In a Holidaze by Christina Lauren

chapter seventeen

After the secluded, dark basement, it feels obscenely bright in the kitchen, like we’re walking onto the set of a salacious talk show. My guilt complex is behaving as though we were naked and rolling around on the scratchy basement carpet. Everyone looks at us expectantly when we emerge from the downstairs, and I’m sure it’s just my imagination but I can’t help but feel that a suspicious hush has fallen over the room.

I wave, like an idiot. “Hey. Sorry I fell asleep.” I point behind me, down the stairs. “After we were talking. And playing cards. You know.”

Miles screws his face up. “Thanks for the update.”

He tugs at the strap of a floral apron around his neck and picks up a can opener. Granted, it’s a sort of fancy version of a regular can opener, but my brother turns it around in his hands like it’s a complicated rocket engine part salvaged from NASA. Are we really entrusting this fetus with dinner preparation for thirteen people?

Andrew starts to explain to him how to use it, but I stop him with a hand on his arm. “No. He will learn through the suffering.” I turn to give the same warning look to my mom, but she seems perfectly content at the kitchen table with a glass of wine in one hand and a paperback in the other.

Miles looks like he would very much like to give me the finger, but then his expression clears and a smirk pulls at his mouth. “Dude.” He points upward. “You two are under the mistletoe.”

In unison, Andrew and I turn our faces up to the doorway overhead. Miles is right. The festive sprig is now hanging from a red ribbon pinned into the doorway.

“I didn’t know that was there,” I burst out defensively.

“I didn’t either.” Andrew looks down at me, and even when his mouth isn’t smiling, his eyes always are. Does the clock stop? It sure feels like it. Of all the times I’ve imagined luring Andrew under the mistletoe, never once did the fantasy include half of our respective families standing nearby.

“You guys could each take one step backward,” Theo says gruffly, but it’s pretty hard to take his anger seriously when he’s wearing Mom’s Mrs. Claus apron. “You don’t actually have to kiss.”

Except, I think we do. Let’s not break the rule.

Andrew lets out a nervous laugh, but his eyes hook to mine. Slowly, he bends. His lips—oh my God, his perfect lips—land on mine in the purest kiss, ever, in the history of time. Andrew straightens, and I focus on keeping my spine rigid so I don’t lean into him for more.

It was perfect, but it was nothing. Barely lasted as long as one of my agitated heartbeats.

A flash bursts nearby, followed by Lisa’s muttered, “Damn it. I missed it.”

Miles scoffs. “That wasn’t a kiss.”

I immediately regret all those times I told my brother he’s an idiot; very clearly he is a truth seer with the emotional intelligence of Yoda.

“Dude, it’s fine,” Theo growls.

But we’re in our own little bubble now. Andrew laughs quietly. “He’s right. It wasn’t really a kiss.”

Andrew. Kissed me. On the mouth. I shrug with feigned indifference, keeping my voice low. “It was fine.”

“I promise you,” he whispers, “my goal for our first kiss was not ‘fine.’ ”

“Okay, well,” I say, heart shoving itself up into my throat. “Try again.”

He quirks a brow, eyes darting down to my mouth and back up again.

“Are you gonna kiss her?” Zachary yells down the hall.

We turn to find at least six pairs of eyes watching us with vibrating intensity, and every cell in my body lets out an aggrieved groan. A chorus of conversation breaks out all around us.

Kyle laughs. “I think interrupting a mistletoe kiss is bad luck.”

“God, they’re so young,” Aaron stage-whispers. “I want to be that young again. Making out under the mistletoe. Staying up until three in the morning. Tying my shoes without getting winded.”

“They weren’t making out,” Dad scoffs, and then adds with less certainty, “Were they?”

Why do I like my family again? Even if Andrew was intent on doing the kiss over, the moment has been doused with several proverbial gallons of ice water.

“So,” Andrew says, taking a step back and sliding his hands into his front pockets. “Sardines?”

“Sure.” I muster up some enthusiasm. “Let’s do it.”

Sardines is Zachary’s favorite game, and Kennedy’s least favorite game, but she agrees to play it when he asks because, as she once said to all of us at the dinner table, “I don’t like standing close to people but I don’t mind standing close to any of you.”

Aaron got up and pretended he had something in his eye so he could go have a happy cry without her seeing it.

Zachary is explaining to Lisa how Sardines works, in an effort to convince her that she should play. Best of luck to you, kid.

Lisa scrunches up her nose. “So, we all get in a small space together and hide?”

