Heating Up the Holidays 3-Story Bundle (Play with Me, Snowfall, and After Midnight): A Loveswept Contemporary Romance

by Lisa Renee Jones

  “Oh, Jenny,” my mom said, looking at the view, “I’m not worried about you.”

  “I’m not worried about me, either.” I hadn’t been.

  What was there to worry about? The big stuff, you can always see. The small stuff, the stuff I love, I found out you can see that, too. Entire worlds can fit on the head of a pin. On the point of a pin. Less than that. Small worlds.

  This was before I knew you could lose sight of the big world, too.

  Chapter One

  First Inch, Early December

  I grab my laptop off the side table and open up Apertr, the site that hosts “C’s” photography blog.

  Our relationship is entirely online, but we didn’t meet online.

  I got a Christmas card addressed to him.

  Early November, a big thick card in a green envelope arrived, addressed with such elaborate silver-inked calligraphy I could only make out Ford and my address. The previous tenant, who I knew nothing about, had moved out just before I had, so I guessed the sender meant it for him.

  My landlord, a very sweet Greek man, lives two doors down, so I started down the sidewalk to give it to him to forward. Impulsively, I went back inside and grabbed a Christmas card from the box I had recently purchased and scribbled a note about how the place and C’s landlord were just the same and to have a good holiday season.

  I gave both cards to my landlord to forward.

  A few days later, I got a postcard.

  It was printed on what felt like watercolor paper, and the picture side was filled with a sharp, oversaturated photograph of a child’s matchbook car. The photograph was so close-up that the blades of grass around the toy looked Jurassic and you could see every little pit in the paint of the car.

  I loved it. A small thing made large.

  The written side said New Mystery Tenant—thank you for the update and for forwarding my aunt’s card. I’m not at all surprised everything’s exactly the same. Does the pocket door in the hallway still sound like a cow mooing when you open it? I lived there for six years, all through grad school. I hope your memories will be as good as mine. Happy Holidays and Happy New Year.

  It wasn’t signed, but there was a URL to his Apertr blog printed along the bottom. He had actually addressed the postcard to “Mystery Tenant,” and I realized I must have forgotten to sign my card.

  One of my favorite things about the house was that the pocket door sounded like a cow mooing when you opened it.

  Plus, he couldn’t really be a stranger, stranger. My landlord had a deal with the university college of sciences recruitment office to accept new graduate students and research faculty, like me, so this guy might even be someone I walked by every day.

  He’d lived in my place for six years. My landlord said he was a good guy.

  I always try not to let that sink in too deep.

  I’d looked at his blog and figured out the toy-car picture was called a macro photograph and that he took lots of them.

  Macro pictures are extremely close-up pictures, with very fine focus to make usually invisible details the focus of the picture. C Ford, which was his handle on the site, mainly took pictures of small, everyday things—dandelions where you could see every feather of the seed parachute, a penny on a sidewalk with every scratch and dent in sharp, coppery focus, the bubbles clinging to the inside surface of a mug in a freshly poured cup of coffee.

  It was like ordinary-life microbiology.

  I had scrolled through his photographs and loved every one more than the last one. A couple of them I had copied into an email to my mom because I knew she would love them, too. When I found the matchbook-car picture, I suddenly found myself creating an Apertr profile just so that I could comment.

  Lincoln (I used the name of my street, his previous street as my handle): The cow door still moos, and this picture is wonderful. Happy Holidays to you, too.

  He had replied, almost instantly, via the private message feature on the site.

  I miss that door. The picture you like was taken in the little side yard of the house. If you look in the gap where there’s a missing brick on the side of the garage, I bet this car is still where I left it.

  It had been. And finding it, finding something so small that I never would have without his clue—without his telling me his secret—made me warm in a way I hadn’t been in a long time.

  So a stranger and I began, one degree of separation between us.

  This lonely season I’ve made it my routine to curl around the glowing hearth our words make in the dark.

  We’ve made rules, big ones, so that we can maintain the stakes—small ones. I’m still just Lincoln, and he remains C. We’ve not met, and haven’t asked to.

  We know that we both work in the college of sciences at Lakefield State, but not for who or what.

  The present is the immediate present of the moment, the past distant, the future nonexistent.

  We’re stripped down to just enough words for a few flames of ideas, illustrated with his photographs, illuminated with a safe spark that flares bright and quick against the blackness of my evenings.

  I leave Jenny behind in the bright winter light.

  Here, it’s just C and Lincoln, strangers everywhere else in the big world but here, inside the tight circle of light we’ve allowed ourselves, everything else crowded out.

  Sometimes, I write to C tonight, sleet ticking against the window, I really like living by myself for the first time. Like, I realized that I always eat cereal in the living room, and never for breakfast anyway, so I got one of those dorm fridges and I set up a cereal station right at the end of the sofa.

  Really? C’s response blinks up. I’ve started to think I can hear the sound of his voice when his words pop into his message box in the corner of the screen.

  No. But I think about doing that all the time.

  What’s stopping you?

  Nothing’s stopping me. I think that’s the problem. I’m not ready to do something crazy without someone else arguing with me that I’m a little nuts. Doing something crazy all by my lonesome still feels lonely.

