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

by Lisa Renee Jones

“The bench work? What’s it like?”

  “Preparing samples and refining images from the electron microscope.”

  Dr. Allen looked down at her digital tablet, but the screen was blank. “You’ve talked to your team.”

  I was starting to feel shaky with where she was going with all of this. “About my diagnosis? Yes. They were supportive. I mean, at this point, I can do all the stuff I always do so the gist of it was basically, let us know what you need.”

  She looks back up and meets my eyes. “I want you to know that you’re holding. There hasn’t been any significant change in your visual field since your diagnosis. Recessive-gene expression of this disease is kind of unpredictable, as you know. You’ve been working with Evan Carlisle the last three months?”

  My occupational therapist.

  Who drives me nuts. “Yeah.”

  “He’s the best.”

  “That’s what they tell me.”

  “Evan told me that you’ve been struggling in therapy.”

  Well, that was diplomatic of him. More like, I’ve been totally resistant to therapy. Which has surprised me, actually.

  I am kind of a naturally compliant and cheerful person. Evan does not know this.

  “A little.”

  “He thinks you’re struggling a lot.”

  “Okay.”

  Dr. Allen leans forward. “Here’s the thing. The harder you work in therapy now, combined with the aggressive interventions I’m ordering for you, the more likely you’ll stave off progression, but that’s not as important as learning to adapt your life as you live it, and Jenny—”

  My cheeks are hot. My nose is burning. “Yeah?”

  “You, better than anyone, understand how important adaptation is when you’re evolving. And that’s what you’re doing. You’re evolving; you’re changing. But if you don’t adapt to the change, you’re not going to make it.”

  “Change is stressful.”

  Dr. Allen laughs. “That’s right. Just ask your E. coli.”

  “I’ll try harder, I swear.” I will, too. Maybe I’ll get myself a fedora with a little heart patch to wear during therapy.

  As a reminder to adapt, like my friend E. coli.

  “Okay.” Dr. Allen stands up. “Good talk.”

  “Okay!” I head to the door of her office to grab my coat off the hook, and on the way, I bark my shin painfully against a stool I had no idea was there. While I’m rubbing it, congratulating myself for not swearing in Dr. Allen’s office, she grabs my coat and holds it open to help me into it.

  “Give him a chance,” she says.

  “Sure. Absolutely.” I zip up and yank my hat down over my ears.

  “Adapt.”

  “Got it. Make like an E. coli and evolve.” I wave over my shoulder.

  The cold air in the courtyard takes my breath away—the light snow is picking up a little, but the wind is, too.

  I look straight up into the sky and try to track the journey of a single snowflake as it swoops and spirals toward me, but I keep losing the one that I’ve got in my sights. I look back at the square, one-story brick building on the other side of the courtyard where I’ll spend the next hour adapting.

  Then rush home before it’s dark.

  I find myself standing in the echoey tiled foyer of the therapy building, and as usual, I do not want to do what Evan wants me to do.

  “I could get a blindfold instead.” He’s standing in front of me, his absurdly long arms crossed over his chest, looking at me in some way that is supposed to be stern and serious but is impossible if your eyebrows are always folded in like a basset hound’s and your mouth is always sort of smiling when it’s not and your hair’s always a mess and it all somehow impossibly adds up to a general impression of friendly, laid-back hotness.

  What does he need arms that long for, anyway? I guess maybe to go with how big his hands are. His legs are weirdly long, too, how does he even find jeans? Is there a special shelf in the men’s departments where inseams include numbers with ten-power subscripts?

  “Jenny?”

  “What?” My voice reminds me of the one and only year of my life my mom and I didn’t get along. Jenny at fourteen sounds just like my voice in occupational therapy.

  “Are you going to close your eyes?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  Evan actually closes his eyes, wrinkles them up tight, and brings one of his giant hands up to pinch his forehead. “Did Dr. Allen talk to you?” He keeps his eyes closed.

  “Yes.”