“One of us goes to hide,” Kennedy says in her small voice, “and when someone finds them, they get into the place with them.”

Zachary does a snappy karate-chop dance combo, and one of his shoes goes flying. “The last person to find the hiding space is the last winner!”

“The loser,” Kennedy corrects. “Daddy and Papa call it the last winner, but really the last winner is the loser.”

Zachary shrugs. “I like to win.”

I can see Kennedy considering taking a swing at this one, but she just looks back to Lisa instead. “Are you going to play? Andrew is hiding first.”

Lisa is clearly pleased that her son and I have given her a chance to escape. Maybe she’ll move the mistletoe again. “I think I’ll see if Elise needs my help with dinner.”

“Theo and Miles are cooking.”

“Maybe they need help?”

“Mom.” Andrew winces gently.

She laughs. “Fine. I’ll go find Elise.”

He turns back to the twins. “Who’s ready?”

Two little hands go up in the air.

“Okay, then. Cover your eyes, count to fifty.” He looks at me. “And Mae?”

“What?”

“No peeking.” His eyes gleam flirtatiously, and my lady parts wave the white flag of surrender.

“I wouldn’t dare.” Bringing my fingers over my eyes, I start to count along with the twins to the sound of Andrew’s tiptoeing retreat.

“One . . . two . . . three . . .

“Twenty-four . . . twenty-five . . . twenty-six . . .

“Forty-eight . . . forty-nine . . . fifty.”

“Ready or not, here we come,” screams Zachary.

The kids peel off in different directions: Zachary down the hall toward the kitchen and basement, Kennedy into the dark dining room. Me, I pad upstairs. I have a pretty good hunch where Andrew’s gone.

When our entire group hasn’t descended on the cabin, the Hollis boys don’t actually have to sleep in the basement; there are four bedrooms upstairs, plus the attic. Dad sleeps in the study, and Mom sleeps in Theo’s bedroom. The room where Kyle and Aaron sleep is Andrew’s.

With my heart hammering, I push open the door and am hit with the intense essence of Andrew. Lisa puts candles in each bedroom, but whereas she and Ricky favor lavender, and Theo gets sandalwood, the eucalyptus is specifically for her oldest son. Beneath it, there’s also the clean scent of laundry, and that unmistakable feel of him everywhere. As soon as I walk in, the room goes tense, like the walls and furniture are sneakily pointing to the closet and hissing conspiratorially, He’s in there.

The light is on, too, which is another clue. Kyle is a notorious energy saver, but Andrew wouldn’t want the twins to have to search a dark room.

I walk over, hovering outside for a deep, steadying breath. A hundred times we’ve played this game and not once have we ever managed to huddle alone together, hiding.

I crack open the closet door.

Andrew cups his hands over his eyes, blinking into the bright light. “That didn’t take you long.”

“It wasn’t exactly a stretch of the imagination.” I step in beside him, and the small closet shrinks to the size of a shoebox when our situation hits me.

“Where did the twins go?” he asks.

“Downstairs. Dining room.”

He doesn’t say anything in response, but I feel him shift beside me. I am immediately drowning in the deep, aching tension of proximity.

“So . . . is it hard for you to give up this room over Christmas?” I finally ask.

I can barely see him because the only light we have to work with is a tiny sliver illuminating us from below, valiantly stretching up from underneath the door. But I can still see him shake his head. “I’m not here much anymore. Besides, I can sleep anywhere.”

I know this to be true. When we were kids, Andrew was famous for falling asleep at the table after a big meal. “Then why go out to the Boathouse?”

“Because there’s just something so infantilizing about sleeping on a bunk bed in the basement,” he says. “I know it seems crazy, but I just could not do it another year.”

“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.

His breath shakes when he exhales. “Turned on.”

And just like that, Andrew’s lips are on mine. Again, he breaks it too soon, but even in that single, perfect second, his touch was hungrier, playful. It was nothing like the public moment under the mistletoe.

And even though our lips are no longer touching, the intensity continues to ratchet higher because he stays right there, maybe only an inch from me, and he’s struggling to breathe just like I am. It’s dark in here, compressed and warm. A few of his shirts are on hangers—slid to the side so they bracket us—and they smell like him. Those same shirts have been on his skin when he’s worked and sweated, napped and played cards with me in the basement, and now they’re brushing against my back just after he kissed me.

“Is this okay?”

“It’s better than fine,” I whisper.

He laughs, breathlessly, and this here—breathing with him, deliciously anticipating what comes next—is easily the most erotic moment of my life.

