I’m not a snuggler by nature, and I loathe sleeping in the same bed as someone else.
Morning breath.
Cold feet.
Frizzy hair.
Writhing in pain during a midnight flare.
Someone else seeing you at your most vulnerable?
Hard pass.
Calloused fingers graze my abdomen, and a radiant comfort follows the soft caress. Then again, it could be Connor since his constant weightlifting has done a number on his hands.
Dammit. Re-establishing the “I don’t snuggle” boundary will be difficult. He’s always been too clingy for my taste, but ah, well. At least we made up, I guess.
Which… I don’t remember.
Fresh pine swirls around me as the sheet of ice damming the memories in my mind cracks and floats away until a flood of memories rushes forward like white-capped rapids. But… they’re wrong, somehow.
I rub my temple, hoping to clear my mind from its jumbled haze and tumultuous waves. Maybe if I open my eyes, clarity will find me.
Blinking, I squint against an ungodly light streaming through a pair of frosted windowpanes.
Okay, a cold front or not—that’s impossible. It was seventy degrees yesterday afternoon.
No. It was freezing like always in Balsam Hill.A timid voice whispers in my brain.
Mytimid voice.
I thought I squashed that bit years ago.
Memories I swear are mine fade until they’re nothing more than a faint whisper of a dream or a recollection of a movie I once watched. And a new set of memories, one that belongs to a more… sensitive… tender-hearted… wimpy… Maddie takes center stage.
Snowball fights with a bespectacled Connor.
Ice skating on a frozen cranberry bog in the center of town.
A gazebo in the town square wrapped in Christmas lights and sparkling in the night sky.
A small college town with a quiet, rural, New England vibe to it.
Clutching a large hot chocolate while I navigate the icy cobblestoned streets on campus and in town, banks of snow and icicles dripping from overhead awnings.
It feels like my life, but it’s not. It can’t be. I’m a Southern girl through and through, and I’ve never seen more than a dusting of snow, yet here I am, lying in bed with years and years of White Christmas memories screaming past my skull.
Andhim. The hand on my abdomen pulls me tighter against his warm chest.
A chest that doesn’t belong to Connor.
Oh, no. It’s a chest that belongs to someone far, far worse.
Seth I-was-pretentious-before-it-was-cool Aarons.
Terrified flutters bully the pit of my stomach at the contact.
Oh yes, a new start will do you well. Ellie’s parting words voiceover the holiday-worthy montage playing in my mind. Between the host of fresh memories and my presence in the bed of the last man on Earth I’d be caught dead with, I don’t have it in me to be skeptical anymore.
