You Had Me At Christmas: A Holiday Anthology(132)

He quirked his eyebrow, and there was no point in trying to lie to him.

“Okay, I was running away.”

He leaned back against the wall, shoving his hair off his face. It was long. Longer than she remembered. It made him look like a pirate.

A sexy, sexy cowboy pirate.

“It’s all right,” he said, forgiving her rudeness. “You can go if you want.”

“No,” she sighed. “I…I want to stay. I’m sorry. I just…don’t want things to be awkward.”

“I’m not awkward.”

“Of course you’re not. But the rest of humanity gets a little awkward the morning after drunk monkey sex with a childhood friend.”

“It was pretty hot drunk monkey sex, so I figure there’s not much to feel awkward about. But you go right ahead, if it makes you feel better. You want some coffee?”

She couldn’t help but laugh. So much for awkward.

“Sure,” she said. “Where is it?”

But he stood up, shameless and naked. Long and lean and perfect. He pulled on his jeans and the dark long-sleeved henley he’d been wearing last night and stepped over to the little galley kitchen on one wall of the small apartment. The window was still dark and the wind howled outside.

Outside really didn’t seem like a good idea anymore.

“Good God, is that the time?” he asked, staring at the clock on the microwave. “Why are you even awake?”

“Habit,” she said. “I always wake up early.”

“How are you feeling?” he asked.

“A little rough. You?”

“I have some experience down at Holly’s,” he joked. “I know my way around a hangover.”

He brought her a glass of water and a couple of aspirin.

“Thank you.”

Dean’s apartment, conveniently located above Holly’s Bar, for all its bareness was cozy. Kind of library-chic meets lumberjack couture. It was basically one large room. The floors were wide planks of pine. A kitchen with white cabinets on one end, a beat-up brown leather couch and TV on the other and a bed right in the middle. He had a bunch of bookshelves crammed with paperbacks.

His old guitar sat on a stand, a beat up Gibson acoustic with the pretty mother-of-pearl inlay. “You still play?” she asked. He’d gotten it for his tenth birthday. She’d been there, wearing a Star Wars party hat, when he opened it.

“When I get a chance. How about you?” he asked, stirring sugar into her mug. The way she liked.

It took a far tougher woman than her not to melt at that.

“No. No time for piano.”

“The party is ruined,” he joked.

It had been years, but the memories were entirely fresh. Like brand new and crisp. That was how this…crush on him had started. Playing music with him. It was, and probably always would be, one of the most intimate things in her life. Timing, breath, that thin layer of expectation from their parents that had sort of trapped them inside a bubble of shared experience. The creation of something beautiful, even if it was only a slightly offbeat “Silent Night”.

Honestly, what did it say about her that those were her best childhood memories?

The mug he handed her said Laramie Tech in yellow letters.

“Last time I saw you was that Christmas Eve,” she said, shoving her thoughts away from those intimate memories. “That party at your apartment in Laramie.”

He winced. “When Dad showed up?”

I have to tell him. This secret, the longer she spent with him, was feeling like a lie.

He narrowed his eyes. “Has it really been six years since I saw you?”

“Yeah.”

“You look the same, Trina. Exactly the same. Like time doesn’t move for you.”

“Oh, it moves.” She laughed. “And you’re just…bigger. The same but bigger.” Okay, Trina, you can shut up now. But of course she didn’t. “You’re like man-sized.”

And beautiful. All that adolescent promise had been fulfilled, and Dean was one of the handsomest men she’d ever seen.

Easily the handsomest one she’d ever seen naked.

Cowboys had way better bodies than accountants. It was fact.

“Anything else you want to say about my size?” He was laughing at her, so she scowled at him.

Still laughing, he crouched down in front of the brick fireplace, laid out some dried cedar and started a fire. His shirt slid up in the back and his pants dipped low, and she saw a small swatch of alabaster skin at the small of his back. She felt like a sixteen-year-old ogling a hot guy’s butt.

She had to look away, or she’d touch him. And she kind of thought that all the touching that was going to happen between them had happened last night.

By getting out of that bed, she’d given up her claim.

“I like your place,” she said.

“Thanks. It’s not much, but Holly let me have it cheap for the winter.”

She wondered why he needed it cheap, but was afraid to ask.

A star hung crooked on one of his cupboards. A dark tree sat on a table in the corner, dressed in tinsel and red bulbs.

“It’s Christmas Eve,” she blurted out. Somehow in the drama and fire of last night she’d forgotten what she’d walked into Holly’s to forget.