I was blushing furiously, my hand coming up to uselessly cover my face. I felt suspended in a pocket of time that didn’t belong to the real world.
He finished the chorus, hitting a final, ridiculously dramatic low note that vibrated through the steering wheel, and collapsed back into his seat, panting and laughing at the look on my face.
“You are a public embarrassment,” I wheezed. “I am divorcing you tomorrow, Reed.”
“You love it.” Silas smirked, his eyes sparkling with a victorious, breathtaking light as he reached across the console. He leaned over, pressing a soft, lingering, and completely unhurried kiss to my lips. “And you love me.”
“Yeah,” I whispered against his mouth, the snark completely melting away into the sweet, heavy truth of our new life. “I really, really do.”
26
CHRISTMAS EVE — THE REED LAND, NORTH CAROLINA
Now playing: Last Christmas - Wham!
Silashadleftthehouse at seven sharp, practically dragged out the door by Maverick and Scott. They claimed they needed to head into town for some urgent, last-minute supply run for the big family dinner tomorrow. But Silas had been so frantic, so transparently nervous as he checked his phone and tripped over the rug on his way out, that I didn’t need a mind-reader to unlock the truth. The man had likely procrastinated on a Christmas gift for me, and was currently scrambling through Wilmington, trying to find something that didn’t scream, “I bought this at a gas station twenty minutes ago.
Honestly, it was a miracle the three of them were in a vehicle together. The homecoming had been rough. Maverick and Scott had spent the first week oscillating between wanting to murder Presley, and reminding Si that he should've never engaged in an argument with the chairman. But as Christmas crept closer, the older Reeds made a conscious, stubborn effort to drop the UWF drama.
It was only the second time I had been left entirely unsupervised on the Reed land. But today, the lingering sense of being a temporary guest had completely, beautifully dissolved. This home felt likeours. The bare floorboards had been worn into a familiar warmth, and the kitchen counters carried the faint scratchesof our midnight coffee brewing. The winter air outside the double-paned windows only served to make the interior feel like an impenetrable fortress.
In my entire life, from the dark, lock-rigged bedroom in Pennsylvania to the sterile, identical hotel rooms I lived out of for thirteen years, I had never possessed a single coordinate on this earth that I could truly call home. I’d always been moving, always bracing for the moment the floorboards would be ripped out from beneath my boots. But sitting here, in the center of our living room on Christmas Eve, looking at the way the light caught the edges of our furniture, the realization hit me right in the sternum. I had a home. A real one. And the sheer magnitude of it meant the world to me.
I leaned back against the plush cushions of the sofa. The lights on the massive Fraser fir in the corner were already turned on. Its heavy branches glowed with the vintage ceramic bulbs I’d fought so hard to find. On TV, an eighties holiday movie droned at a low volume, the sound offering a comfortable, nostalgic background noise.
And I was currently engaged in a desperate, deeply frustrating war with the bridge of my nose.
I reached up, adjusting the frames of the glasses I’d been forced to adopt. The adjustment period was proving to be a literal, agonizing hell. The optometrist had warned me that because my vision had degraded so significantly from years of taking head bumps on the canvas, my brain was going to fight the corrective lenses at first. He hadn’t been lying. If I wore them for more than twenty minutes at a time, a sharp headache would bloom, making my vision swim with a nauseating static. But without them, the world was a blurred, out-of-focus watercolor, and I was tired of squinting at the text on my phone like an blind old man.
I pulled my phone out of my pocket, unlocked the screen, and casually flipped the camera application over to the front-facing lens. I lifted the device, staring at my own reflection to analyze the new addition to my face. As I stared at the screen, the critical, self-sabotaging voice in my head, the one cultivated by Ewan’s fists and decades of locker-room cynicism, slid out from the dark.
I began to meticulously dissect every single coordinate of my face. I looked at the dark circles permanently etched beneath my eyes from a lifetime of insomnia. I looked at the jagged, silver scar cutting clean through my left eyebrow where the coffee table had caught me as a child. I looked at the hard, locked line of my jaw, and the crooked bridge of my nose that had been broken three times in dark arenas and struggled to keep the glasses in place.
The sharp, sudden chime of the front doorbell made me jump. The front-facing camera caught the momentary flash of panic in my eyes before I cleared the screen. I stood up from the couch, my knees clicking loudly in the quiet house, walked over, and pulled the front door open.
Standing on the porch, trembling violently in the crisp, biting winter air, was Josie.
She looked completely, utterly destroyed. She wasn’t wearing a jacket, only an oversized flannel shirt that hung off her small frame. Her eyes were violently bloodshot, her face tracking a river of hot, silent tears.
“Cal,” she choked out, her voice a fragile, broken gasp that barely carried over the wind. “Cal, please… I didn’t know where else to go.”
I didn’t hesitate. I reached out, grabbed her by the shoulders, and hauled her inside, out of the cold, pushing the door shut behind her.
“Josie, hey, look at me.” My voice was low and grounding as I ushered her into the living room, guiding her down onto the soft cushions of the couch. I grabbed the fleece throw blanket from the armchair, wrapping it securely around her shoulders and tucking the edges in until she was completely blanketed. “Breathe, kid. I’ve got you. You’re safe. Just breathe.”
She buried her face in the blanket, her shoulders shaking with the force of her emotion. She looked so tiny on our couch. Her fair skin was a pale, translucent shade of shock, and the faint bridge of freckles crossing her nose seemed thousands of times darker than normal against her skin.
“I’m sorry,” she sobbed. “I know I shouldn’t have come here. I know it’s Christmas Eve and you and Si are supposed to be alone, but…I didn’t know who else to go to.”
“Josie, stop. You don't ever have to apologize for coming to this house. You hear me?” I dropped onto the coffee table across from her to catch her eye. “This is your family’s land, and this is my door. Talk to me, kid. What’s going on?”
She shook her head frantically, a fresh wave of tears spilling over her dark freckles. “I don’t know what my mom is going to say. I don’t know what Dad is going to do. He’s going to be so furious. And Silas…oh god, Silas is going to look at me like I’m a disappointment. I couldn’t face them. But for some reason…I just felt like I could come to you. I knew you wouldn’t scream at me.”
A profound, overwhelming softness melted through my defensive armor. She trusted me. In a valley full of Reeds, this girl had looked at the scary, tattooed outsider and decided I was her safe harbor.
“I’m not going to scream at you,” I assured her softly. “I’m right here. I’m in your corner. No matter what it is, we’re going to fix it. Just tell me what’s going on.”
She took a long, ragged, shuddering breath, her eyes swimming with a terrifying, soul-deep dread as she looked right into my face.
