Page 80 of And Now, Back to You

My stomach flips. “It has nothing to do with our kiss.”

It might have a little bit to do with our kiss.

He squeezes gently, fingers spread wide. “Then why in the hell do you want to go outside?”

I study his face in the flickering shadows. I can see him better now than when I first woke up. His hair is sticking up at odd angles. There are circles beneath his eyes.

I reach up and trace the edge of one of those purple circles, from the corner of his eye to the middle of his nose. My knuckles brush against the cool metal of his glasses, his breath a warm exhale in the middle of my hand. I touch him the same way he was touching me, when I tried to come up with a reasonable explanation for all the things I’m feeling.

I make another gentle circuit with my fingers and his eyes go half-mast.

I pull my hand away. “Sorry.”

“No.” He tugs my hand back. “That was nice.”

I carefully reach for him and trace another idle path, trying not to read too much into it. It’s okay to touch like this, in the hush of the night. When it feels like we’re the only two people in the world. It’s okay to kiss him too, but only in tucked-away places where no one can see. It’s okay to feel something for him, as long as it stays within the boundaries we’ve constructed for it. None of it has to matter. That’s what he said.

But for me, I’m sort of afraid it does.

“I have trouble sleeping,” he confesses, his eyes closed, lashes dark gold fans across the tops of his cheeks.

“Always? Or just this trip.”

“Always,” he whispers.

On my next pass, I trail my fingers back along the temple of his eyeglasses, over the spot where I snapped them ten days ago. I trace over the curve of his ear. To the hidden place below where his skin is so, so warm.

He releases a deep sigh. Some of his hair falls over his forehead. I push it back, then smile up at him when his eyes crack open. I think Jackson might need another distraction. I think I could use one too.

“Want to come outside with me?” I whisper.

We pull on our snow gear in near silence, nothing but the swish swish swish of our jackets and the quiet sighs of zippers. Jackson snickers when I start jumping up and down to get my socked feet through the bottom of my cinched snow pants, reaching over and holding me steady with one hand curved against my hip while I wiggle and kick.

“I can’t believe you thought you could sneak out of here,” he says, his fingers holding me tight. Five distinct pressure points that I could probably map into a constellation later. “How were you going to do all this without waking me up?”

“I assumed you were a deep sleeper,” I grunt, blowing my hair out of my face once my feet are through. My socks are mismatched. One of them is bunched at the ankle. In fact, I’m pretty sure one of them is Jackson’s.

“What made you assume that?”

“Your overall disposition? I don’t know, Jackson.”

Twenty minutes later, we’re standing in the lobby of the lodge, staring out the window at the wall of pink-tinged white that’s waiting for us.

“Just to confirm,” he says, “you want to go outside. In that.”

Outside the windows, we can barely see across the parking lot. It’s a wall of white, the very tops of the trees swaying in the wind.

“You don’t have to come.” I tug on my hat, pulling it low over my ears. “You can wait in here.”

“You invited me,” he says, somehow making it sound like an accusation.

“Yes,” I say slowly, “but I’m not holding you at gunpoint. You are free to do as you wish, Jackson, and that includes staying inside and watching from the window.”

He glances down at his legs. “After I put on these snow pants? I don’t think so.”

Jackson’s snow gear is utilitarian black. Sleek and formfitting. He looks like Jack Reacher’s nerdy little brother, snow expedition edition.

I snicker.