Total pages in book: 63
Estimated words: 59947 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 300(@200wpm)___ 240(@250wpm)___ 200(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 59947 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 300(@200wpm)___ 240(@250wpm)___ 200(@300wpm)
“It sounds like it’ll be a good fight.”
Fuck, my chest keeps knotting up. Because I’m hoping, too.
“I think it will be,” I tell her.
I don’t want this to end. Yet the New Year’s crawling closer. I hold Abbie in my lap with her head against my shoulder—we’ve both got real comfortable with this position over the past week—and battle everything within me. Everything that wants to hold her tighter and tighter.
Because she’s told me what’s coming. She has to go back. She has to clean house. She has to withstand all the shit they’re going to throw at her over the next two months. Maybe longer. And although I want—fucking need—to stand with her, to help her through, it’s got to be her choice. Because me being there might make everything a million fucking times worse for her.
So I wait. And I hope.
“Did you plan anything specific for New Year’s,” I ask her, and my throat feels raw and thick.
“No.” Her breath against my neck is the sweetest damn thing. “No fireworks, for obvious reasons. I don’t like champagne. I think there’s some old tradition of opening the door to let the old year out and the new year in, so I suppose we could do that.”
“Let a year into Harris’s cabin?”
I feel her smile against my throat. “Symbolically.”
“What did you do last year?”
“I volunteered to be Harris’s plus one at the Bennet gala, because I was avoiding home.”
“The year before that?”
“I was in bed, binge-watching…I think it was The Last of Us.”
“That sounds real close to what I did. I might have already been asleep when it hit midnight.”
“Well, I’ve never been kissed at midnight on New Year’s Eve, so that’s what you’re doing tonight.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She laughs, then lifts her head. “What is Hot Biscuit Slim looking at?”
At the window. It’s too late for it to be birds.
Abbie uncurls from my lap and I follow her over, looking out.
“Oh,” she breathes softly. “Are those deer?”
“Elk.” In the clearing, bathed in moonlight.
Watching them, she reaches down and entwines her fingers with mine. “It might hurt your professional ego to hear, but nature is the very best structural engineer.”
“I happen to agree. What about Paul Bunyan, though—making those rivers?”
“He’s a close second to nature.”
“Then I won’t argue against that, either. But what made you think of it?”
“Looking at the elk. Which made me start thinking of meese legs—”
“Meese legs?”
“Yeah. A moose has four legs, so it’s a plural number of legs, so meese legs.”
Her straight face never breaks. “All right,” I tell her. “Go on.”
“Well, the fat cells in their legs are mostly unsaturated, so they don’t harden so easily at low temperatures. The cells don’t line up in their orderly crystals or bricks or whatever, so they don’t freeze unless it’s really, really cold. I don’t know if elk are the same. Maybe? Probably something similar. And I just think it’s amazing.”
She is amazing. The way she watches the world, looking for all the wonder in it. And my heart’s aching so fucking bad. I think I know what love is now. And understand why it’s so hard to pull out of the components. It’s made up of too many words, none of them exactly precise, but all of them right.
I cup her face in my hands, capture her mouth in a brief, soft kiss.
“Is it midnight?” she whispers.
“I’ll still be kissing you then. Though not only on your mouth.” I sweep her up, carry her across the cabin. “This will be the last condom. Though I don’t know how you’ll top the eleven fuckers sucking.”
“With a dozen cunts a-coming, of course.”
Of course. I kiss her, then kiss her again. The last one. It won’t be enough. It can’t be enough. One last night won’t get me through a week, let alone the rest of my life. But it won’t be the last.
I’ll have hope.
Abbie
Abbie
I have to go back.
That knowledge is just as horrible now as it was before, though for an entirely different reason. I’m not looking forward to confronting my mother, but I’m steeled myself. Readied myself.
I’m not ready to let go of Reed.
He’s been quiet all morning. First helping me pack the car. Then offering to drive when I looked doubtfully at the slushy, muddy road. So he drove while I watched him. Memorizing his profile. Wishing that I’d sketched him. Hoping my memory will be good enough.
Praying I won’t need to rely on my memory.
But he hasn’t said anything about the future yet. Not even a hint. And this drive won’t even last the hours until we reach the city, because his truck is at his dad’s lodge somewhere nearby.
Then there it is. A sprawling log house—empty and shuttered. The new family gathering apparently didn’t last through New Year’s. I wonder if Reed’s dad ever found out about the “Oops.” Then realize I don’t really care.