In A Holidaze(41)

“I see it more as a summer camp vibe, but I get that this is your red button.”

“It is.”

I think about the cold, dark, empty space of the Boathouse, and it makes me shiver. “Don’t you get creeped out, sleeping by yourself out there?”

Andrew laughs and leans a little into me. “What’s going to hurt me out there, Maisie? A ghost? The wolf-man?”

“I was thinking more like a deranged serial killer roaming the area.” He laughs at this. “What scares you, then?” I ask. “Anything?”

“I fell in love with audio work by watching Halloween and The Shining and Return of the Living Dead,” he says, and I can hear his sweetly proud smile. “I watch movies like that to unwind.”

What a paradox he is, this bowl-of-sugar man who loves horror.

“What’s your favorite scary movie?”

He laughs, all deep and hoarse. “That’s the killer’s signature line in Scream.”

“It is?”

“Literally everyone knows that, Maisie.”

I laugh now, too. “I’m telling you I can’t watch anything scary, even funny-scary.” I elbow him gently in the dark. “But really, what’s your favorite?”

“For sound?” he says, and I shrug.

“Sure.”

“Probably A Quiet Place. But my all-time favorite is Silence of the Lambs.”

Thrill glitters across my skin. “We saw that together, remember?”

“I remember you wouldn’t let me move more than a foot away from you on the couch, and I even had to check under your bunk in the basement later.”

“Listen,” I say, laughing, “I’m a wuss. I’ll always take kissing over killing.”

I can sense how he leans his head back against the wall at this, exhaling like he’s got a lot on his mind. I do my best to not imagine running my tongue over his Adam’s apple.

“You okay?” I nudge his shoulder with mine.

I feel him turn to look at me. “I’m okay.”

“Just okay?”

“Overthinking, probably.”

A storm erupts in my blood, and I deflect nerves with humor: “About how I’ll forever think you’re just a fine kisser?” I joke.

His laugh this time is half-hearted. Even in the darkness, there’s a sizzle-snap in the air. I blink away to the shadowed view of his jaw, but that doesn’t help because he’s so angular and edible. I look down at his neck, which is similarly problematic. Finally, my gaze drops to his forearms, exposed in the slice of light. He’s rolled up his flannel shirt, and they’re muscular, lightly dusted with hair, and even more amazing than his neck. I want to sink my teeth into them.

“This year has been so odd,” he says quietly. “Theo’s building a house. Mom and Dad are talking about retiring. Everyone seems to know where they’re going and—” He breaks off. “I love my job, but I have this restless sense there’s more out there. More life, more adventure. More than just a few dates a month.”

My heart squeezes. “I know that feeling.”

“I meet people,” he says, “but one date bleeds into another. I haven’t really dated someone, like, long term, in a long time.” In all the time we’ve known each other and although I’ve known he’s had them, Andrew has never talked about a girlfriend near me. “And then you . . .” He lets the sentence hang, and I worry if I try to speak, my voice won’t work. “It threw me. Not in a bad way. Do you know what I’m trying to say?”

“Not really.” I hear the way my words come out wavy.

I mean, I think I know where he’s going with this, but I need him to articulate it carefully. He could mean a lot of things. Like, this year is different because Theo and I aren’t super close. Or this year is different because I finally told Andrew how I feel about him. Or, for example, this year is different because I’ve traveled through time, and he has no idea.

“Remember how I said I was at a party a couple months back,” he whispers, “and a friend of a friend was reading tarot cards?”

“Yeah.”

“I was teasing her about it, I guess, and she made me sit down. Put these cards in front of me and was like, ‘I’ll do your reading.’ What do I have to lose? She doesn’t know me. So I told her, ‘Sure.’ She looked down at the cards and said I could be happy being second at work. Told me I didn’t need a big life, didn’t need to set the world on fire. She’s right—I don’t. But then she told me I’d already met the love of my life, I just wasn’t listening.” He laughs. “And all I do is listen.”

There is a swarm of dragonflies inside me, colorful and bright and taking up too much space. It’s hard to breathe, because I feel this weight of all the things that he might mean by this.

“I still can’t believe I didn’t ever know,” he says, and turns his head down. “How you felt about me.”

I gnaw on my lip. “I can’t figure out if you’ve been put off by that,” I whisper. It feels like a decade passes before I decide to push the next words out: “Or turned on by it.”

He shifts beside me, angling his body into mine. When I realize what’s about to happen, my heart is no longer a heart, it’s a gloved fist, punching the wall of my ribs again and again. Andrew lifts a hand, so unhurried, and rests it on the side of my neck.