Hope that maybe, finally, after ten years of frostbite, she’d started thawing.
Hope that the way she’d looked at me yesterday—uncertain and a little soft, like she was reassessing all her data—wasn’t my imagination desperate for scraps.
And hope was a hell of a lot more dangerous than lust.
I dropped onto the bench beside Moose and flipped the Twelve Stops notebook open in my lap. It gave my hands something to do, if nothing else. The pages were a mess of our scribbles now—my blocky all caps, her looping script, little arrows and stars and exclamation points where she’d gotten excited about an idea.
She’d drawn a candy cane border around the Cocoa Flight section. I knew because my idiot brain had memorized the shape of her handwriting.
“We’re here.” Moose tapped his knuckles lightly against my shoulder. “Waiting for you to ask us a deeply vulnerable, feelings-based question you’re going to pretend is about logistics.”
“I’m not asking you anything,” I said.
“Sure,” Meatball put in. “So what’s with the frown wrinkle? You’re thinking hard enough to leave skid marks.”
I stared at the list of activities, trying to focus on something besides the fact that Jess had smudged her thumb over the edge of the page and left a little ghost of a print.
“We’re not ready,” I said finally.
“For what?” Moose asked. “Armageddon? The parade? Santa’s judgment?”
“For the event.” I tapped the notebook. “Half these challenges are untested. We don’t know how long they’ll take, if they’re going to create bottlenecks, if Granny Mae’s hip is going to survive candy cane limbo.”
Moose peered down at the page. “Spin-to-win wheel thing, cookie decorating, cocoa flight, selfie station, terrible sweater contest—these are pretty straightforward.”
“Straightforward is how you get lines down the sidewalk and angry church ladies,” I said. “If every family takes ten minutes at each stop, we’re going to have people backed up all the way to the highway.”
Meatball squinted at the list. “How long does a cocoa flight take?”
“That’s the point,” I said. “We don’t know. Not really. We have estimates. We need data.”
Moose leaned back, folding his big arms behind his head. “You want to run drills for Christmas games.”
“Yes,” I said. “Exactly.”
“Of course you do.” His tone held more fondness than exasperation.
“It makes sense,” I argued. “If we’re going to roll this out for the whole town, we should test run a couple stations. See how they flow. Adjust the rules if we need to.”
“We could do that here,” Meatball suggested. “Throw some tables up in the bay, rope in a few of the guys, promise them cookies.”
The image popped into my head—Jess in the station bay, trying not to smile while Moose and Meatball acted like idiots, holiday music echoing off the concrete, engine lights reflecting off tinsel someone would absolutely put on the truck.
It… wasn’t terrible.
But it wasn’t right.
“Too public,” I said slowly. “Too many people. Too much noise. We’d spend the whole time putting out fires instead of actually tracking how the activities work.”
Moose snorted. “You say that like it isn’t our job.”
“We don’t need a crowd. We only need… one family. Two people. Enough to see what breaks.”
Moose eyed me, catching up. “Two people like, say, you and Jess.”
I kept my gaze on the page. “She and I already know the plan. We’d take it seriously. Time it. Talk through the kinks. It makes sense.”
“It does,” Meatball agreed, because he was the worst kind of enabler. “What are you thinking? Community center? Church basement?”
