Marigold tugs on her coat and passes me mine. “They’re in cahoots. To what end, I don’t know. But definitely in cahoots.”
She pulls on a rather ridiculous-looking beanie, bedecked with a sparkly white pom-pom on top.
“You look like a cupcake,” I tell her.
“Thank you,” she says haughtily, and grabs the keys. “Now, are you going to call in sick? Or are you coming with me?”
Coming with, apparently, although the prospect of faking a migraine does sound awfully tempting now that she mentions it. Only once we’re out on the street, barely catching the downtown bus before it pulls away from the curb, I think…This isn’t so bad.
None of this has been “so bad,” in fact. Not since the day I moved in with Marigold.
I still don’t know what to make of that.
It’s snowing when we emerge from the bus at Rockefeller Center. It’s really starting to feel like the universe is out to get me. And byget me,I of course mean turn tonight into some kind of syrupy Hallmark movie. One in which I’m presumably the Scrooge character for not getting appropriately merry—or at least that’s what Shrishti implies when we meet up with her and Cessy in the locker room:
“Who pissed in your eggnog?” Shrishti, of course, is ornamented in a green-and-red reindeer sweater, complete with a headband that has antlers sprouting out of it. “Lighten up, Jamie, it’sChristmas!”
I honestly hadn’t thought I lookedthatmorose.
“I just didn’t realize this was a double date, that’s all,” I say. “But consider me lightened!”
And if therehadbeen any lingering part of me holding on to some resentment, it vanishes once we’re out on the ice—partly because it turns out that Marigold can’t skate. Like, at all.
“This is so embarrassing!” she shrieks at Cessy as she topples over for the third time in the first five minutes. The knees of her cream-colored tights are already soaking wet. “I can’t believe you have me making a fool of myself in front ofJamie Larson,of all people!”
“I heard that,” I call from ten feet away, and punctuate it with a smooth counter turn, just to show off; twenty-one years of Iowa winters weren’t for nothing.
She laughs, and I’m suddenly struck by how beautiful she looks like this, cheeks flushed pink with the cold and snow scattered like glitter through her hair. I skate closer and offer her a hand, which she—somewhat surprisingly—takes.
“You good?” I ask once she’s upright again.
“The only thing injured is my ego,” she says. Up close, she’s even prettier. Her pupils are huge and black, reflecting the fairy lights strung about the rink—dark pools full of stars.
“Do you need someone to hold your hand?”
I mean it to be sarcastic, but it doesn’t come out that way. It must not, because she just nods and interlaces her gloved fingers with mine, grip tightening as we start to skate forward.
“You good?” I ask again after we’ve made it ten feet—which is more progress than she’d made so far on her own.
“Hanging in there!” she says, all fake cheery, but she’s still gripping my hand like she wants to crush it.
“You can loosen your grip, you know,” I say. “Just a little.”
“Oh. Sorry.” She relents, but only for about five seconds before she wobbles and we’re back to bone-disintegrating strength.
“Is this your master plan? Snap all the bones in my fingers so I can’t play at Stockholm next month?”
She snorts, but the pressure doesn’t really let up. “Yeah, you got me. This was all part of the long game. Get you to stay at my place, so you start to trust me, then have Shrishti invite you here so I can obliterate your treble hand. Is it working?”
“Few more minutes should do the trick.”
She laughs, and the sound is light and crystalline in the chilly night air. It makes me want to say something else to earn that laugh again. I watch her out of the corner of my eye, her hair whipping around her wind-reddened cheeks. Her lips are flushed the same color—bitten,a part of me thinks, and the visual of my mouth on hers, my tongue salving the sting from my teeth and her breath hot where it mingles with mine….
Indecent, that’s what it is.
I really need to focus on something else. Anything else.
This late, we’re some of the only ones left on the ice—even at Christmas. A drunk-looking couple near us staggers against the rink wall, cackling; Marigold’s distracted enough by them that she skates right into me and sends us both tumbling down to the ice.
