I couldn’t hold back my grin as I pulled the straps of my bra up.
Me:What does your friend have in mind?
Three little dots appeared in his text bubble, then disappeared, and then appeared again.
Nolan:My friend says that you have to come and find out for yourself.
And then a moment later, a picture of the small ice-skating rink beside the church loaded, and I put on my sweaterdress,tights, boots, and jacket as quickly as I could. I took one last look at the wedding gown, hanging from a hook high up on the wall so that the train did not touch the ground, and then left the toy shop. I walked against the wind to the rink, going past the Mistletoe Theater, the one-dollar, twenty-four-hour, Christmas-themed movie theater where I had planned on spending my downtime before my downtime turned into Nolan time.
I saw him before he saw me. His cheeks were red as he puffed out white air, like a little boy pretending to smoke a pipe in the cold. I stopped walking, letting myself blend into the early Thursday evening crowd. Over the last couple weeks, the town had become more bustling as visitors arrived to overdose on Christmas endorphins. But I wanted to watch him for a moment longer. Just to observe him as him. A fleeting moment where Nolan wasn’t trying to be anyone or anything for someone else. From where I stood, he didn’t have any worries or concerns beyond enjoying the burn of the crisp Vermont air in his lungs.
And then he turned, and his face lit up with a slow grin as he saw me, like I’d stepped right into his trap.
We’d decided to cool it until after filming wrapped, but that didn’t stop me from hoping he had a dirty little surprise in store for me. I circled around the skating rink to where he sat on a small viewing platform with two steaming cups of what I assumed was hot chocolate beside him.
“I guess they didn’t have any figgy pudding syrup?” I asked as I sat down and nearly kissed him hello like we were an honest-to-goodness couple before I suddenly remembered thatwe were neither in the privacy of our own rooms nor were we pretending to be the duke and Felicity. Here we were just two people in a very public place. Two people who definitely did not fuck each other.
He growled. “An abomination to hot beverages everywhere.”
“So where’s your friend?” I asked.
“He had to go. Trouble back home. Something about putting his sleigh in the shop and rerouting some deliveries.”
“Well, when the home front calls,” I said very seriously. “So. Nolan Kowalczk...”
“Yes, Bee Hobbes?”
“Would this be considered... a date?”
“I guess we have done it all kind of backward, haven’t we?”
I let myself scoot an inch closer to him so that I could feel a little warmth from his body. “I like it that way, I think.”
“Do you?” he asked as he slid a hand under my ass.
A thrill rippled through my chest. “We are in public. Just as a reminder.”
“My hand was cold,” he said innocently.
I shimmied my hips a little. “That should help.”
“So what do people talk about on dates?” he asked. “I never really did the dating thing. It was more like, hey, let’s hire a petting zoo to come to my suite on the thirtieth floor, do a little ecstasy, and have a minirave.”
“Tale as old as time,” I said.
He shook his head at the memory of his party boy days as he picked up his hot cocoa. “I’m curious, though. How did Bee Hobbes become Bianca von Honey?”
“Ah, yes, my villain origin story,” I said with a laugh.
“I can tell you from experience that Bianca von Honey truly brings joy to the world. You are no villain.”
I want to kiss him. I want to kiss him. I want to kiss him.“Well, it started with me sending a nude to the first boy in high school who gave me the time of day. When I asked if we could go to prom together, he said no, because people would think we didn’t make sense together. He wasn’t even, like, a jock or something. Just some show choir loser.”
He groaned with disgust.
“And then after graduation, when I told him it was over and that I was done trading nudes and making out in secret, he threatened to post a topless photo of me on some revenge-porn website, so I posted the photo before he could.”
“Wow.” His whole body tensed as he slammed his cup of cocoa on the bench beside him. “That little fucking twatface.”
