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Tessa pulls her sleeve down over it. “Christmas.”

“Now you need to tell me who,” Kylie says, but I can tell that she’s teasing.

And Tessa looks at me across the kitchen like she can’t help it.

“I won’t tell the girls,” Kylie says.

Kylie follows the look to me, and then back to Tessa. Her eyes go very slowly narrow.

My mom saves us. She comes in from the hall and says she needs Kylie’s help with the guest room, the towels, in that voice that means it isn’t a request, and Kylie gets up off the stool with one long look over her shoulder that says this isn’t over.

Kennebeck goes after his bag. Barnes goes after the tin of my mom’s Christmas cookies on the counter.

And for about ten seconds, it’s just me in the kitchen. Then arms come around my waist from behind. Both of them. Tight. She presses her face into the back of my shoulder between my shoulder blades and holds on. I feel her breathe in, long, against my shirt.

“You surprised me,” she says into my back.

I put my hand over hers where they’re locked together on my stomach.

“I can’t take all the credit,” I say.

She holds on for another second, two, and then her hand comes up and runs down the middle of my back, and she lets go and goes up the stairs after Kylie.

I stand there with my hand still on my stomach where hers was.

And Barnes is in the doorway to the mudroom with the cookie tin under his arm, looking at me. He’s got a cookie halfway to his mouth. He doesn’t eat it. He just grins slowly all the way across his face. Then he comes around the island and stands across from me, and nods. Over and over.

“Thought you two hated each other.”

Kennebeck comes back in from the hall, sees Barnes’s face, sees mine.

I don’t say anything. It’s none of their business.

After lunch, my mom goes to call her sister. My dad’s in his study. Tessa and Kylie are upstairs behind a closed door, and every few minutes something comes through it that sounds like screaming.

It’s the three of us in the kitchen. Me against the counter. Kennebeck on a stool. Barnes on the other one, eating the fucking cookies out of the tin.

Nobody says anything for about five seconds.

“So,” Barnes says. He brushes his hands off. “Are you two together, or what?”

I glare at him.

I don’t mind talking about hockey, but he’s asking about this?

“Yeah,” I say because it’s true.

Neither of us have said boyfriend and girlfriend or relationship, but we went to dinner, and she said she hoped it was a date. She’s slept in my bed two nights in a row. I bought her a gold watch from an estate store and she hasn’t taken it off. She told me last night that she likes my tenacity, and that was the hottest thing she could’ve ever said to me. When I think about tomorrow, she’s in it. When I think about the day after that, she’s in that, too. There’s actually no fucking world that I’ll live in without her, so yeah. My answer is yeah.

Barnes face lights up like Christmas morning.

“Shit,” he says, and then nods. “Fuck me, bro. I’m the last one in the group.”

Nash shakes his head. “No, you’re not. Just get your head out of your ass and ask Paige out.”

Koda makes a short sound. “I’m convinced she was put on this earth to fucking torture me, man.”

My phone buzzes on the counter.