“I said, Hey Trina,” he yelled.
“Right!” Oh wow, she was such an idiot. She gave him her widest, brightest smile, perfected by the last year working with his family. “Good to see you.”
He pointed to his ears and shook his head before he took the gas pump and flipped the lever so hard she flinched.
This is ridiculous, she thought. We’re grownups. We were lovers and we’ve been friends our whole life.
She walked across the cement over to his truck.
He wore a shearling coat with the collar pulled up. He’d very recently shaved, and that skin on his cheeks, near his ears, was pink. She wanted to put her fingers against it, protect it from the cold. “Hi,” she said. “Seems ridiculous to yell.”
“I guess so.”
“It’s good to see you,” she told him.
“You too,” he said with about the most insincere smile she’d ever seen him smile.
“How have you been?” she asked.
“Fine.”
“Cold night,” she said.
He just watched her. And part of her wanted to say goodbye and leave, but she’d done that already. Too many times. Not tonight. Tonight she wasn’t going to run.
“Are you heading out to the party?” she asked. Over the edge of his coat, she saw a flash of red. A tie.
“Mom asked, I couldn’t say no. I’m stopping out at your dad’s first.” He aimed the casual words right at her.
“Why?” An icicle slid down her spine. She sounded defensive to her own ears. Even when she didn’t mean to.
“Because it’s the holiday. Because that’s what you do. Because I haven’t seen much of him lately.”
“Don’t try and make me feel bad,” she snapped.
“I’m not.”
The implication was that she didn’t need his help. But she didn’t need to justify anything to him.
“You going to the party?” he asked into the snappy, crackly silence.
“No,” she said.
“Really? As an employee I would have figured attendance was mandatory.”
“I’m heading up to Fort McMurray, Alberta.”
“Tonight?”
“Well, I’m making some stops, along the proposed path of the pipeline, but—”
“It’s Christmas Eve.”
There was a hard stone in her throat. “It’s just another night, Dean.”
She made the mistake of looking up and meeting his eyes. And in the wide white and blustery world, his eyes were hot. Points of light, directed her way. The heat there—in him, in his face—cut through the cold. Cut through the past. Through the silence and all her prickly discomfort. It sliced right into her shame. Her guilt.
Only to reveal her longing for him stretched and threaded through nearly every moment in the last year.
I’ve missed you, she thought. So much.
“I’m sorry I waited so long to call you back.” The words flung themselves from her mouth, like convicts taking advantage of a sleeping guard and an unlocked door. And they were wrong. All wrong. Totally wrong. Not at all what she wanted to say, or how she wanted to say it. But the cold and the heat—the care in his eyes, no matter how much he didn’t want to show it to her—was making her short-circuit. “It’s just been so—”
“Come on,” he said, and he grabbed her elbow.
“What? Where?”
“Get in the truck. I’m not having this conversation out in the cold.”
He opened the driver side door of his truck, and she climbed in and slid across the bench seat to the passenger side. He got in behind her and shut the door. The silence was loud.
“I was saying I was sorry I waited so long to—”
Dean kissed her.
He leaned over the seat, grabbed her head and kissed her.
Yes! This! She’d missed this. Missed him.
In the cold his mouth was hot, so hot. And she melted against him. Wrapping her arms around his neck, opening herself up to him. Her mouth, her tongue, everything. She offered all of it with a low sigh, a happy groan. He held her so hard. Like he was trying to absorb her.
Trina began to shrug out of her jacket. Just so she could be closer.
Dean wrenched himself away, resting his head against hers. Their breath fogged in the cold air between them.
“Dean?”
“I’m dating Rachel Smith,” he said, and she pulled back so fast her hair got pulled on his gloves.
“What?”
“I’m dating Rachel. I have been for about a month.”
“Then why are you kissing me?”
He sat back, leaning against the driver side door, and she tried not to notice how handsome he was, how…real. How strong and virile and exciting. He was seeing someone else.
“Because you’re Trina Crawford,” he said. “And I always want to kiss you.”
She blinked.
“I waited the better part of year, Trina,” he said. “For you to call me back. And then I remembered the one thing I have always known about you.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You don’t forgive and you don’t forget.”
“That’s not true!” Except it was. It absolutely was.
“Remember who you’re talking to,” he said. “I’ve known you your whole life. Your mom, your dad. And me.”