“We break up and pretend this never happened. Obviously.”
He smirks and presses a kiss to my temple. His mouth is water-slick and hot. “Bold of you to think I’ll let you forget.”
“Watch meEternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mindyour dumb face right out of my brain forever. You’ll show up for class and I’ll be like,Who is this ugly new kid?”
“Nah. You think I’m sexy. You’d be all up on me by week two.”
“Sure, till I found out about your sparkling personality.”
His hair is plastered to his face, cheeks flushed from the steam. I can feel him getting hard again, against my stomach, and I lean into it, pressing us together.
“Didn’t stop you from getting a crush on me this time,” he murmurs, moving his hips forward in a series of tiny thrusts.
“Amnesiac me is smarter than real me.”
My hands find his ass and pull him in rougher, faster. That, it seems, is enough to tip him over the edge, because he grabs my thighs and hitches me up with effortless strength, driving me back against the chilly shower tile. I laugh and kiss him, and it’s perfect; we’re perfect.
Nothing should ever change.
Four Days
Until Stockholm
17
Marigold
We run out of Hanukkah candles on the third night.
“I have to go out,” I inform Jamie, who has been hunched over the piano for the past four hours, playing and replaying the same twelve measures as if they aren’t already perfect. “Gotta get more candles for tomorrow night.”
“I’m coming with you,” Jamie says almost immediately, straightening upright like he’s been waiting for an excuse. “I need a break. My back hurts.”
“Okay, but it’s a trek. We have to go like fifteen blocks.”
“I thought you New Yorkers considered anything less than twenty to be a light stroll,” he quips, and breezes past me to shove his feet in his boots and grab his coat.
It had started snowing this morning, and it’s still coming down with a vengeance by the time we step outside, although it’s less a blizzard now and more of a flurry. Still enough for me to be glad I brought a coat with a hood so I can tuck my hair down the back and keep it from getting soaking wet; my beanie is totally insufficient in this weather.
“How does it feel colder here than it does in Iowa?” Jamie asks,burrowing his face down into the collar of his coat. “During the polar vortex a few years ago, we got down to minus-forty windchill. Is it just because it’s so humid here? With thebeing an islandthing and all?”
“I think that’s in your head, because it definitely does not feel like minus-forty degrees.”
“I mean, yeah, but it feels colder than…what is it right now? Twenty-five? I swear I can feel my bone marrow frosting over.”
I shrug and say, “Cull the weak.”
Zabar’s has candles in stock—andsufganiyot,which I take great pleasure in introducing to Jamie, because everyone needs a little more jelly-filled donut in their lives.
“Wait, so you eat these every Hanukkah?” he asks, mouth full of powdered sugar. “I thought the whole thing was, like, candles and latkes and chocolate coins.”
“Dreidels are for kids,” I inform him. “Grown-ups get donuts. Lots of donuts. And anything else fried in oil, for that matter. Like fish and chips, which I must say is my personal favorite.”
“Mmm. Fish and chips. Now I’m hungry.”
“You are literally eating a donut as we speak.”
“I could eat more. Five or six more.”