  You know what would be completely insane and you probably shouldn’t do?

  I grin, and adjust the laptop where it’s perched on the arm of my sofa. No idea.

  You absolutely should not buy a tiny fridge so you can keep milk and cereal in your living room to eat on the sofa.

  I laugh, but am surprised by the tears that come right after. Thanks, C.

  Anytime, Lincoln. One more thing.

  Yeah?

  Let me know when you get the tiny fridge and I’ll share a bowl with you.

  He’s serious about that, I know. If I wanted him to, he would leave his unimaginable house and get into his unimaginable car, and he would be here. I would see him and he would be more than words on my screen, glowing in my dark Ohio living room.

  This man, who coincidence found for me, could fill the space beside me on my sofa, warm and real.

  I’m not ready for real.

  I want to be, but I’m not.

  Anything else I shouldn’t do? I hold my breath. My hands, my neck, go hot after typing the words.

  You shouldn’t suck on the end of your finger. Then you shouldn’t use that finger to draw a circle around your nipple. You shouldn’t let that finger brush over where your pajama pants have warmed up. Definitely don’t get your whole hand under your panties and think about what my hand would feel like, how you wouldn’t be able to predict what my hand would do from moment to moment, how you’d jump when I pinched and how you’d push against me when I slid inside.

  We don’t do anything, just like that, for a long time. As long as it takes the loud rattle of sleet to quiet into snow.

  * * *

  “Hey, Jenny?”

  “Yeah, Bob?”

  I’m messing with the app that adjusts the screen of my monitor to account for the light levels in the room. It isn’t perfect, but it’s necessary.

  I’m not sure I’d prog
rammed the right resolution for the sample I zapped with electrons earlier.

  “Were you the last one here last night?” Bob comes over and leans against my worktable. He’s a good scientist but he also uses lab supplies to plate out his own throat cultures when he’s worried he has strep, so I think of him as a kind of rogue.

  “Yep.” I toggle the black/white balance.

  “You armed the alarm?”

  “Um, yep?” I stop what I’m doing to look at him. He has his arms crossed over his EXPERIMENT WITH A MICROBIOLOGIST T-shirt.

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “You put the code in, but you didn’t hold the door so the contact plate was touching the bar thingy.”

  Shit. “Sorry.” I wince.

  “Forgetting about the tens of thousands of dollars of cultures we’ve got in here, we’ve also got a lot of computer equipment.”

  “I know; I get it. I honestly thought I was holding the door so that the bar was making contact.”

  “We’ve had break-ins before.”

  “I know. I’m sorry.” Bob is generally laid-back, but he, more than anyone, relies on the equipment. He’s a phage biologist—he looks at a kind of virus that infects bacteria—and runs reams of data that is important for future clinical applications. I shove my hands into the pockets of my lab coat and fiddle with the loose strings inside them. Shit.

  This isn’t the first time.

  It’s inching close to the tens column for number of times.

  “Show me,” Bob says, turning toward the doors.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, if you want to hold on to your lab badge, come show me how you think you’re arming the alarm.”

  Double shit.

  “Sure.” I slide off my stool and follow him through the double doors, the whoosh of air from the lab blowing back the wisps of hair that have fallen from my ponytail. The lab is kept at a slightly higher pressure than the air outside to discourage too much contamination from wild microorganisms.

  But whooshes of air won’t keep out bad guys.

  We reach the locking steel door.

  “Okay, arm it.” He opens the door and stands in the exterior hallway outside the lab. I hold open the door at the angle I hope is correct and try to look directly at where the contact bar should be.

  Jesus.

  I knew; I just knew the contact bar was there, that I should be able to move my head to see it, but I can’t. No matter what angle I look, my peripheral vision doesn’t connect.

  It turns out, peripheral vision is something people use a lot. For example, the inventor of this door alarm absolutely depended on a person’s having regular peripheral vision, just to make his invention work.

  The inventor of this door alarm was not thinking about me, what I can see.

  I’m not supposed to say, anymore, what I can’t see. My doctor informs me it’s not a positive perspective.

  I try to subtly experiment with the door, pushing it in a few inches, pulling it toward me, to test if I can hear the contact bar snick over the plate, but the surfaces are too smooth, or the noise from the air lock is too loud.

  So I do what I always do. I guess, and then put in the code. Pull the door shut, make sure it’s locked.

  “You didn’t get it.”

  “Oh, okay. Sorry. I’ll try it again. Hold on.” I start to slide my lab badge into the keycard lock, and suddenly Bob is right next to me. I hadn’t seen him move beside me. He puts his hand on my arm.

  “Look. It’s not your fault. There’s no way you can get the code in at the pad and angle your head in any position to see—”

  “Okay.” I shove my hands into my lab pockets again and feel uneasy with him standing next to me. I can feel him moving, but I don’t know what he is going to do.

  The freaking-stupid thing is that Bob? He wouldn’t ever do anything. It’s just—

  When I can’t see him, have no hope of seeing him, standing right there next to me, a little bit behind me, out of my limited periphery, suddenly it’s like my brain decides he’s a saber-toothed tiger and why aren’t I running, exactly?

