by Karina Bliss
His phrasing saddened her, his use of the past tense.
“I like you, too, Marc. But you don’t have a future. You’re not even sure you want one. You want your past, and I don’t exist in your past.”
Her words must have stunned him, because he blinked several times, his mouth open and his teeth glinting in the sun. “God, Selina,” he said finally. “When you put it like that . . .”
She put her right hand over his as it rested on her left arm, enjoying the length of his bare fingers and the way he gripped her bicep. She wanted so much for him to say that he would stay, set up some sort of Internet company in Salt Lake City, and take her out to dinner, on a real date. But it had to be what he wanted, not what he felt like he had to do.
“I want to settle down,” she said. “All I’ve ever wanted is a good job that I could be proud of, one that paid me enough to buy a house, and have a family. Travel, but for vacation, not because I need to wander. I’m a person who stays put, grows roots. Only Athol wasn’t a place I wanted to stay.”
She stepped closer, until they were touching, and he wrapped his arms around her. She pressed her head against his chest. “I’m not going to wait for you, but if you ever decided that’s what you want, too, give me a call. It doesn’t even have to be in Salt Lake City. Just give me a call.”
He kissed her hair, then she straightened up to face to him and he brushed his lips agaist her. She could almost stay like this, safe in his arms forever, the breath from his nose hot on her cool face.
But this was a good-bye kiss. There would be no nibbling on her bottom lip or exploring his mouth with her tongue. Whatever happened here—kiss included—wouldn’t end in anything other than them parting ways.
So she pulled away before she gave in to the temptation to get her bags from inside and follow him to the ends of the Earth.
“That’s good-bye, then,” he said, looking down at her, dampness in his eyes.
“And thank you.” She stepped out of his grip, wrapping her own arms around her for comfort and warmth. He reached out for her again, but she stepped back again. One of them had to do it. She could be the strong one if necessary.
He must have gotten the hint because he nodded. “Thank you for coming with me on this journey. I’m not sure where I’ll end up come summer, but I know that the past couple days with you have had a profound effect on me. If I end up doing something else great, it will be because I listened to you. If I don’t, it will be because I wasn’t smart enough to take your advice.”
She smiled even though her heart felt as though it was cracking in millions of pieces. “Good-bye, Marc.”
He opened his mouth to say something, then apparently thought better of it, turned and got in his car.
She didn’t let herself cry as he drove away.
Chapter Twelve
There was no denying that Marc’s room at Snowdance was nice. When he’d started this trip, he’d have been thrilled at the space, the expansive views of the mountain, and the luxury of his surroundings. But now he’d rather be back at the middling hotel off a freeway exit in Jerome, Idaho. At least then Selina had been with him.
And Selina had made all the difference in his life.
The bellhop stashed Marc’s bags where Marc had asked him to, then left with a generous tip. Marc tossed his backpack onto one of the queen beds, then flopped onto the other. The vast emptiness of the room stretched out from the bed to the mountains, echoing back off the snow. God, he wished Selina were here. But she didn’t want to be with him.
No, he corrected himself. He shoved up to a sitting position and forced himself to get up and walk over to the window. Selina wasn’t here because what she wanted in her future was different from what he wanted in his future.
Only that wasn’t true, either. He didn’t know what he wanted in his future. He could have stayed in Salt Lake with her. It’s not like he had to be anywhere at any particular time. But it wasn’t fair to her to use her to keep him entertained and distracted while he found himself.
Whatever that meant.
Here you are, he thought as he looked out over the slopes that would be covered in skiers tomorrow. He would be skiing tomorrow, too, and the next day, and the next, and the next . . .
When he thought about it that way, his future stretched out into a long stretch of skiing and driving between resorts. What had sounded like a dream a couple of months ago now sounded like a life sentence.
Selina was right. He wasn’t looking for a future in all his travels. He was trying to not commit himself in case his past called him back. He wanted to be able to leap when that phone call came asking for his help.
He pressed his head against the cold windowpane. It wasn’t that he didn’t believe Curtis and the team he now headed couldn’t do the work to keep their baby afloat, or even that Marc was angry over being left out. He had chosen not to take a position with the company that had bought their platform. With all that money on the table and the chimera of freedom beckoning, he’d thought moving on to something new was what he wanted.
Moving on was a hell of a lot scarier than staying put.
All the more reason to admire Selina and the guts she’d shown to get in his car and find a new place to live.
He banged his head against the window until his headache reminded him that his head was better used for thinking than as a hammer.
As he was digging through his backpack for his laptop, the phone in his pocket buzzed with a text message. Curtis. A name he’d not seen in his texting app since Marc had started sending him e-mails about key exchanges.
Interested in work?
Marc’s heart began to pound.