  “So you get it.” He looks at me, now, unrelenting eye contact meant to appeal to the serious, good girl inside me.

  Except, she is not inside me.

  She has blown this Popsicle stand because she hates occupational therapy and Evan, by extension.

  “Get what?” I have to wince at myself, just a little. Still, I’m impressed with this untapped well of belligerence I seem to have found.

  “That what we do here is just as important, probably more important, than vitamin therapy and whatever clinical trials or experimental implants come your way.”

  “Actually, the idea of implant things kind of freaks me out.”

  As an answer he closes his eyes again.

  “It’s just that they’re a little too Geordi La Forge, and if I’m going to be a Next Generation character, I’d have to go with Commander Troi. I’d have to figure out how to get my hair to curl like that, but I think I could work Troi’s cosplay pretty hard.”

  He opens his eyes, and I swear he doesn’t, he doesn’t look me over like he’s imagining me in a skintight Federation uniform, but something, somewhere, maybe something really, really bored in my lower brain swears to me that he does.

  For some reason known only to that really bored part of my brain, I meet his ridiculously blue eyes again, just after that moment where he didn’t, where he totally did freaking not, check me out, and predictably, this bored and messed-up part of my brain decides to dilate every single capillary in my face until I am sure I am the precise shade of a doomed Federation lackey’s red uniform.

  I close my eyes.

  “Okay,” Evan says.

  Then he goes totally quiet. I wait for him to tell me what to do, he always tells me what to do, he tells me what to do until I want to scream.

  “Evan?” My voice echoes in the foyer.

  For some reason, I don’t open my eyes. He doesn’t tell me to keep them shut, but I know that’s what I’m supposed to do, of course, to mimic the blindness that’s coming for me.

  In the quiet, not knowing where he is or what he’s doing, my eyes closed, I feel alone. Because I’m alone, I want to cry.

  So for what feels like forever, but is probably not even a minute, I fight tears.

  Evan has seen me be stubborn and sarcastic, he’s watched me half-ass a dozen therapies.

  Once, I even got revved up into a kind of angry speech.

  But he hasn’t seen me cry. Not even once. No one has, not even my mom, who I could barely get rid of after she came out here to visit when I got my diagnosis.

  I suck in a breath, as quiet as I can, to chase back the tears and I dig my nails into the heels of my hands.

  Then I hear something—a kind of rustle, then a clomp against the tile.

  Then it happens again.

  Evan has taken off his shoes.

  While I’m processing that, I feel a sort of brush of air along my side, like a softer version of walking past the air lock in the lab.

  Then, just after that, I smell—well, snow, and I’m not a poet so I can’t really get much more precise than that, and also, those red-and-white star mints.

  This is what Evan always smells like, sugary mints and snow, even in September, when I met him.

  Which means, he’s walked just past me, close enough to disturb the air around my body.

  And he took his shoes off, and he’s not talking.

  So obviously, I am supposed to be having some kind of therapeutic moment her
e, where my other senses get honed on the strap of this exercise and maybe later I’ll finger-spell W-A-T-E-R into his ginormous hand and we’ll embrace with joyous laughter.

  I am totally embarrassed for myself that I even had that thought, and honestly, I can’t even believe that it’s me, acting like I do, in these sessions.

  I am not this person who makes jokes about the blind and refuses to do things I know perfectly well are good for me.

  Except here, standing in the quiet, my eyes closed, my occupational therapist creeping around in his socks, I am that person, and that person is angry, and that person is juvenile, and that person—

  Is warm on one side of her body.

  The breath I take in is sort of instinctual, and I want to take a step forward, away from the source of the heat, but I’ve had my eyes closed for so long that I have a sensation that I am standing in the only safe place on the floor and to step off it would be to drop into the abyss.

  So I focus on what must be the heat of his body? How close would he have to stand for me to feel that? So I then I realize I am sort of craning my brain toward the warmth, like my brain is a probe I’ve sent away from the ship, where I am the ship, and I need the probe to give me an idea of what we’re looking at.

