“Sure,” I said.
I let my head fall into the curve of his shoulder. It felt filled with lead, and there were weights on my eyes. I think I fell asleepeven before the Ghost from Christmas Past sang the last note of theWinter is Warmsong.
Chapter 11
We were late for Christmas Breakfast.
It was my fault. Probably. When I woke up, I swallowed because I had little tiny fuzzy socks on each of my teeth. (Royce was a big pusher of brushing and flossing—bah, enough about him.)
I had been planning on getting up and brushing my teeth (ah, minty fresh!) but when I rolled over, there was only a blank spot beside me.
Blinking, scrubbing at my eyes, I looked around, only to see Alex pushing a cart from the doorway, this one smaller than the one from the night before. It carried a silver coffee urn, two thin china cups (and saucers, would you believe), a silver pitcher of milk, and a silver bowl of sugar cubes. That was it.
My attention was torn between the coffee offering and Alex. He’d been up, had already showered and shaved, and doused himself with whatever cologne he was wearing. (I planned to find out later what brand of cologne, so I could soak a piece of paper with it and stick it under my pillow.)
He was wearing sharply ironed gray slacks, and this time he had a Christmas sweater on, complete with a reindeer with bows on its antlers. He was even wearing shiny loafers with tassels on them as he brought me my coffee. All in all, he was like a commercial for clean living.
“No food?” I asked, sitting up, cramming those zillion pillows behind me. Instantly, I regretted the remark, but boorish, boorish Bad Boy Beck always thought of his own needs first. “I mean?—”
“We’ll get plenty to eat at Christmas Breakfast,” Alex said.
He sat on the edge of the bed, so yummy smelling, I barely wanted the cup of coffee he gave to me.
Man, that coffee was delicious. I drank it, but I never stopped looking at Alex.
“Feeling better?” he asked.
“After what?” I asked, though I knew what he meant.
Part of me, old me, wanted to pretend the conversation from the night before had never happened. New me, though, figured I needed to own up.
Alex seemed like such a straightforward kind of guy. He wasn’t likely to appreciate any attempts to suddenly have pretend amnesia. Still, I didn’t quite know what to say.
“I guess I kind of spilled my guts,” I said, then I buried my nose in my cup and tried to look elsewhere, rather than at his understanding blue eyes.
“You did,” Alex said. “That all sounds like it was hard to deal with, you and Jonah being so close for so long.”
“He was a part of me.” I clamped my mouth shut rather than complain any more. “Kind of like you and your boyfriend, I guess.”
That was a pure guess on my part, because I had no idea who’d he’d been stepping out with. More, I had no fucking clue why anyone who had been with Alex would ever let him go.
“His name was Charles,” said Alex, as if I’d asked him outright to tell me the story. “I wanted to call him Chuck, but he never would let me.”
“All of your people have shortened names,” I said.
“Say what, now?”
“Nathan is Nate, Charlotte is Lottie, and so on,” I said. “And I guess Baby Ginny is Geneva? The only person who doesn’t have a short name is your mom. It’s always the full thing. Jasmine. It’s a power move. Like your mom needs any more power than she already has.”
I guess I thought I was in luck because Beck was a shortened name. Go me!
Alex looked at me thoughtfully for a moment, then said, “I guess I knew that, but I didn’t really know it.”
“There you go,” I said with a shrug, which just about spilled hot coffee on me, but I made a save just in time. “Why did he leave?”
“I found out—” Alex paused and shook his head. “Sometimes it happens. They only want your money.”
“Yeah,” I said, handing my now-empty coffee cup over to him. “I guess so.” I’d never had money, so not having it (which was the norm) was no hardship.
