Page 85 of The Christmas Yes List

“Nothing.”

I shut the door behind me. I’m accepting my fate anyway. At least for the next couple of days.

James wins.

I don’t have the heart to play this rejection game any longer. Any of it.

The Christmas No List is over.

Genie tried to talk me out of it, to force me to stick up for myself and to forget failing last night on our one terrible date, but I can’t. The wind is knocked out of me.

I’m so disappointed in myself that I have only the willpower to do what I have always done: Keep the peace at all costs, even if it means making myself miserable.

Now would be a terrible time for somebody like Dom to find me. Which is on my mind because last night, he did. In the form of a voicemail at 10:32 p.m. It went like this:

Hey, Chloe. It was great seeing you the other day. Listen, uh, there’s something that’s been on my mind, that I’ve been thinking about, for a while. And I think it would be wise to get together sometime, just to—you know—get some official closure over how everything went down. It’s just . . . it’s a small town and you’re back now and I want to make sure we all can put our best foot forward peacefully and . . . just . . . I think it would be best to clear the air on a couple of things. I think we owe that to our past selves. It doesn’t have to be a big thing. Just coffee or a walk. Low-key. I think we’d both feel better afterward. Ha. Anyway. Let me know what works for you.

I listened to the voicemail six times, feeling another ten-pound weight rest on my shoulders with each word.

I didn’t call back.

I shrug. “Your gloves are just a little creepy.”

“I beg your pardon,” he says, inspecting them all over with appraising eyes. “They aren’t creepy.”

“They’re a little creepy.”

He takes my suitcase handle from my hands, and I let him. “What’s creepy about them?”

“They’re too slim. They make you look shifty.”

“They are fit to my hands,” he protests.

“Then maybe it’s your hands. They’re too slim. It exudes shiftiness.”

“I do not have small hands.”

“Your glove size begs to differ.” I stop, peering at the car parked along the curb. My mouth drops open slightly. It looks exactly like the car he was standing next to when I called him over at the airport. “Where did you get this?”

“Oh,” he says, looking a tiny bit abashed. Then, as nonchalantly as possible, he continues, “It’s my rental.”

“Your car rental? Since when did you rent a car?”

Are his ears turning pink?

He opens the passenger’s door too fast and ushers me inside, murmuring something.

“What?” is all I can say as the door shuts.

He moves over to the driver’s side. Turns on the ignition almost as though he didn’t hear me.

But he did. He heard me.

And it’s not until we’re rolling that he repeats himself. With a little clearing of the throat, mind you, beforehand.

“All week,” he says.

“All week?” I cry out.