“Yours?” I ask.
He pretends to consider, eyes bright. “Kiss you every midnight I get.”
“Ambitious,” I tease.
“Achievable,” he counters.
The party spills into the backyard again, knit caps and puffs of breath unbeautiful and perfect. Fireworks crack open the sky in the next block, illegal and glorious. We stand on the porch steps and watch light become noise and then ashes as the dog argues with the heavens. Someone hands out sparklers; Mari traces a heart in the air and cackles at herself.
“You okay?” Triston asks, quiet, sacred, like it’s midnight again and he’s asking for the year.
“I am,” I say, and it surprises me how true it is. “Wayne isn’t here. He doesn’t need to be. He’ll still be there tomorrow. So will we.”
“So will we,” he echoes, thumb stroking my wrist where the velvet lives. “On your right.”
I turn my wrist and press his knuckles with the back of my free hand, the small ritual we invented in hallways and kept because it matters in rooms with sunlight. “Always.”
We go back inside because toes are mortal and the playlist just remembered the nineties. I dance with the girlfriends and learn the rookies’ ridiculous victory shuffle and teach Mari the proper way to lead a conga line around furniture that costs more than my monthly rent. Triston laughs and leans in doorways and gets body-checked by Joy itself, which steals his hat and refuses to return it.
At some point I end up on the kitchen floor with the goalie’s wife, splitting the last cookie and talking about how love does not feel like the movies promised and also better. At some point he sits beside me, cross-legged, and feeds me a clementine segment like a sacrament. At some point midnight loses its sharp edges and becomes a warm blanket we all pull over our knees.
When the clock says 1:43, the house has turned into a soft chorus of cleanup and yawns. I help stack cups even as the host protests and Triston helpfully eats the last three pigs in blankets like he’s preventing waste. We pull our coats from a mountain that could avalanche. Someone kisses both my cheeks and tells me I deserve this. Someone else knocks over a plant and apologizes to it sincerely.
On the porch, he tucks my scarf tighter, breath fogging like a secret. The street is quiet except for the distant sizzle of delayed fireworks and a couple arguing gently about whether to call a rideshare or risk frostbite. He holds the car door and I slide in and the new year starts not with a bang or a vow but with the ordinary miracle of a man who willdrive me home and carry in the leftovers and text the group thread a picture of the glitter still stuck to his eyebrow.
As we pull away, I look back at the house glowing with a handful of stragglers and think of what we didn’t lose. We didn’t lose ourselves. We didn’t lose the night to fear. We didn’t lose the kiss to shame.
“Tell me a secret,” I say, turning down the radio that thinks we want to scream-sing.
He considers. A streetlight turns his profile into a study I will never stop drawing. “I bought something,” he admits, wary.
“For me?” I tease, but my stomach flips because the word bought is a cliff men build in December.
“For us,” he amends. “For later. For when it doesn’t feel like a dare to imagine later.”
I rest my head against the glass and smile out into the quiet city. “Okay.”
“You’re not going to ask what?”
“I don’t need to ruin a surprise to own it when it arrives,” I say, surprising myself with the maturity of a woman who used to spreadsheet feelings to protect herself from them. “Just don’t let it be a puppy. We have a rink schedule and I have shoes.”
“Copy,” he says, laughing. “No living things. Yet.”
I fall asleep on the drive the way children do—mid-sentence, trusting the driver. When I wake in my bed (my bed), the scarf is on the chair and my makeup is off and there’s a glass of water on the nightstand and a note tucked under it that says, in his disastrous all-caps…
I laugh into the pillow until my cheeks hurt and then I cry a little because happiness is heavy when you’re new to it.
Downstairs, the house is quiet, Wayne’s door closed, the whistle on the table exactly where he left it. I press two fingers to it and then to the ribbon and then to my mouth, then exhale a white flag that looks suspiciously like steam in a winter kitchen.
The kettle sings. My phone buzzes.
Unknown:On your right. With syrup.
I write back,
Me:Always. Hurry.
Outside, the city shakes glitter from its hair and gets to work being January. Inside, I pour coffee and set out two plates and let the last chapter of a Christmas story end not with a fight or a plea but with the certainty of a bell that knowswhen to ring.