Yes!
Not our project. That’s done.
God, text messaging could be so annoying for conversations like this. Seeing one small sentence pop across his screen and wondering what would follow but having to wait for it was the worst.
Group working on improved mobile security for banking. Focused on banks in developing countries. Want more info?
Marc tossed the phone to the bed. Mobile banking security was . . .
He was going to say boring, but the more he thought about it, the less boring it seemed. He’d read enough stories in the news about the importance of mobile banking in developing countries to know that something so simple could change the lives of millions. No, billions of people.
He grabbed the phone.
E-mail me.
Not that his decision was made, but he could at least start doing research.
*
Marc skied while he was at Snowdance. He’d paid for the skis, the room, and the lift tickets. Plus, it was fun. But he skipped the pool in favor of room service and lots of time spent in front of his laptop, doing research and negotiating positions. He found the hotel’s business room where he could print for exorbitant amounts of money and use a scanner. He contacted old computer geek friends for information and got put in touch with some new contacts with experience in mobile banking.
By the time the end of the week rolled around, Marc was barely able to bend his knees after all the skiing, but he had a new job lined up and ideas on how to improve security in mobile banking while keeping the application flexible enough to be used across countries with various cultural expectations of banking and money.
Ideas that would translate into months and months of work to get off the ground and perfect, followed by years of tweaking as technology changed.
Marc shoved his dirty ski clothes into his bag, not able to remember when he’d last been so excited to sit in front of a computer for hours on end. The best part of the job was that it would give him stability and something to work on, but the international goal of the work meant he’d also have an excuse to travel.
As he zipped up the bag, he wondered if Selina would see the compromise. He needed one more week to wrap everything up and pin down his future, and then he’d call her.
No. Better yet, he would stop by her house and talk to h
er.
He wasn’t doing this for her, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t hoping she would be one of the benefits.
*
Selina staggered into Pam’s house, her feet aching from being on them all day. She’d worked a double shift today at the restaurant downtown, which was hard but necessary. In the past couple of weeks since Marc had left, she’d registered for spring classes at the local community college, talked with the gallery owner about a possible job there, and landed herself a waitressing job. All the while, she helped Pam around the house.
She sighed as she pulled her shoes off her feet and wiggled her toes. Not only did the work add money to her bank account but it kept her mind off her loneliness. Pam was good company, too. Selina had gone out to coffee once with one of her coworkers also. But none of them distracted her from the fact that she missed Marc.
With a sigh, she stood up and shuffled to the bathroom to brush her teeth. It would all get easier, she told herself. One day.
Chapter Thirteen
Selina was about to hang an ornament on Pam’s tree when the doorbell rang. She nestled the fragile ornament—a white china bird’s nest—back into its small piece of protective wrap and went to the front door to answer it.
Her jaw dropped when she opened it. Marc stood on the other side, a knit cap pulled tight over his floppy hair and his hands shoved into the pockets of a navy peacoat. He no longer looked like a white knight.
Over the course of two weeks, she’d come to realize that falling in love with a white knight was a bad idea. Better to come to a man as an equal than for him to know that he’d rescued you because you weren’t able to rescue yourself.
“I don’t remember you having a peacoat,” she said.
His face broke out into a lopsided grin. “You didn’t see all my clothing.”
“No, but . . .” I didn’t think you were the peacoat type.
Really, though, what did she know about him? She’d wondered that every night when crying to herself about her loss. What had she lost?
She’d lost a funny, interesting, smart, and capable guy who’d kept all of his promises, never asking for more than she could give, nor offering more than he could follow through on. Along with learning about the dangers of white knights, Pam had also been lecturing about why that trait was so rare, in men and in women.
His brow raised until it nearly touched the ribbing at the bottom of his cap. “No, but?”
“I’m happy to see you,” she said because it was true. “But I don’t know why you’re here.” That was true, too.
“Can I come in? I brought you a present.”
Selina stepped aside, and Marc passed through the doorway into the entryway of Pam’s house. She saw him reappraising the small cottage, now made brighter with an overflow of Christmas decorations, including a large collection of nutcrackers.
“Did I hear the door?” Pam asked, coming through to the living room from the kitchen, a tray of snacks and two mugs of hot chocolate on it.
“Oh,” she said, the chocolate sloshing over the sides of the mugs as she stopped short. “It’s the young man who brought you here. I was given the impression that you’d left forever.”
“I’d hoped you would come back,” Selina explained, “but I told you I wasn’t going to wait on you.” Even though the temptation had been great. Instead, she’d focused her crying on healing and let Pam’s excitement over having Selina help putting up the Christmas decorations take her mind off the fact that she no longer had Marc to talk to.
