“Still managing to breathe despite having his head up Dad’s butt.”
It was almost impossible to believe that Dean and Josh were brothers, except they looked nearly identical. They were just so different. Dean lived in his body and in his smile, and he was a pretty decent guy. Josh lived in Skeletor’s Snake Mountain with the rest of the bad guys.
“Thanks for the food,” she said, holding up the little bag. An olive fell out of one of the holes from the toothpicks, and she put it in her mouth.
“I’m sorry I couldn’t score any of the yule log. It hadn’t gone out yet.”
Man, she did like the yule log.
“Did you play?” She wiggled a piece of cheese out of the bag.
“Yeah. Mom begged.” He sighed. “It’s not the same without you, though. ‘Silent Night’ just isn’t as pretty without the piano.”
“I miss that party.”
“No way,” he laughed. “It’s the one nice thing about our parents not being friends anymore. You don’t have to sit through that party.”
She glanced up at the black, black sky and kept her mouth shut. He just wouldn’t understand how much she used to look forward to Christmas Eve. She’d loved that party. Loved that little half hour in the middle when she and Dean would play Christmas carols.
“Can I ask you something, Trina?” he said after a while.
“Sure.”
“If your mom doesn’t come back…what are you going to do?”
“Stay out of my dad’s way, not that that will be hard. And then, after I graduate, I’m going to leave and never come back.”
“Never?”
“Not ever.”
He was quiet for a long time, and Trina sat up to look at him. He gave her a quick smile, then looked back out over the glittering snowdrifts to the red lights of the cars on the highway in the far distance.
People leaving, going someplace else. Someplace better. That’s what she thought when she looked out at those lights.
I want to be there, she thought. Tires on the road, this town in her rearview mirror.
“You?” she asked.
“Same. We gotta get outta Dusk Falls, Trina. Or they’ll poison us.”
Their parents and this stupid feud between them. All over that patch of land at the boundary of their properties. The same patch of land Dean had ridden the ATV over to get here. The land with the coyotes.
“Tell me something good,” she said. Having pulled away from Dean, she now wanted nothing more than to lean back against him. But by shifting away she felt like she’d sort of given up her claim.
“My butt is numb.”
“Mine too,” she laughed. “And I don’t think that’s good.”
“Remember the year the Christmas tree fell over at the party?”
“And smashed into the ice sculpture? Of course I remember. The look on your mom’s face…” She attempted to recreate it. A kind of slow motion horror/panic silent scream.
“That’s actually not too bad,” he said.
“Thank you. I’ve been working on impressions. Want to see my dad?” She dropped every ounce of expression from her face and stared out, unseeing, into the distance and pretended to drink a beer.
“Uncanny,” he breathed.
“Well if this law thing doesn’t work out, it’s good to know I have something I can fall back on.”
“You know what I remember?” he asked. “About that party?”
“That we were picking pine needles out of the cheese tray for like hours?”
“No. Though that was funny. I remember how you, like… spun my grandma around so she wouldn’t see it and then distracted her.”
“I asked her about how she ran the ranch during the war when your grandfather was overseas.”
Dean looked down at her, and for a long moment Trina wasn’t sure what was happening. It seemed, sort of, like he might…might be thinking about kissing her. Not that she was totally sure of what that looked like. Her track record would indicate that she was not a girl that guys tried to kiss. Brian Goser kissed her last year, but he’d looked like he had a stomachache.
And the kiss had kind of given her one.
Dean looked intense, and his bright blue eyes were dark, and he was breathing hard. Every exhale turned into a plume of smoke around his head.
And he looked like a man. And he made her feel—not at all like a kid. When he looked at her that way, she felt different.
Like a woman? Was that what this feeling was? Her skin felt too small to hold her. Her blood was hot in her veins and all she wanted, all she wanted in the world was to taste him.
His skin. His lips.
Just a little.
Just a lot.
But then he glanced away and the moment cracked like a thin layer of ice over the creek. “Well, Grandma loved to talk about that.”
“She would have lost her shit if she saw that tree down,” Trina said, totally discomfited by what she’d imagined on his face. Embarrassed by how badly she wanted…what she wanted. Ridiculous. The cold was getting to her.
“Luckily she’s deaf as a post and didn’t hear it fall.”