  I turn my head to look right at him, and there he is, right where I left him.

  Not a tiger.

  He has that worried-about-you face that everyone has been making at me lately. He blows out a breath.

  “I’m going to ask Melissa to put some kind of sound indicator on the contact plate.”

  I look back down at my shoes. They’re new, hard-leather, closed-heel clogs, perfect for the lab. They would be plain black, but they’re a gift from my mother, and so she painted an Escherichia coli on one toe and a microscope on the other.

  The E. coli is smiling and wearing a little fedora.

  “Right.” The microscope had not been anthropomorphized, but she painted a little sprig of daisies next to it.

  “Just—tell us, Jenny. We’re on your side.”

  “Okay. I’ve got to shut down my program inside the lab.”

  I stare at the fedora. She’d painted a little patch on the hat, shaped like a heart, as if the bacterium wearing this hat is a friendly, gentlemanly hobo.

  I keep looking down, counting the brushstrokes on my toe paintings, reassuring myself with the acuity of my narrower field of vision, while at the same time willing my heart to slow down. Telling my heart, Look, the whole world around you is still there. It just seems like it disappeared.

  But my heart is stupid and can take in only the first and simplest messages my brain gives it, in this case, from my eyes.

  And as far as my eyes are concerned, the world is crumbling all around me, and what’s hiding in that nothingness isn’t friendly.

  So my heart obliges, gets me ready to fight, or to fly.

  I wish my heart would follow me into the dark.

  * * *

  Seriously, and I thought I had told you this story, I made my first camera when I was seven.

  After my encounter with Bob and a long bus ride home in the snowy cold, I snuggle with my laptop to look at the pictures C has posted on his photography blog today. They are dark, black-and-white, with black edges, but the images of the marble-columned Lakefield Metropolitan Library in the middle are so sharp and crystalline they look almost three-dimensional.

  You really took these with a camera you made?

  Yeah, a pinhole camera with black-and-white film. I figured it was a good time to get some cool pictures because the new snow would throw the light in interesting ways for a picture of architecture. I made this camera with an empty oatmeal can.

  Then he sends me a link with directions on how to make a pinhole camera so I can see what he means.

  Why are the edges all around the library black?

  That’s how the light entered the box. There are ways to prevent that, but I like how it looks. I like that it frames exactly what to look at, and that this was the only way this camera could see. Just what is right in front of it, without any other clutter.

  I don’t know what to say. I don’t want to tell him about what is happening to me, the way the world is narrowing in, but what he’s told me gives me chills. C and I don’t talk about ourselves, not exactly.

  We talk about his pictures.

  We tell funny stories about our childhoods, but only the stories that could be from anyone’s childhood.

  We tell each other where to put our hands.

  All of it, by mutual agreement, though I know the online anonymity is only respectful deference on his part.

  If I asked, we’d meet, we’d be more than pictures and stories. I don’t ask.

  So I don’t say that the pictures make me genuinely uneasy and tell him why. Instead I write that they’re a little spooky, almost.

  I’ve been kind of obsessed, lately, with what we see versus what we’re looking at. What do you mean?

  You can look at anything, direct your vision at any part of the world around you, but it doesn’t mean you actually see anything. Notice it, think about
it, take it in. I’ve just been thinking, lately, for lots of reasons, a few of them personal, that maybe it’s not really the mechanics or objective quality of the looking that’s important, but what is actually seen and noticed. I took these pictures with an oatmeal container. Objectively, much worse equipment than I’m used to. But my fancy camera would never have captured this image, isn’t even capable of seeing this image. Two cameras, pointed in the same direction, at the same thing. The pinhole camera really “sees” the library, I think.

  These pictures are beautiful. The marble of the columns looks so tactile, almost like bone.

  The pictures remind me, too, of the field of vision under a scope, how the dark circle around what you’ve focused on just bleeds out into infinity while you look at what’s right in front you, centered on the slide.

  They remind me of me, of course, though my loss of vision at the edges isn’t some dark ring I can see, it’s just what isn’t there.

  I can’t tell him any of this.

  How do you get the pictures out of the oatmeal container? I have to develop the film I put inside.

  Like, with a red lightbulb and the basins of chemicals and stuff?

  Yeah, but I don’t have a special darkroom because everything’s digital nowadays. I just develop them in my bathroom. But I still screw in a red lightbulb.

  That is very cool. It’s too bad that’s not the moment where the murderer’s face is revealed in movies, anymore.

  Ha! True. Yet something else technology has stolen.

  I smile, ready to play. I toggle away from his library pictures, though.

  I print out C’s pictures, sometimes, to pin up by my kitchen sink, or in my office, and maybe I’ll someday want to look at these again, print them out, they’re so beautiful, after all.

  Not yet, though.

  Instead, C and I walk into a dark room together.

  I beckon him, respond,

  Exactly, because it was always kind of sexy, too. Or, it seemed like there were a lot of hard-bitten detectives and their pretty clients all close together in the tiny darkroom, waiting for the picture to magically develop in the basin thing, slooshing it around with the tong things, glancing deep into each other’s eyes trying to deny the inevitable.