“She seem upset?” Kris asks.
I haven’t told him what she said to me, that she used to want the sweeping romance her parents had but doesn’t believe in it anymore. It wells against my tongue. The urge totell himso he can rush out there and confess his feelings to her and put us all out of our misery.
But she’s my best friend, and he’s my brother, and this is the weird line I always have to walk between them.
All I can settle on is to shake my head. “Yeah. Maybe. I can talk to her later.” And saywhat,that hey my brother would be willing to help you rediscover your belief in love? Speaking of a Christmas rom-com.
Though I’m one to talk, aren’t I?
Kris scratches the back of his neck. “All right. I’ll go get that cake, then,” he says and leaves.
I hit play on the projector screen. Out in the theater, the lights automatically dim, and the rolling noise of the movie kicks up in the sound system.
“So.A Christmas Prince?” I beam down at Hex.
“Shockingly, it is not a film aboutyouor any Prince of Christmas. It’s rather deceptively named.”
“You’ve watched it before.”
“We established that.”
“Were youhopingit was a movie about me?”
He rolls his eyes. “It’s remarkable your ego can fit in this projector room. I saw it before I came here.”
“But after we kissed at the bar?”
His lips thin. “Possibly.”
I brace his hips in my hands and press myself over him. “You were watching movies about me. Youliiiiikedme. And my Holiday.”
“Teasing me for being interested in you is hardly an effective form of mockery after everything we’ve done.”
“No, this was before—wait, oh my god! You admit it. You had a crush on me!”
“Acrushon you? Are we twelve? Did you have acrushon me?” He shakes his head. “No, you wouldn’t have, would you? You didn’t know who I was.”
But I laugh and wobble into him and catch myself by kissing his neck. “I was, though. Interested in you. Not the Halloween Prince. Just—you.”
He peels back. “You were?” His tone changes, banter to shock.
“Why is that surprising?”
He holds, eyes searching mine, uncertain, or maybe self-conscious. It makes him look so much younger, like for a flash we are back in that alley, in the dark and the hot summer air.
“I had no idea who you were,” I tell him. “But all I knew, needed to know, was that you made the fuses that were burning up towards me—my responsibilities and myirresponsibilityand my future and my mistakes—feel cut off, and in those seconds, I wasn’t destined to explode. I was justthere.With you.”
He blinks quickly, rocking into me, forehead to my lips.
“You said it was hot when I talk?” he whispers. “Hardly. Can you hear yourself?”
I grin into his skin. “Come on. We’re missing the movie.”
The lights are so dim in the theater that if Dad was watching—and he is, I know he is—with the movie screen black, Hex and I are swathed in darkness momentarily.
I feel through the shadows and take his hand, pull him so my lips find his ear. “I want to know what other Christmas movies youlike. How about you pick a few of your favorites and we watch them together?”
The movie sends a pulse of white light that floods the theater, and I pull back, but I don’t step away from him. Not yet.
