Chapter 22: Chapter twenty two

Chapter Twenty Two

MARA

Christmas morning I woke up to three texts.

The first was from Jess, sent at seven AM, which was criminal: Dex gave me a book. an actual book. he asked what I liked and I told him and he found it. who does that. Then immediately after: don't say anything.

The second was a photo from my aunt in San Jose, the whole family in front of a tree, my four cousins in matching pajamas, chaotic and grinning.

The third was from Cole.

Just: merry Christmas Mara.

I lay in bed and read it in the early morning grey of my room and felt the warmth of it move through me the way his texts had started to do, quietly and completely, like something my system had learned to recognize.

I typed back: merry Christmas Cole. Then, before I could think about it too long: last night was really good. thank you for having us.

He replied fast. my mom's already planning the next one.

I smiled at the ceiling. so is mine.

We opened gifts after breakfast, my mother and I, the way we always had — on the couch, coffee in hand, the small tree she put up every year blinking its patient colors in the corner. It was a lean year, she'd told me in October, and I'd said I know and meant it, but she'd still found things, the way she always found things. A new notebook, the good kind with the thick pages. A second-hand copy of a book I'd mentioned once in passing, which meant she'd been paying attention the way she always was. A card with her handwriting inside that said more in six lines than most people managed in paragraphs.

I gave her the earrings I'd been saving for since September. She put them on immediately and wore them all day.

Cole came by at two.

He knocked and my mother let him in and he had a small bag with him that he seemed faintly uncomfortable about, which I found interesting because Cole was not generally a person who showed discomfort readily. He sat at the kitchen table and set the bag down and pushed it across to my mother first.

She opened it. Inside was a jar of the coffee she'd mentioned liking, the specific brand she'd pointed out once when they'd been talking in the kitchen and I hadn't been paying attention but apparently he had been. She looked at the jar and then looked at him and pressed her hand to his forearm once, brief and warm.

"You remembered," she said.

"You mentioned it in November."

She nodded in the compressed way she had when something had gotten to her and she was managing it efficiently. She took the coffee to the counter and started opening it and Cole looked at me with the expression of someone who'd made a small right decision and wasn't sure what to do with that information.

Then he reached into the bag again and put something on the table in front of me.

It was a book. Marine biology, specific to bioluminescence, the kind of dense and beautiful text that sat halfway between science and poetry. I looked at the cover and then looked at him.

"You mentioned it once," he said. "The twelve year old plan."

"I mentioned it once."

"I know."

I picked it up. It was used, the good kind of used, the kind where someone had loved it before you, and inside the front cover someone had written a note in faded pen that had nothing to do with me but felt like a kind of inheritance anyway.

"Cole," I said.

"You don't have to do anything with it. I just thought—" He stopped. "You gave something up that you actually loved because of a practical reason and that's very you and I respect it but I thought you should still have the book."

I looked at him across my kitchen table on Christmas morning and felt something so full and complete it took up all the available space in my chest.

"Thank you," I said. Quietly, the way things need to be said when they mean more than the words can hold.

He nodded once, the brief way, and picked up his coffee.

My mother disappeared shortly after with the diplomacy she'd been deploying since October and we sat in the living room with the blinking tree and the grey afternoon light and I flipped through the book while Cole sat beside me with his arm along the back of the couch, close and easy.

"Jess texted me this morning," I said. "Dex gave her a book."

He smiled. "I know. He asked me what she liked two weeks ago."

"You helped him."

"I suggested the concept. He did the work."

I looked at him. "You're a good friend."

"Don't tell him that either. Between that and the decoration thing he'll become impossible."

I put the book down and turned toward him on the couch and looked at his face in the low afternoon light, at the line of him that had become familiar in a way I hadn't expected anything to become familiar this year.

"What," he said.

"Nothing." I reached up and touched the side of his face, just briefly, the way he did with me. He turned slightly into it. "I'm just looking."

"At what."

"At you." I said it simply, the way he'd taught me simple things could be said. "I do that sometimes."

Something moved through his expression, warm and unguarded. He turned and kissed my palm before I pulled my hand back and I felt it everywhere.

"Mara," he said.

"Yeah."

He looked at me steadily, the way he had the night he'd said you're mine and I'm yours, with that certainty underneath everything else.

"I love you," he said.

The tree blinked. Outside the city was quiet with Christmas.

I had planned for a lot of things this year. Scholarship applications, GPA maintenance, the careful management of everything that could go right or wrong before May.

I had not planned for this.

"I love you too," I said.

It was the most unplanned thing I'd ever said.

It was also the most true.