“Six hundred eighty-four dollars.” I choke. “You have to be kidding me.”
I click around, change airports, change times, pretend I am the type of person willing to take a six a.m. flight with two layovers in cities that aren’t even on the way. The cheapest option is still over six hundred. And that’s not including the checked bag I’ll need for presents, the ride to the airport, and the thirty-dollar coffee I’ll need to make my flight on time.
I lean back and stare at the ceiling. “Okay. Okay. You can drive. It’s what… fifteen hours?”
I pull up Google Maps and type in my address in Denver, Colorado, to my parents’ house in Willow Creek, Illinois.
My mouth twists. “Fifteen hours. Alone. In December.”
Fifteen hours of podcasts and bad gas station coffee and me overthinking every breath I’ve taken since the moment I let him kiss me. Fifteen hours of watching road signs tick by and imagining him wherever he is, not thinking about me at all. Or… I could stay here.
I could do the sad, independent grown-up Christmas. FaceTiming my family from my couch while I eat Chinese takeout and pretend it’s fine that I’m not watching my dad get tangled in lights or my mom cry over a casserole that she burned for the fifth year in a row. I tell myself I’m an adult now, I have my own life, this is normal.
But I can already hear Maddie’s voice. “It’s Christmas, Hails. You have to come home.”
I close the tabs and toss the laptop beside me. My shoulders feel tight, like I’ve been bracing for something since that night in the truck. Since he looked at me in the dark and we both said… nothing.
I drop my head back and stare at the ceiling. “I shouldn’t have acted like that toward him.”
Because I did play a part. I kissed him back. I invited him out. I texted first. I am the one who let it get blurry, and I did it knowing the line was there.
And yet… when he lied, it was like a knife to the heart. I felt cheap, like someone’s dirty little secret. God, I hate that it hurt.
I scoot down on the couch, grab my mug of now-cold cocoa from the coffee table, and take a sip anyway. It’s lukewarm chocolate sadness. Fitting.
My phone lights up with a notification and my heart leaps so fast I almost spill it. But it’s just a weather alert. I wheeze out a humorless laugh as I read it aloud. “Cool. Blizzard warning. Love that for me.”
Another alert pops up right after, this time from the airline I was looking at.
Hailey, finish booking your trip home for the holidays!
“You pay for it, then,” I tell the screen. “You book it.”
This is stupid. I’m spiraling. And when I spiral, there is exactly one person I talk to. The one person who doesn’t make me feel like I’m being dramatic for feeling things. I pull up Maddie’s name and stare at it.
If I call her, I’ll have to pretend it’s just about flights and missing home and how Denver is “so cute but weird” and not at all about how her brother did tricks with his mouth and hands that turned me into a water fountain.
I hover over her name but the phone buzzes in my hand with an incoming call. It’s Maddie. I stare at it for half a second, heart climbing right up into my throat, and then I swipe to answer.
“Hey, girly,” I say, forcing brightness into my voice like I haven’t been moping on my couch for forty-five minutes. “I was literally picking up my phone to call you.”
“That’s because we’re soulmates. Duh. We have that connection.”
I pull my blanket tighter around me and sit up, laptop still open to those stupid, expensive flights. “Good. Because I need to complain, and I need you to tell me I’m being ridiculous.”
“Oh, perfect,” she says. “My specialty. Hit me with it.”
“I’m going to have to rob a bank.”
“Mmm, okay. So, I’m going to guess this is about plane tickets?”
“How can they charge this much, Mads? It’s a two-and-a-half-hour flight! You barely even get a snack; it’s four mini pretzel twists and a warm soda if you’re lucky.”
She sucks in a breath. “Ohhh, how bad is it?”
“Six eighty-four. And that’s the cheap one.”
“Ew.”
