Let It Snow Read online

  Let It Snow

  Cassie Cross

  Contents

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  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Preview: Meeting Mr. Wright

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  Copyright © 2020 by Cassie Cross

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations for reviews or other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Locales and public names are sometimes used for atmospheric purposes. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to businesses, companies, events, institutions, or locales is completely coincidental.

  Chapter One

  Fate blessed me the moment Josh Abbott came into my life. It was just before his first birthday, when I was six weeks old. My mom set me down across his lap, posing us for a picture that I keep a copy of on my phone, one that’s framed and displayed on the fireplace mantel at my parents’ house.

  In it, Josh is wearing this little yellow and blue striped t-shirt, his blonde hair a cute mess that was his trademark until we graduated from high school. I have on a light pink onesie with a hood that has ears on it. Josh grins down at me as I hold his finger in a white-knuckled grip.

  Mom says neither one of us wanted to let go that day, and that’s when she and Josh’s mom, Gloria, knew we’d be best friends forever.

  Twenty-six years later, we’re still inseparable…for the next six days, at least. That’s when Josh is loading up his car and making the drive from Austin to Connecticut to start a new job that he just couldn’t turn down. They offered him almost double his current salary; I can’t really blame him for ditching me right before my favorite holiday, honestly.

  I’m trying to learn how to deal with it. Most days, I desperately lie to myself about how living without him won’t be as bad as I think. Then I wind up flip-flopping between being irrationally angry at him and unfathomably sad. I’m constantly 100% head-over-heels in love with him.

  That’s my little secret, though.

  For one brief moment, I had a sliver of hope that we were on the same page. He invited me out to dinner at our favorite place, and I’d gotten swept up in fantasies that he’d take my hands across the table, smile that gorgeous smile of his and say, “Ames, I’m in love with you.”

  What he actually said was, “Ames, I’m moving back home. I got a job in New York.”

  I can’t blame him for trying to soften the blow with barbecue, but I lost my appetite after that.

  I haven’t really gotten it back. It’s worked out in my favor for the most part, since this time of year I’m working a schedule that doesn’t allow much time for eating. I’m an editor/producer for a social media baking star. We’re about four months ahead in the production schedule, so while it’s Christmas in real time, it’s been Easter in my world for the past few weeks. I’ve barely had time for a real meal, so I’ve basically just been inhaling the baked goods after we’ve finished taking pictures of them for Instagram.

  Yesterday, I had a handful of almonds and a sizable portion of a bunny’s butt made out of yellow cake, raspberry jam, and the most amazingly fluffy buttercream frosting I’ve ever had.

  At this point, my body is screaming, NUTRIENTS, PLEASE!

  Josh knows me like the back of his hand, and has some kind of weird internal alarm that sounds whenever I’ve gone a few days without eating a vegetable. I’m positive that’s why he invited me over to eat, and why I gave him a hard time before I said yes.

  I know I’m lucky to have a friend like him. He’s smart, he’s fun, he’s funny, and it doesn’t hurt that he’s model-gorgeous and an absolute pleasure to look at, especially when he’s in the kitchen making me dinner.

  He’s still dressed from work, the crisp white sleeves on his shirt rolled up to his elbows. A hand towel is draped over his shoulder.

  I’m on the couch, staring at the way his shirt stretches across the muscle-y expanse of his back, aching for him in a way that became apparent to me about six months ago. He and I and a group of our friends took a boat upstream on Lake Austin, to this ginormous rock with a picture perfect rope swing.

  Josh, always willing to be the first one to try anything, jumped into the emerald water before the rest of us. I, a perpetual scaredy cat when it comes to heights, was less sure of the whole situation. He smiled up at me, held out his arms and said, “C’mon Ames, jump. I’ve got you.”

  So I jumped.

  And he had me.

  He held me close and ran his hands up and down my upper arms, and when he pulled back and looked at me with his honey brown eyes, my stomach did this roller-coaster loop that would’ve knocked me off my feet if I’d been on them. Then he pushed a piece of hair out of my face—something he’d done a thousand times before—and tenderly asked, “You okay?”

  Twenty six years of friendship changed in a second. For me, at least. And the truth is, I wasn’t okay that day and I haven’t been since. Half a year later and my stomach still swoops and my nerves still crackle whenever he’s close. I can’t shake it, and I don’t know if I want to. I probably should if I know what’s best for me and for our friendship.

  Our foundation is strong and decades-old, but nothing can cause a crack like a declaration of feelings, especially if they’re one-sided, which I’m pretty sure mine are.

  Sometimes I get the feeling that maybe he feels the same, but Josh has always been an overly affectionate, caring teddy bear. I’m definitely reading too much into it.

  “You need any help in there?” I ask, even though I already know the answer. “I set the table.” Well, kinda. I set the coffee table, where we’re going to eat in front of the TV, since Josh’s roommate Parker is spending the night at his girlfriend’s place.

  He turns his head to the side, like he wants to make sure I hear him clearly. “Absolutely not. You stay outside a ten-foot perimeter of the kitchen.”

  Jeez, a girl sets a pot of water on fire one time…

  I lay back on the couch and look over at the stack of boxes piled up next to the TV, and something desperate clenches painfully in my chest. My eyes start to tear up, and I have to swallow down the lump in my throat.

  It’d been kind of easy to avoid the subject for the past couple of weeks, but he’s done most of his packing now and the evidence that he’s leaving is pretty much everywhere I look. Even though this place is a definitive bachelor pad, I decide it needs a little bit of sprucing. I hop up off the couch, dig around in my bag, and pull out a jumble of string lights.

  Yes, I carry them around with me this time of year, for situations like this where holiday cheer is called for.

