you nervous?” I ask, pointing to my chest. “How the hell does that work?”
She chuckles. “You just do. You always have.”
“You’re going to have to explain yourself, because if anything, you make me nervous.”
“Oh please, Cole. You know that’s not true.”
“It is. Sure, maybe when we were under the age of ten, you were just the girl who came to visit Cindy during Christmastime, but when puberty hit, that changed things. You were the pretty girl I wanted to talk to—who happened to visit Cindy.”
She tilts her head to the side, those hypnotizing eyes nearly cutting me in half. She has the prettiest face I’ve ever seen. Wide eyes, long lashes, freckles that span her nose and cheeks, which she covers up when she’s wearing makeup. High cheekbones, full lips, and a slender nose decorated with the smallest of nose rings that, if you weren’t looking hard enough, you might miss.
“And you were the handsome guy with the broad shoulders and even broader grin that lived next door to Aunt Cindy, the one I’d try to stealglances at whenever I was in town. And on the best of occasions, you were the one who helped me escape from the insanity of my parents during the holidays by just sitting on this very porch and talking about nothing important.”
She hands me the cup and I take another sip. “You were the girl from California who was way out of my league, who is still out of my league,” I say, not caring that I’m putting it all out there.
“You were the boy who set the standard, a standard no one else has yet to match.”
I glance down at the hot cocoa, not sure where to go from here.
“So, yes, I get nervous around you,” she says as her hand lands on my arm. “Why do you think I was rambling on in the Kringle Krampus? I saw you, got nervous, and then I couldn’t shut up from there.”
I chuckle. “You were extremely talkative.”
“And you hated every second of it.”
“For other reasons,” I say.
“For how I left here,” she says, understanding the circumstances.
“Yeah.” I blow out a heavy breath. “Thinking about it now, I kind of wish I’d asked Cindy for your information so I could have at least contacted you. Maybe seen if you wanted to be pen pals again or something like that.”
“Pen pals,” I say. “That would have been really cute in our early twenties. I probably would have been better too.”
I turn toward her. “Would you have written me back?”
“Yes,” she answers, turning toward me as well so our knees knock. “It probably would have made me feel more connected to something.”
“But you were done with the town. Wouldn’t you have been done with me too?”
She shakes her head. “You were the one thing I would think about every time Christmas rolled around.” I hand her the hot cocoa, but she sets it to the side before taking my hand and turning it up so my palm isexposed. She glides her finger over my calluses. “Hard not to think about you now, Cole.”
I swallow the lump in my throat. “Even with the tension and anger?”
She looks up at me through her lashes. “Especially with the tension and anger because I wanted to know where it was coming from. I wanted to fix it. I wanted this.”
