“Serves him right,” Rose says, clapping her hands together as she leans back in her chair.
“What is happening?” Jeremy asks.
“Oh, Adrien must be telling everyone about the time I slept through my hotel room being robbed in Paris,” Sergio explains, laughing lightly himself.
“Oh, my god. You didn’t?” Jeremy asks. His jaw has dropped open in shock.
“He sure did,” Adrien says.
“They even stole my underwear. I hope they got a good price for those.”
“Yes,” Adrien says, wiping laugh-induced tears from his eyes. “Everyone in Paris wanted your Versace drawers.”
“Wanted them or wanted to be in them,” Holden adds.
“Hey!” Sergio tries to defend. “I’m trying to turn over a new leaf here.”
“Oh, come on now, Sergio,” Jeremy says, smirking. “Even I’m guilty of wanting to get into your Versace drawers in the past.”
“In the past?” Sergio challenges.
A faint blush creeps across Jeremy’s cheeks. “Are you saying you still have some?”
“I restocked my supply later that day.” Sergio smirks.
“Jeremy, no,” Rose scolds from his other side. “You’re better than this.”
“How about you let me be the judge of that for once,” Jeremy says, taking his eyes from Sergio to Rose. “I’m a big boy. I can handle myself and a man in his best Versace underwear.”
After lunch and wanting nothing more than to go back to the Harings’ with Jeremy, Sergio restrains himself. He’ll have plentyof time for Jeremy this evening, and hopefully tomorrow and the next day and the day after that and the day after that and every day from today until forever. But he’ll never get there if he doesn’t make it right with Rose—who is, by far, his biggest hurdle.
So with his goal of making this his last New Year’s Eve—until next year that is—he bids Jeremy goodbye, resisting the urge to kiss him on the cheek. He takes one last longing look when Jeremy walks away with Henry in his arms, then turns and grabs Rose’s attention. “May I take you on this first run?” he asks, holding the crook of his elbow out for her to take. He looks over the top of Rose’s head towards Holden. “You don’t mind if I steal your wife for a bit, do you?”
“It’s your funeral,” Holden says, then clicks on his skis and calls out to Adrien, “Hey, Adrien! You want to go hit that double black diamond?”
“Yeah, alright!” Adrien yells back.
“I’ll be on the bunny hills,” Allison says, tucking her bundle of corkscrew curls underneath a cap before she skis away.
Sergio holds his elbow out to Rose more prominently, giving it a shake. “Shall we?”
Rose rolls her eyes. “You know you don’t need to escort me,” she says, but loops her arm around his elbow anyway, effectively making their skiing awkward and clumsy. They manage to make it onto the chairlift with minimal effort or separation. “What’s this about?”
“It’s about us.”
She huffs out a laugh. “There is no us, Sergio.”
“Well, sure,” he relents. “There is no us like there is a you and Holden. But we do have a relationship of sorts. We’re more like brother and sister.”
“I guess so,” she says, raising one shoulder and twisting her lips to the side. She waves her arms at the chairlift their sharing,making its slow incline up the mountain. “That still doesn’t explain whatthisis about.”
“Maybe not. But …” he drags the word out and looks over his shoulder at her with a half-smile. “Siblings are interesting. Did you know I fired my brother today?”
She snaps her head to look at him. “What?” she asks, surprise clear across her face.
“Yeah,” he says, raising his eyebrows and shoulders.
“Damn.”
