Kiss Her Once for Me (40)

“Those monsters are ruthless,” Dylan grunts. “And we can’t beat them unless we’re willing to fight dirty, too.” They turn to me with a grave expression. “Ellie, how is your aim?”

“Uh…”

“I assume that means bad,” Dylan cuts in. “That’s fine. You’ll prepare our stockpile of ammo with Lovey while Katherine and I lead the assault.”

A stoned Lovey gives Dylan a salute and immediately starts building snowballs for our arsenal. I shoot a glance through the trees to where Andrew, Jack, and Meemaw have all hunkered down together behind a giant stump. The hot toddy thermos is long forgotten as Meemaw seemingly draws out a plan of attack in the snow using a stick. Both Jack and Andrew have their arms folded across their chests, twin expressions of consternation on their faces.

I burst out laughing. I can’t help it. They’re six grown adults engaged in a snowball fight like it’s a matter of life or death. It’s easy to imagine, though, how this tradition might have started, if you grew up in a family like this. A seven-year-old Jack throwing snowballs at her brother like she threw punches. The grandmas egging them on, Katherine indulging them. Clinging to the tradition over the years like they cling to each other.

For all Dylan’s strategizing, when it actually comes time to start throwing snowballs again, it’s utter chaos. Katherine and Dylan throw a few through the trees, and some even hit their marks, but then Meemaw grabs a snowball in each hand and charges directly at us. From there, the teams dissolve, and it’s every Kim-Prescott for themselves.

I hide behind the trees a few beats longer before I grab one of my premade snowballs and attempt to lob it at Andrew. I miss and hit the back of a khaki jacket instead. Jack swivels to find the source of the assault. Her face conveys the briefest flash of surprise before she unleashes an epic battle cry, gathers up a fistful of snow, and barrels toward me.

Quite maturely, I squeal and run away, deeper into the thicket of trees, holding back the bubble of laughter gathering in my throat. I feel the first blow against my back, followed quickly by another clod of snow hitting my thigh. I halt in my tracks to gather up another snowball for my own arsenal, tripping slightly from the momentum of my run, and I don’t realize Jack is right at my back. She bumps into me, and since I’m already off-balance, I go tumbling down into the snow, my ankle twisting as my legs give out beneath me.

Jack reaches out to try to hold me up, but I only succeed in bringing her down with me, until we’re a heap of limbs strewn across the snow.

Jack is strewn across me, her weight pinning me down. Even through the pain in my ankle and the wetness seeping through my clothes, I’m laughing. It’s a deep laugh, the kind that catches you by surprise and doesn’t let go. Above me, Jack looks stricken for a second, and then she’s laughing, too, perhaps at the sound of my laugh. But Jack’s laugh is ridiculous—a mix between the honk of a goose and the screech of tires on wet asphalt—and the sound of it only makes me laugh harder, until there are tears streaming down my face. Until I can’t remember the last time I let myself laugh like this.

Then, all at once, the reality of the moment settles over me. Jack is lying on top of me. We’re touching in so many places: knees, thighs, arms, stomachs, chests.

I gasp, and Jack’s eyes go wide. “Shit, I’m sorry—” She scrambles off me. “Sorry.”

“No,” I manage through the pain and embarrassment. “It’s my foot. I—I think I sprained it.”

I sit up, and she sits down, so we’re side by side in the snow. “The hazards of all-out war,” Jack muses. “Do you think you can make it back to the cabin?”

I look up. We’re far from the path now, where the rest of the family is engaged in their snowball fight, and I can’t see the cabin through the trees. “Maybe,” I say. Now that Jack is no longer on top of me, the pain in my ankle is consuming all my attention. “Maybe not?”

“May I?” she asks, indicting my foot. I nod, and then she’s slowly untying the laces on my boot. I see her that night in the Airstream, bent in front of me, doing the same thing.

I wince as she tugs the shoe off my sore ankle. She immediately takes my foot in her hands, cradling it carefully. For someone who’s never heard of an inside voice, Jack has a surprising capacity for tenderness.

“Can I remove your sock?” she asks. I might be imagining it, but her voice sounds huskier, scrapes pleasantly across the exposed parts of my skin. I know she’s asking to be polite—that she is establishing clear boundaries between us—but there’s something about the way she waits for permission to touch me that stirs my misguided feelings back into action.

You’re over her, the voice in my head screams. You need to be over her.

But the lust is louder than the scream when I say, “Sure,” and Jack pulls down my thick sock to reveal my pale ankle. Her thumb slowly strokes the back of my heel.

“I didn’t realize patissiers needed such intense first-aid training,” I choke out. Maybe if I turn this into a joke, I can start laughing again instead of feeling like parts of myself are waking up for the first time in a year.

“I was a camp counselor every summer in high school,” she says, still stroking my foot with her callused fingers. “And I’m going to say to you what I said to a lot of crying ten-year-olds during games of capture the flag: you just twisted your ankle. It’ll probably feel fine in about twenty minutes or so.”