Total pages in book: 72
Estimated words: 66453 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 332(@200wpm)___ 266(@250wpm)___ 222(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 66453 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 332(@200wpm)___ 266(@250wpm)___ 222(@300wpm)
I marveled at how he stripped the emotion from his voice entirely.
“No, we can’t,” I agreed.
His eyes flickered to mine, then slid away again. He started walking for the door, and I followed suit, my mind awhirl. He had to see that I didn’t mean it. That if he’d sat back down, I would have crawled back into his lap for another taste.
That I had more to give him.
15
DOMINIC
Marjorie and Jake came by the office the next day. I expected my sister, but Jake was a surprise. An unpleasant one, for the first time. My heart stuttered to a stop when I saw him standing behind Marjorie in the doorway. My first thought was that he’d found out somehow, but that conflicted with the relaxed grin on his face.
“Jake’s in town!” Marjorie announced as if I hadn’t seen him there, standing six inches over her.
“I’m in town,” Jake agreed. “And I’m crashing your lunch.”
“Great,” I said. My voice sounded strange to my own ears, but Marjorie and Jake didn’t seem to notice anything was off.
“Where’s Selena?” Jake asked, glancing around.
My heart thumped again when he looked right at the conference table, the two chairs still pushed incriminatingly close together. “Fifth floor,” I said, feeling like I was being strangled.
“I’ll meet you in the lobby in ten?”
As soon as we nodded, Jake disappeared down the hallway, heading for the elevator. Marjorie dropped down into one of the chairs across from my desk, looking around with a small smile on her face. She was proud of me, but it was more than that. Mark’s name was everywhere. On the awards we’d won, the pens and notepads, the side of the building, and she loved it even if it made her sad at the same time. His name was everywhere, but he’d been gone nearly twenty years now.
“What’s this?” Marjorie asked, leaning forward and plucking the fancy envelope off the edge of my desk.
“An invitation to the Christmas ball,” I said, trying very hard not to think about Selena.
Marjorie glanced up at me quickly. “The one on Christmas Eve?”
I nodded. We’d gone once when Jake did a year abroad, but otherwise, we spent Christmas Eve the way we always did. We trimmed the fake Christmas tree, ate dinner, drank eggnog, and capped off the evening watching Mark’s favorite holiday movie–A Christmas Story. Sometimes we switched up the movie. Sometimes we had ham instead of turkey. One year we had a Tofurky when Jake tried to go vegan, but the bones were the same.
“Are you…?”
I glanced away from my screen, confused. “Am I what?”
Marjorie waved the invitation. There was a funny look on her face.
“Of course not. I spend Christmas Eve with you and Jake.”
Marjorie’s eyebrows rose at the edge in my voice, but she only put the invitation back on my desk and picked up a pad of paper with the large MWM across the top. A few minutes later, we headed down to the lobby to meet Jake. I had a twitching irritation I couldn’t explain, but I knew it came from that exchange about the Christmas ball. How could Marjorie have even asked if I was going? Hadn’t I kept my promise to always be there for her and Jake? I’d chosen them over a yacht in the South Pacific (the year Julian decided he was getting seasonal affective disorder in LA and needed more sun for Christmas). I’d chosen them over skiing in the Swiss Alps (the time Garrett’s ex was filming there and invited us all to her sumptuous ski lodge).
I’d always chosen them.
I was relieved to only see Jake waiting for us in the lobby. It had occurred to me at the last second that letting him go see Selena was a bad idea. What if he invited her to lunch? But there he was, standing alone, his head bent over his phone. He was grinning at it, an expression that stayed on his face as he looked up to greet us.
“I think Jake has a little girlfriend,” Marjorie murmured, acting as if he was five instead of twenty-five h.
Judging on the size of his grin, the sparkle in his eye, Jake wanted to do more than share his cookies with whoever was on the other end of the text conversation. I looked at his phone almost involuntarily, afraid I’d see some evidence that the little girlfriend was Selena. He’d already turned off the screen, though, and now he slipped it into his back pocket.
“Lunch?” he asked cheerfully.
“Lunch,” I agreed. We went across the street to the same bar we’d had our happy hour at. This was a tradition we’d started years ago – meeting up the week before Thanksgiving to figure out what to have for dinner and dessert. Christmas was set in stone, but for some reason, we all had different ideas about Thanksgiving. Marjorie wanted a fucking lasagna of all things. Jake changed what he wanted all the time. I was good with sticking to tradition. Nothing wrong with a turkey, cranberry sauce, green bean casserole, and pumpkin pie.