I stretch forward just as he bends again, and his mouth is there, lips parting. When his arms come around my waist, pulling me into him, I moan and he takes the opportunity to sweep his tongue across mine.

That’s it.

I get it. I will no longer snort derisively at descriptions of women in novels falling to pieces with barely a touch. I can’t imagine what kinds of noises I’d make if I ever managed to get this man naked.

Heat blazes a path from my mouth down my throat, across my pounding chest, and down the center of my stomach. A million times I imagined this, but my brain is an uncreative disappointment in hindsight, because this is beyond anything I’ve conjured. Andrew tastes like peppermint and chocolate, smells like the smoke from the wood in the fireplace, and feels like sunshine. If you put all my favorite things in a Willy Wonka machine, I’m pretty sure Andrew Hollis is the candy that would come out. It’s all I can do not to press my hips against his and push that flannel shirt off his shoulders.

“You look growly,” he says on his own growl.

I’ve never known this side of him, but it’s like being shown a glimmering, dimly lit hallway. Gemstones line the floor. Gold winks on the walls. Let’s see where this goes, a voice says. For just a breath, I panic that this isn’t the right path. That kissing Andrew in a closet isn’t what I’m supposed to do.

But then he bends, nipping at my jaw, and the hesitation dissolves.

“I feel growly,” I admit.

“Whoever thought Maelyn Jones would be totally fucking irresistible,” he muses to himself, kissing down my neck.

“Not me.”

His hand grips my hip and slides up over my waist, stopping painfully far from my breast. “For so long, you were just a kid,” he says. “And then a couple years ago, you weren’t.”

I’m out of words. Instead, I just reach forward, running a finger down his neck to his collarbone.

“I’d had a sex dream about you,” he says, and then breaks out laughing.

“You what!”

“In the bunk bed,” he admits. “Mortifying.”

“When we were all here?”

Andrew nods. “You know how when you have a dream like that, it just stays with you all morning?”

“Yeah.”

“After breakfast, you and Theo were wrestling on the floor, and you were screaming laughing. Having the best time. I just had to push the thought aside—of seeing you that way. I couldn’t give it any more space to breathe.”

Every word he says requires me to rewrite my mental history. “If I knew that back then, I would have happily reenacted the dream.”

Andrew laughs. “And now you told me you wanted me, and I remembered the tarot cards, and—I don’t believe any of that, or at least I didn’t think I believed it, but I just thought—‘What if all this time, she’s been right in front of me?’ It felt so obvious. When we were on the sled?” he says. “And you smelled like caramel and sweet shampoo?”

“Yeah?” I’m in an Andrew trance.

“I almost leaned forward and kissed your neck. Just like that. Just out of the blue.”

Without thinking, I make a gentle fist in the front of his shirt, pulling him closer. When he lets out a quiet grunt, his breath mixes with mine and suddenly I want to take this sunshine man and do very, very dirty things to him.

“I’ve had almost the identical thought,” I say. “Many . . .” He stretches but then diverts away from my lips. His open mouth lands on my neck, sucking, teeth sinking gently in. I can barely think. “. . . many times.”

Andrew’s hand slides down over my ass to the back of my thigh, and he pulls my leg over his hip, leaning in. A slow grind. I feel him, the heat of his hips against my legs, the solid weight—

Bright light slices across us, and a small body bolts into the closet.

Andrew drops my leg, jerking backward. I throw my hands up like I’m under arrest. We are both breathing so hard and fast we sound like we just did closet CrossFit.

“Found you!” Zachary whisper-screams giddily.

“Oh—hey!” Andrew takes a deep, steadying breath and reaches up, adjusting the neckline of his shirt. “Took you long enough, squirt.”

Even in the dim light I can see the flush on Andrew’s neck, the quick flicker of his pulse beneath the skin. I wouldn’t be surprised if I looked down and found that my skin was on fire.

“I thought you’d be in the Boathouse,” Zachary says.

Andrew guides him to sit between us and closes the door with a gentle click. “There’s nowhere to hide out in the Boathouse.”

Zachary sounds dejected. “That’s what Uncle Ricky said.”

“Where’s Kennedy?” I ask.

“Still looking.” Zachary’s dark eyes shine when he looks at me over his shoulder. “But don’t call her a loser, okay?”

“I would never,” I assure him.

Over the top of Zachary’s head, Andrew and I stare at each other. I feel hot and achy all over. Unsatisfied and jittery.

“To be continued?” he whispers.

Oh, without question.