  Except, I can’t look and my probe can’t look, it can only take samples of whatever this thing is and send back data.

  All at once, I get the impression that he’s facing my right side, close. Like, so close that if I shrugged my shoulders, my upper arm would make a little contact with his chest.

  It takes me another superlong minute to break down the data into objective bits to confirm this impression.

  I mean the warmth, I think. Because the foyer’s kind of cold and I’m wearing a sweater and so is he, so if I can feel his body heat, then he must be really close.

  I think he held his breath, at first, because now I hear it, above me, he’s close enough to let me realize that he’s just about exactly a head taller and I’m certain of this because—

  My hair. My hair is long, board straight even in rainy Seattle, and I’m wearing it loose today because I didn’t have to be at the lab.

  I can feel his breath sifting what must be no more than half a dozen hairs along where my hair parts down the middle, or maybe he’s stirring up a few shorter baby hairs because the nerves in those few follicles, I never knew, are so sensitive.

  Six nerves, barely nudged, are enough to light up a thousand more downstream, until in addition to the sensation that I am standing at the edge of a cliff, I also feel the teeth of warm prickles pressing me back and away from the abyss, pushing me back and into—

  His chest.

  “Oh,” I say, because as soon as I make contact I open my eyes, dark afterimages swimming across my vision from keeping my eyes closed for so long, and when my eyes are open Evan is not just an impression, a collection of sensory inputs, he’s, well, he’s Evan, and he isn’t just close, he’s in my space, right inside of it.

  So I said oh, the same way I would if I accidentally nudged a stranger on the bus.

  He doesn’t move away, though. Like a stranger would.

  I can’t see him—he’s standing in my periphery—but there is a sense of my uneasy periphery getting filled in, spreading out, in a way that I haven’t felt for months.

  It’s not nothingness, something is there, and it’s not a saber-toothed tiger, it’s nothing to be afraid of, it’s just the regular world.

  I’m in that space, or if not me, my probes, ready to send data across the little gap in my vision.

  Oh.

  And it’s just like that first time I found staph in my microscope. There was nothing, and then there was everything.

  I turn my head to look at Evan, then, who hasn’t moved an inch.

  He’s grinning at me, wide and pleased.

  For the first time ever, I grin at him, and the sight of my smile must shock him because his grin disappears and he just looks at me, solemn. “Jenny?” he asks.

  I face forward and close my eyes. “Again,” I answer.

  * * *

  “Just so you know,” I say, stomping my feet against the cold while Evan and I stand in line for a gyro at a food cart parked behind the university medical center, “today’s breakthrough or whatever does not mean I will now be all ponies and roses.”

  “Never say,” he says, and grins, stomping his own feet.

  “I think I feel sort of ambushed, actually, like all of the fail therapy was some secret, ongoing lesson that you meant to happen all along so you could spring this thing on me today.”

  “Yeah, let’s go with that.”

  He turns and grins right at me, with teeth and everything, and it’s kind of sad how it makes him look so different, mainly because I obviously made him so unhappy and never saw him smile.

  That smile’s a lovely one. Broad and sure of itself.

  He seems sure of who he’s smiling at, too.

  After we ran through the exercise a few more times, he talked about proprioception and interpreting sensory cues. He told me I had an amazing mind and that the exercise was mainly to help me be more comfortable with my limited peripheral vision.

  Also, he said, more comfortable with him.

  Which made me realize that if there was anyone I was comfortable with, right now, in my life, it was Evan. Mainly because he had stood witness to everything I have been feeling and kept trying.

  I think I should keep trying.

  My amazing mind deserves to keep trying.

  After we were finished, he told me he was starving and that he’d decided that he owed me dinner, and I found myself following him through a couple of courtyards to this food cart and I’m only a teeny, tiny bit worried I’ll miss my bus.

