You Had Me At Christmas: A Holiday Anthology(127)

“That’s actually not too bad,” he said.

“Thank you. I’ve been working on impressions. Want to see my dad?” She dropped every ounce of expression from her face and stared out, unseeing, into the distance and pretended to drink a beer.

“Uncanny,” he breathed.

“Well if this law thing doesn’t work out, it’s good to know I have something I can fall back on.”

“You know what I remember?” he asked. “About that party?”

“That we were picking pine needles out of the cheese tray for like hours?”

“No. Though that was funny. I remember how you, like… spun my grandma around so she wouldn’t see it and then distracted her.”

“I asked her about how she ran the ranch during the war when your grandfather was overseas.”

Dean looked down at her, and for a long moment Trina wasn’t sure what was happening. It seemed, sort of, like he might…might be thinking about kissing her. Not that she was totally sure of what that looked like. Her track record would indicate that she was not a girl that guys tried to kiss. Brian Goser kissed her last year, but he’d looked like he had a stomachache.

And the kiss had kind of given her one.

Dean looked intense, and his bright blue eyes were dark, and he was breathing hard. Every exhale turned into a plume of smoke around his head.

And he looked like a man. And he made her feel—not at all like a kid. When he looked at her that way, she felt different.

Like a woman? Was that what this feeling was? Her skin felt too small to hold her. Her blood was hot in her veins and all she wanted, all she wanted in the world was to taste him.

His skin. His lips.

Just a little.

Just a lot.

But then he glanced away and the moment cracked like a thin layer of ice over the creek. “Well, Grandma loved to talk about that.”

“She would have lost her shit if she saw that tree down,” Trina said, totally discomfited by what she’d imagined on his face. Embarrassed by how badly she wanted…what she wanted. Ridiculous. The cold was getting to her.

“Luckily she’s deaf as a post and didn’t hear it fall.”

“And you and your mom—you were like, superhuman cleaning that up.”

“It’s what Mom and I are good at,” Dean agreed. “Cleaning stuff up.” He took a swig from the flask and then handed it back over to Trina. She took another sip. The flask was nearly empty, and she was much warmer. Because of the booze. Because he was here.

What would I do if he wasn’t here? she wondered. And the endlessness of her life here blended hard with the endlessness of Wyoming. With her father’s land. And for a minute she couldn’t breathe. It was as if all the space…the distance, it pulled at her, picking apart her seams. And if she didn’t leave—didn’t concentrate really hard on who she was and who she wanted to be—she’d lose herself here.

She’d just bleed into the air and the snow and mountains. The coyotes would take off with her.

“My mom’s not coming back.” There was no use in pretending. No point.

“No. She’s not.”

“It’s just me and Dad now,” she said, her throat tight.

“You got me,” he said. “I’m here, too.”

“Thank you.” The tears she wouldn’t let fall were blinding her. Burning her eyes. But she held onto them. Held onto the pain. Stitching it into her skin, another thing that would keep her from getting lost in all this space. She was the inverse of Virginia Woolf, loading her pockets with rocks so she’d sink.

Dean curled his hand around her shoulder and pulled her back into him.

And she was so happy to rest back against him. The scratchy camouflage snowmobile suit couldn’t totally hide his warmth, the sturdy, solid feel of him. And she relished it.

“You want to leave?” she asked. “We could go to Holly’s.” Holly’s was a bar on the edge of town that didn’t card, or at least didn’t card the two of them. And she was always open on Christmas Eve.

“No, I’m good.”

“Freezing your ass off on my porch?”

“Yep.”

Oh, God, Dean.

“Tell me how you’re going to go to Stanford,” he said. “And law school, and save the world from the evil corporations.”

“Well, first I’m going to get a cape.”

“Good idea.”

“I might need a sidekick.”

“Like a trusty dog or something? A sassy gay best friend?”

“You’re not gay, are you?” she asked, shocked and tingly from the strange audacity of that question.

His body shook with a laugh. “Not gay.”

“Well, that rules you out, doesn’t it?”

He laughed, and there was a strange quick pressure on the top of her head that she barely registered through the thick yarn of her hat.

Did he… did he just kiss my head?

She wished for a moment she was another kind of girl, the kind that was brave and bold and could turn around and kiss him. Right here on her dad’s porch.

But in the end she was Trina Crawford, and so she just leaned against him and tried as hard as she could to soak up some of his strength.