But the man she faced when she turned back from watching Pam leave the room was different. The vulnerability etched in his face didn’t make him look older, but it made him look more serious. That was a man she could believe would both put together a multimillion-dollar computer program and go on to do other things with his life, a man looking to plan his future rather than a permanent vacation.
“Selina,” he said, his hands outstretched toward her, “you were right. Traveling wasn’t what I wanted. Or, maybe I want to travel, but I don’t want traveling to be my life. I want to do something.”
He took a step closer to her. “You were right. About all of it. And I didn’t realize it until I was at Snowdance, in this beautiful room with the most amazing view of the mountains I’ve ever seen and I felt as lost and empty as I ever have. I want to work. I like to work. I find meaning in work, where I can build something.”
Her heart stilled with his words, hoping that they meant something more than what he was literally saying. Then she took a deep breath and remembered the man she’d spent a couple of days with. He’d been more than his words, and he’d stuck to all his words.
“What does this mean?” she asked.
“It means I want to take you out to dinner. On a date.”
She couldn’t help but smile. “I think I got that part.”
“Is that a yes?”
“I meant, what does this mean for you? Are you looking for work?”
“Huh? Oh. Um, no.” He shook his head. “Work found me. Curtis called.”
“So you’re working on your project again?”
“No. That’s the best part.” His previously concerned face was now as animated as she had ever seen it. He was clearly more excited about his current project than he ever had been about spending a winter traveling from resort to resort.
“There’s a group that’s trying to develop better mobile security for banking, specifically for third-world countries where mobile banking is a community’s lifeline and can mean the difference between poverty and security for a woman selling baskets or cloth.”
“But . . .” Her nervousness returned. “That sounds like something you need to do . . . somewhere else.” Salt Lake had an international airport, but you still have to fly somewhere else first to fly internationally.
He waved her concern away. “This is the computer industry. And it’s software, not hardware. I can work with anyone, anywhere as long as we both have Internet access. I’ll have to travel, yes. You should know that going in. Maybe a lot, even. But I’ve got an apartment here and I plan to return here. Always.”
Her head lifted and dropped and lifted and dropped, slowly as if what he was saying was a ball and she had to roll it into the hole where it would hit a lightbulb and she would understand the importance of what he was saying.
“We could get you a passport,” he said, stepping forward, his hands still extended. She slipped her palms into his. “You said you wanted to travel for vacation. Maybe I’ll be someplace you want to vacation and you could come with me for a week or two.”
Flop. Bang. Ring.
The ball rolling around in her head dropped, and suddenly she got it.
Tears sprang to her eyes as she shuffled closer to him, desperate to touch him and yet afraid that if she let go of his hands, he would disappear and this would all be a dream.
He cocked his head, examining her face. “Are you crying?”
“Yes, but it’s because I’m happy.” She sniffled. “If you haven’t noticed, I’m a crier.”
“Oh, I noticed.” His wide smile was the embodiment of joy. “Is this a yes?”
“Yes,” she said, nodding and sniffling again and then tilting her head up for a kiss. She didn’t know if she was agreeing to a date, or a kiss, or the future he’d outlined, but she didn’t care. She wanted them all.
Almost instantly, she was wrapped in his arms, their lips pressed together. Their kiss was hopeful, as if they had decades of kisses to set the tone for. When they finally pulled away from each other, Marc looked down at her, his eyes soft with the same love she felt warming her heart.
“Merry Christmas,” he said, reaching in to the pocket of his peacoat and pulling out an envelope. “Your present . . .”
Her eyes widened. “What is it?”
He just shrugged so she flipped the envelope over. She tried to be gentle, but the paper ripped as she pushed her finger under the flap. Inside the envelope were two brochures and two car
ds, which she fanned out in front of her.
“Are these . . . ?”
“Lifetime memberships to the Salt Lake art museums. I didn’t know which one to get, so I got both of the big ones. You can volunteer or get a job in a gallery, but this way you can visit anytime you want, too. They were going to be yours even if you sent me packing.”
She hugged the envelope to her chest. Even if she decided working in the art world wasn’t for her, he was giving her the gift of art. And while he may have given her dreams to her in an envelope, he was a solid, flesh and blood man who wanted to be with her.
And she wanted to be with him. No matter what.
“Merry Christmas,” she echoed, reaching up to her tiptoes to drop a kiss on his cheek.
The End
Copyright © 2016, Jennifer Lohmann
Thank you, readers!
I appreciate the time you took to read Twelve Kisses Until Christmas. Authors love reviews and I’m not different. Whether you liked the book or hated it, all online reviews are great.
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Thank you, Molly!
This anthology was Molly’s idea, way back at RWA in San Antonia in 2014. I’ve loved working with this group of women and hope to be able to again (hint, hint).
Want to read more?
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