  It’s nice, I think, to make Evan happy for once. He’s sort of cute when he’s happy and all the basset-hound worry lines in his face turn into smile crinkles. He isn’t wearing a hat, and the snowflakes are mixing in with his messy hair.

  He keeps playing with the red-and-white star mint he’s sucking on, switching it from one side of his mouth to the other, between laughing at whatever I’m saying, which isn’t even that funny.

  He’s kind of sparkly, actually. Sparkles look good on him.

  “What do you want?” he asks me, and he does that thing he always does, which is steer me a little with his hand in between my shoulder blades, and I am honest enough with myself to admit that even through my puffy down coat, my cable-knit sweater, sturdy cotton camisole, and four-hook bra strap, his hand feels really good.

  It feels, in fact, amazing, the confident push of it, my proprioception is very on board with his hand, so on board, that I step back just a little into his hand, and I sort of feel his fingers spread out, cover more space, settle in, like he’s letting me know it’s okay to let him hold me to this moment and tell me where to go, and sort of like on him a little.

  So I do, like on him, because I’m touch-starved and far away from home and living alone kind of sucks, actually, and it’s cold outside and right now, this minute, he sparkles.

  “What do they have?” I try to make myself focus on the little menu written in marker on a grease-splatted cardboard square. “Do you eat meat?”

  He looks at me, expectant, his hand still on my back. I think of the sad, shrink-wrapped, preservative-laden deli cuts of turkey in my fridge, my resignation at their existence, and in the cold sunshine, with Evan’s eyes on mine, I say, “No, I don’t. I’m a vegetarian.”

  He turns to the gyro guy. “Two veggie gyros and the extralarge bag of potato chips.”

  After the guy grills up our sandwiches and Evan pays, we go to sit on the low concrete wall around the courtyard.

  He hands me a hot pita wrapped around a dripping mess of grilled vegetables and feta cheese, and I’m not sure how to go about it.

  “You just have to dig in like an animal.” He leans forward and peels back the foil and takes this huge bite, letting the juice and grease drip on the g
round.

  I laugh but copy him. It’s so delicious I could die. I can’t remember the last time I’ve eaten outside, the last time I’ve eaten something that wasn’t a turkey sandwich or a bowl of cereal.

  It’s perfect.

  The freezing cold wind and the bright sun and the blazing-hot sandwich and Evan’s hip alongside mine on the wall, all perfect. We eat like children eat, fast and unself-consciously, ignoring the napkins piled on our knees.

  I ball up the foil, and Evan takes it from me to lob into the big trash can, then leans back and opens the potato chips, tipping the bag toward me first.

  “Thanks,” I say, taking a handful.

  It’s kind of an all-inclusive thank-you. “Of course.”

  “I’m sorry about all the other times.” But I wince, because this feels like the very last moment on earth for an apology, and his solid hip pressed against mine is messing me up, reminding me so keenly that I’m a human, with a human body and human feelings, that it’s like I need to get out all the feelings between me and Evan at the same time.

  His eyebrows smash together again as he looks out over the courtyard.

  “You don’t need to apologize for anything, Jenny.”

  He said my name. That makes everything worse. When you’re lonely and afraid, it can be almost terrifying to be well fed and treated kindly and acknowledged by another human being.

  Because, what if you find that you need all that food and kindness and acknowledgment?

  Particularly if you might, maybe, need food and kindness and acknowledgment from someone like Evan, whose messy hair and crinkles and absurdly long arms and firm hip are growing on me.

  “Just the same,” I try, choking the impulse to put my arms around him and melt into his neck and ask him to rub my hair, “I’ve been stupid.”

  He just keeps looking across the courtyard, like something was going to sprout out of the middle of it any minute, and shakes his head. “No.”

  “No?”

  “I think it’s probably impossible for you to be stupid.”

  “Why?” I blurt, but before I can tell him that never mind, seriously, I’m not fishing for compliments, he throws his handful of potato chips behind the wall and turns his body fully toward me.

  “Do you know what I wrote in my notes, the very first meeting we had?”