Heating Up the Holidays 3-Story Bundle (Play with Me, Snowfall, and After Midnight) (31 page)

“I like your hopeful condoms.” I turn in his arms, hike my leg around his.

“You make me feel hopeful.”

I kiss him, smiling, because he says that like he’s both happy and in pain, trying to please me. We kiss, slow, until we can’t kiss slow, and then we just kiss any way we can, rubbing and touching.

He backs me down into the sofa, bracing over me, letting me watch him put on the condom, stroking over himself. Then he drops his forehead to mine and slicks through me, not really trying to enter me, everything going slow.

“Wait,” he whispers.

“Okay,” I say. “You are.”

“Give me a minute,” he says, kissing my neck.

I buck a little, the buzz only a little desperate, but it feels good to let him play, and kiss. “Take a minute.”

He puts his mouth over my ear.

Then his movements slow more.

“I love you,” he says. “I love you.”

Then he moves inside, and I can’t breathe, his hands tight at my nape and shoulder, his thrust sure, and it opens everything, everything, and there is so much to see, I can’t even speak, or even name everything I am looking at.

He’s still telling me he loves me, soft, almost to himself, the way he moves, for once, doesn’t have any grace in it.

And it’s that breathless lack of grace that yanks me over, sensitized and raw, the light from the lamp too bright, and before I think he can even understand what it is I’m saying, I tell him, “I love you, too.”

But he hears me, his arms tight around me, his laugh perfect, both of us coming
all over each other.

Once we catch our breath he pulls me to sit, and I drape in his lap. He gets the throw from the back of the sofa down around us.

I reach over and turn the lamp off, and the ambient light from the windows halos into my vision, distorted from all the darkness around it.

We watch the snowfall.

“What did you bring?” I ask, just before I start to feel sleepy—I remember the paper bag he came here with, still on the porch.

“Oh, I forgot. I made you a pinhole camera.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. From a cereal box. I was hoping you’d like that.”

I do like that. I turn and look at him, and he touches over my face. “We can go take pictures later?”

“When the snow lets up.” He yawns. “What does
f/16
mean?”

“It was the setting on my camera when I took the last picture of my mom.”

I snug my arms around him and feel him eventually relax into sleep.

It’s so quiet, I think I can hear the snow.

I close my eyes.

Listen harder.

Between Evan’s breaths, I can definitely hear it, the sound of snow.

I listen so I know the very moment it lets up.

“Okay,” Evan says. “I’m hanging it up.”

I can barely hear him over the bathroom vent, and I have my nose pressed against his shoulder blade because of the horrible chemical smells, but when he reaches up to unscrew the red lightbulb and turn on the bank of lights over the vanity, I stop his arm.

“Not yet, we haven’t had the moment of the big reveal.”

He runs his hand over my hair and turns me in his arms so I can lean into his chest.

“So,” he says. “It’s kind of dark in here.”

“It’s a darkroom.” I breathe in his smell to crowd out the developing chemicals.

I don’t mind the dark, and because it’s Christmas, we’ve been busy putting lights up everywhere. High, so everyone knows we’re okay. In here, the dark has kept the fragile negative from getting overexposed.

Out there, the Christmas lights expose everything, us, our new and fragile love, the New Year.

Light and dark have their purpose, in them, we can see different kinds of things, or protect others. Or sometimes, the most beautiful lights would not be seen as well without some blackness behind them.

Joy is myriad and luminescent.

He kisses my neck. “How well can you see the picture?”

The room is small, with lots of white and reflective surfaces, but it really is light tight. The red bulb makes everything grainy, and I really can’t pick up good visual details, of anything, but I’ve been in here so long, Evan talking me through the whole process because I’ve wanted to know everything.

He’d been as precise in the process as a seasoned bench scientist, explained his homemade enlarger, the developer, stop bath, fixer, and the stages of rinsing.

The bathroom was crowded with both of us inside, hardly any room to move, especially with the piece of plywood he’s cut to lay over the vanity as a table.

Everything he had explained to me before he put in the safelight and I watched his grainy shadow move my print through the process.

I had insisted on an eight-by-ten, and I was anxious, because his enlarger could be a little iffy with the film exposed from the pinholes. I’d had to wait until yesterday to use the camera to expose my film because Christmas Eve’s Eve had stayed gray and stormy, and we’d stayed naked.

Christmas Eve dawned sunny, and we took my camera outside to expose my film.

To make out in the snow that had gotten hip deep through the drifts.

My mom came into town today, a full trolley of luggage with suitcases that made Evan’s van incredibly useful, and I was so proud of her for playing it cool with Evan.

Even if I couldn’t.

There has been lots of laughter, and knowing looks, and looks that
know
are the best kind, of course. There have been presents, impractical ones.

Misunderstandings cleared up to make way for love in the New Year.

Carols are playing from every radio station.

I reach up and curl my hand around his nape, pull him down to me.

“Is this the part where I’m irresistible?” he says. I can feel him smile against my temple.

“There’s always that part, but yes, and I’m drawn to you despite my hard-boiled and gruff exterior.”

I kiss him, not an almost kiss.

“Is it good?” I ask. He breaks our kiss to look up at the picture, hanging behind me. It’s an exposure of me—I know that.

We set the camera up on a fence post and I stood in its line of exposure, close-up. I wanted to see how it saw me.

“It’s beautiful, Jenny. You’re looking right at the camera. Your eyes are—so happy, wide open. Your hair’s kind of blowing across the bottom of your face, but it looks pretty and wild like that.”

“Turn on the light,” I tell him.

He turns on the vanity lights, and I step in front of the picture hanging up over his bathtub.

I look gorgeous.

I touch the print on the edge of the paper, to tip it up away from the glare.

“What’s she thinking?” Evan asks.

