Kiss Her Once for Me (89)

It’s the hope that gets me, every single time. She sits there without a stitch of clothing like this is all so simple. Like all I have to do is let her love me.

“Jack,” I say, tightening my grip on her hand. “I’m feeling really emotionally vulnerable right now, and I’m scared of taking this risk with you.”

“Me, too.” Jack kisses my forehead, my chin, each of my cheekbones, in the pattern of the sign of the cross I remember from my childhood. “Maybe we take this whole thing one day at a time.”

She pulls us down onto the bed, holding me tight against her chest, until I’m convinced this whole thing isn’t going to crumble all around me. “What are we going to do?” I ask her.

“Do you mean right now?” she asks into my hair. “Or do you mean long-term, like telling Andrew and my parents about us?”

“Let’s start with today.”

“Hmm.” She presses the tip of her nose to the skin behind my ear, until I tingle in all the places our skin is touching. Which is all the places. “We need breakfast.”

She kisses that soft bit of skin.

“We need to figure out the snow situation.”

She bites that skin.

“We need to figure out how to get home. But…”

Her mouth slides up until her lips are on my earlobe again.

“But no rush,” I say.





Chapter Twenty-Six


“You made me biscuits and gravy?”

“This is a bastard shadow of my biscuits and gravy,” she growls with a frown. “I make my biscuits from scratch using a recipe it took me eight years to perfect, and I would never—”

“You made me biscuits and gravy,” I repeat.

She extends a plate forward with a humph. “I did. Granted, the biscuits are from pancake batter mix and melted snow, and the mushroom gravy is from a McCormick packet I suspect expired several years ago.”

I set down the plate and pull her into my arms and kiss her deeply.

The biscuits and gravy taste like cardboard and chunky slop water, but they’re still the best thing I’ve ever eaten. I wish we could stay here forever, in this tiny cabin, living our own Little House on the Prairie kink, but it’s Christmas Eve. Katherine is waiting for us.

Andrew and Dylan are waiting for us.

The truth is waiting for us.

We got almost a foot of snow in the night, so digging Gillian out isn’t an option. Instead, we find the Singhs’ snowshoes on the back porch next to the firewood. Slowly and reluctantly, we return the cabin to the way we found it. We ditch our Cornell clothes for the ski outfits we came here in last night. Jack leaves a detailed note, along with her Venmo account name, so the Singhs can request money for everything we stole. We’ll bring the snowshoes back when we come to dig Gillian out.

We call Katherine to let her know we’re on our way, and then we stare at each other across the rug in the living room where we danced to Celine Dion. I try to remember the way she held me here, so I’ll have it later, no matter how this next part goes.

We step outside. Neither of us speaks for the first mile as we trudge through the snow in the silent morning, my feet awkward in snowshoes for the first time. It feels like emerging from some kind of dream, and I have the same fear I did last year. What happens when the snow melts? What happens when we return to Portland?

But then Jack is at my side, reaching out for my hand, reading my mind. “It’s going to be hard,” she says. “Whatever comes next, with my family. It’s not going to be easy. But I’m in. I’m all in.”

She’s right here, and her expression is completely unguarded again, and I want to tell her everything. About Andrew and the money and the trust—about the reason I went along with the scheme, and all the reasons I kept going along with the scheme. But there’s still one last reason, shackled to my ankle and pinning me to my dishonesty. And that reason is Jack.

Jack, who is taking a huge risk in opening her own bakery. Jack, who won’t have anything to fall back on if it falls apart.

No, Andrew and I will figure something else out. We’ll find some way for him to get the money, and once Jack has it, once I know the Butch Oven isn’t going to fail or fall apart on her, then I’ll confess everything.

“I’m all in,” I finally say back to her.

Jack leans forward and kisses me, like we’re sealing a promise.

I feel my phone buzz in my coat pocket, and I drop her hand to fish it out. “I’m not sure how I have reception right now…. Are we back in Wi-Fi range of the house?”

I rub the snow away from the cracked screen to look at the Gmail notification. It’s from a name I don’t recognize—“Samantha Clark”—but it’s not the name that stops me dead in my tracks in the snow. It’s the subject line. “Drawn2 Webcomics Interest.”

“Is everything okay?” Jack asks.

“I think so.” I fumble to open the email. Dear Miss Oliver, the email begins, and my brain is swimming. How—why? I scan the rest of the email quickly, searching for the punch line, waiting for something terrible to happen, but the bottom never falls out. I read the email a second time while Jack asks me over and over if I’m all right.


Dear Miss Oliver,

I’m sorry to email you on Christmas Eve, but I didn’t want to wait and miss the chance to connect with you. I’m an editor at Timber Press, an imprint of Simon and Schuster, and I’m reaching out because like many people in the past week, I found your new webcomic series The Arrangement on Drawn2. I was immediately drawn (pun intended) into the dynamics between your characters, Lucy, Joe, Sam, and Ricky, and it served as the perfect antidote to spending the holiday season with my family. As I eagerly awaited more episodes, I also went back and discovered your first series, Snow Day. Your artwork is captivating, but it’s your understanding of storytelling and your voice that really kept me reading.