Noah’s lips pressed together. “Why?”
“Hey, Noah,” Tyler said easily, reaching my side. “Abby.” His gaze lingered on her with too much fondness, and Noah didn’t miss it.
“Hey, Tyler.” Abby sounded amused more than anything. “How are you?”
“Great.” He elbowed me lightly. “Hanging out with my favorite Barbanel.”
“Didn’t you get enough time together the other night?” Noah asked shortly.
Tyler slung his arm around my shoulders. “Never enough.”
I shrugged it off immediately and focused on Noah. “Behave.”
He shook his head and stomped away through the snow. Abby threw me an unreadable look and followed him.
I scowled at Tyler. “Are you going to go around touching me for the rest of the day?”
“Does it really count as touching with fifty layers of goose down between us?” he mused, then took in my expression. “I’ll stop.”
“No,” I said slowly. “You’re right. I want to be comfortable with casual touch. You can... put your arm around me, or whatever. If you need to.”
A slow smile spread on Tyler’s face. “Your generosity is astounding.”
“Hmph.”
He surveyed the mess of Barbanels running and screaming around the hill. “Are these all yours?”
“A baker’s dozen.”
“A fairly uncreative baker,” David said, wandering up to us. His purple jacket matched his hair. “Everyone’s always getting us confused, and only three of the batch are genuinely identical.” He gave Tyler a nod. “Hey, man.”
“Hey.” Tyler gave a bro-nod back. “How’ve you been?”
“I thought you weren’t coming,” I said to David.
“Me too. But Oliver ratted me out.” He surveyed Tyler. “Surprised to see you here.”
Tyler spread his hands. “Shira begged me to come.”
I gaped at him, then at a laughing David. “What’s wrong with you two!”
“A question I ask my therapist every week,” David quipped. “I thought you were hanging out with Olivia today.”
“I was.” I spoke as repressively as possible. “Then I ran into Tyler.”
“We made gingerbread houses.” Tyler sounded far too happy to be having this conversation.
David smirked. “Is that what the kids are calling it these days.”
I reached down and formed a snowball, not even bothering to throw it but mashing it into David’s face. He howled and lunged at me.
“You had that coming,” I yelled, skipping backward.Unfortunately, I promptly tripped. David took advantage, wrestling me to my knees and stuffing snow down the back of my neck. With a scream, I hoisted an armful of snow at him, missed, and hit two of the triplets, who regarded me with blank, awful faces before declaring war.
In minutes, we were a mess of cousins, snow flying through the air everywhere along with laughter and shrieks. The air in my lungs was so crisp it almost hurt, and the missiles lobbed by my cousins’ strong throwing arms were occasionally painful, but it felt good to run and yell and act like a little kid as long as I didn’t bowl over any actual children. I paused briefly when Miriam knocked into Tyler, but he only laughed, helped her up, and conferred with her about who to attack next. I’d almost forgotten that about him; he was good at making people comfortable, putting them at ease.
This was why I loved Nantucket. I got to have this riot of cousins around me, this clan to which I belonged and which belonged to me. I didn’t have to monitor anything, didn’t have to try, could simply breathe—or gasp for air, as the case may be. With my last snowball thrown, I collapsed backward into the snow, holding my hands up to plead mercy to anyone still in the fight.
Tyler dropped down next to me, also short of breath. His cheeks were rosy with pink undertones, unlike the bronzed gleam on all the Barbanels. “Wow. I haven’t had a snowball fight in years.”