“I think she has a lot to look forward to. I think she knows that it isn’t how her
eyes see that makes her a scientist, but who she is that lets her see the world. I think she’s thinking about how much she hasn’t seen, yet.”

“Yeah, so much.”

“Hard to imagine.”

“Exactly,” he says.

He kisses my temple, my neck. I turn for a real kiss.

Think about all the small things in the big world.

This was a difficult story to write, which means there are even more people to thank, who inspired and supported me.

Thank you to the Ohio State University Medical Center Nisonger Center, where I rotated and worked closely with patients and families and learned that for all of us, every one of us, “ability” is a construct, and that all of us will face physical, sensory, and cognitive changes in our lifetime. Universal Access must be just that, universal, so that we all may access the world as we choose to.

Thank you to my agent, Emily Sylvan Kim, who, when I said, out of the blue, that I wanted to do a holiday story and sent her a synopsis about a microbiologist with retinitis pigmentosa, replied, “This is great!”

Thank you to my editor, Sue Grimshaw, and the entire Loveswept team, who developed the Heating Up the Holidays concept with the talented Lisa Renee Jones and Serena Bell. I’m honored to appear alongside such gifted writers. Meeting everyone at RWA 2013 cemented how privileged I am to work with such inspired and powerful women.

Did I say this was a hard story to write? I want to thank Shelley Ann Clark, for her help early on and developmental feedback about the character of Jenny, as well as two friends who asked to be nameless—one working in OT and one with visual difference. These early comments were foundational.

Ruthie Knox and Alexis Hall were instrumental in the development of the writing and story and looked at many drafts, and what’s more, provided support I’ll remember for the rest of my life. They supported my voice, these characters, and met me where I was at to see that this was good, then better. Their brutal, honest, and loving feedback kept me going. Also, Alexis, thank you again for Fred.

Thank you to beta readers Amber Lin, Shari Slade, and Serena Bell. Serena Bell’s read, particularly, was so dear to me. I absolutely could not do any of this without you.

I want to thank, too, the science and math teachers and professors I’ve had through the years. I’ve been lucky that every single one was influential and passionate.
Whenever we can, we must remove barriers and correct underrepresentation in the sciences. It’s a big world, and we need all hands on deck.

PHOTO: © ELIZABETH WELLMAN

M
ARY
A
NN
R
IVERS
was an English and music major and went on to earn her MFA in creative writing, publishing poetry in journals and leading creative-writing workshops for at-risk youth. While training for her day job as a nurse practitioner, she rediscovered romance on the bedside tables of her favorite patients. She writes smart and emotional contemporary romance, imagining stories featuring the heroes and heroines just ahead of her in the coffee line. She blogs at
wonkomance.com
and at her site
maryannrivers.com
.

11:41.

11:42.

11:43.

At this rate, it would never be midnight, and Miles Shepard would never say a permanent good night to this sadistic son-of-a-bitch year.

He stuck his phone back into his pocket and let his eyes wander over the party. They were in someone’s twenty-second-floor condo, all brushed nickel and rice-paper lamps and screens and edgy modern furniture. Well-dressed Bostonians—they’d left their Uggs and Pats jerseys and twenty-year-old Sox caps home tonight—monitored TVs tuned to network coverage of New Year’s events in various U.S. and world cities. The collective effect of an apartment bedecked with garlands of black-and-white streamers and metallic silver balloons, full of women in cocktail dresses and sparkly tops and ass-hugging jeans, was—well, if it hadn’t quite carved through the numbness that had been Miles’s constant companion for the last few weeks, it had at least chipped into it.

His childhood friend Owen was talking to a tall blonde in high-heeled boots, skin-tight silver pants, and a black velvet tunic. She towered over him, but it didn’t appear to intimidate Owen in the slightest. Owen grinned and told the blonde something, with his usual complement of hand gestures, and she smiled back and dipped her head.

Owen was one of those guys with mysterious appeal—he was thin to the point of near scrawniness, with a head of hair that was as unruly as a yellow dandelion, but women found him easy to talk to. Miles guessed that a month ago you could have said the same about him. These days, Miles wasn’t talking much, so if anyone was saying anything about him tonight, it was, “What’s up with the block of stone in the corner?”

The thing was, Miles knew Owen had his back. If anyone trash-talked Miles, Owen
would be ready with a slap-down. When Miles had called him last week to say he needed to get the hell out of Cleveland and had no place to go, Owen had picked him up at Logan Airport, opened his condo to Miles, taken Miles to his sister’s house in Newton for Christmas, and otherwise tried to convince Miles his world hadn’t ended. As if maybe it was in some kind of weird suspended animation and at some point they’d unfreeze Miles and let him have another chance at it.

So for Owen, Miles would endure this party, even if it stayed 11:44 forever, like some punishment straight from the hyper-imaginative Greek gods.

A shriek cut through the hectic bounce of “Come On Eileen,” and he looked up to see a woman dancing her heart out. He definitely wasn’t completely numb, because his gaze fastened on the jiggle of her breasts under her shiny black tank top. Blood didn’t exactly rush south—it moved thickly through his bloodstream—but at least it was moving. Those were some awesome breasts, and he didn’t only mean awesome-cool: He meant awesome in its original awe-inspiring sense. They were the size and firmness that typically had to be purchased, but he knew real when it danced, and those were one hundred percent real.

His eyes traveled upward and—whoops!—met hers. She’d been watching him stare at her breasts as if he were an eleven-year-old unschooled horny boy. He made a wry apologetic face, and she laughed. Man, she was pretty, and not in a cover-of-a-magazine standard-issue way. She had strawberry-blond hair cropped pixie short, an adorable, mobile face, elfin ears, and a long, skinny nose. He didn’t usually go for short hair, but it worked on her, probably because the rest of her was so indubitably female.