  I drape them around the boxes. Josh is too preoccupied with the cooking to notice.

  When I’m done, I head into the kitchen to see what he’s up to. Dinner smells amazing, but then he’s always been a great cook.

  I sneak around the stove, and when Josh blocks my way with his ginormous body, I press myself up onto my tiptoes to look over his arm.

  My nose scrunches up. “You made broccoli?”

  He huffs out a laugh as he keeps stirring. “Yes. And if you eat half of it, I’ll give you a foot rub whi
le we watch a movie.”

  Ugh, he always knows the way directly to my heart. “What movie?”

  He raises his brow. “I’ll let you pick.”

  Oh wow, he must be feeling really guilty about leaving. He knows I’m going to pick something holiday-ish. He never willingly submits to that. “A Christmas Story?”

  “Sure.”

  “Home Alone?”

  He nods. “Mmm-hmm.”

  “It’s a Wonderful Life?”

  “In addition to or instead of?”

  “Instead of.”

  “Yes.”

  That surprises me. During his whole life alongside Christmas-obsessed me, It’s A Wonderful Life has always been a hard limit. Just to make sure he didn’t hit his head on his way home from work and forget what it was he was agreeing to, I remind him.

  “It’s like four hours long. And black and white.”

  He grins. These days, it takes my breath away. “I know.”

  “You hate long black and white movies.”

  A full smile now. “But I love you.”

  It’s playful, something he’s said to me since we were in preschool. To play it off like I’m not desperate for it to mean more, I glance down at the broccoli and chicken that’s resting in the pan.

  “You roasted it?”

  “You think that steamed broccoli tastes like wet dirt, so…yeah.”

  I pop a floret into my mouth as I pass him a plate to portion up. “God, this is good,” I tell him as he places an obscene amount of surprise asparagus across my chicken. I hadn’t even seen that in the pan.

  I look down at it disapprovingly. “Well, that’s sneaky.”

  He winks. “Did you think I wasn’t gonna make you work for that foot rub? I know you’ve probably been eating enough sugar to put you in a coma.”

  I feel called out. “It was a bunny butt. With a frosting tail.”

  He presses his hand over his heart and grimaces like he’s in pain.

  I roll my eyes. “It’s okay, macro king. You’re balancing my diet.”

  He hands over my plate, then starts on his own. Thankfully he kept the majority of the green stuff for himself. When he turns toward the living room, he catches sight of his festively decorated moving boxes.

  “Seriously, Ames?”

  I shrug innocently. “It’s fewer than two weeks from Christmas and this place is a desolate bachelor wasteland. ’Tis the season for decorations,” I sing.

  “Two guys live here; you’re lucky we have matching plates. Christmas decorations were never a possibility. Besides, why would I need them? You’re the only person I know that carries them around in their purse.”

  “You love that about me,” I tease.

  He lets out a cute little laugh. “I do.”

  The air gets sucked out of the room for a few seconds. “C’mon,” I say, my voice a little wobbly as I head for the couch. “I have veggies to eat, and you have feet to rub.”

  After dinner, I do the dishes. Well, I wash and Josh dries, because he always insists. He cooks and he even helps me clean up after he does the cooking. He’s a complete dream guy, which is what I tell myself whenever I want to let myself off the hook for being dumb enough to fall in love with my best friend.

  When we’ve gotten dinner cleaned up, we retire onto the couch, taking our usual positions. Josh slouching against the soft cushions with his legs propped up on the worn-out ottoman that Parker dragged out of a furniture pile by a dumpster on campus before he and Josh moved into their apartment, and me, sprawled out across the rest of it. My feet are in Josh’s lap, where he’s making good on his promise of a foot massage because I ate all my veggies.

  They were good, which I reluctantly admitted.

  Since he’d cooked me dinner and helped me clean up, I decided to compromise on tonight’s movie selection. Instead of one of my holiday faves, I queued up one of his: non-Christmas Christmas movie, Die Hard.

  I like to think that decision earns me some extra vigorous foot action, because Josh is doing a stellar job right now. It takes a lot for me to not moan; he knows just the right spots to hit.

  “Is this okay?” he asks, doubling down on this tight spot on my right arch.

  “Yes,” I sigh dreamily. “It’s more than okay. I sit down all day, how can my feet hurt?”

  “I’ve seen you work,” he replies. “You definitely don’t sit down all day, rushing from one spot to the next, setting up shots like you’ve figured out a way to run wind sprints in an office.”

  I laugh. “Yeah, I guess you’re right. When I get home, I’m fried. Mentally and physically. And it’s not even a hard job!”

  Josh tears his eyes away from John McClane crawling through ductwork to look at me like I’ve grown a second head. “You produce videos, you edit them, you run her Instagram, you reply to her comments. Jerrica doesn’t know how lucky she is to have you and no matter how many times I tell you that, you still don’t know what you’re worth.”

  Yes, we’ve had this discussion many times, especially over the past year when Jerrica’s profile has skyrocketed. My hours have doubled, but my pay remained the same.

  “She took a chance on me when I didn’t have much experience.”

  He rolls his eyes. “She took advantage of someone who was willing to work for cheap in exchange for some experience.”

  “And now I have that experience.”

  “But not the money to show for it.”

  That’s not entirely true. My salary hasn’t gone up, but she has given me a few bonuses here and there, although it’s still not enough.

  “Well, I love my job, which is more than what some other people can say.”

  “You hate that job,” he says, calling me out on my bullshit like he always does.

  “I don’t hate it,” I argue weakly. “I just don’t like the schedule, the lack of weekends, and the fact that I have to live in a house with four roommates to be able to make ends meet. And, to be honest…I also kind of don’t like Jerrica.”

  He gives me the side eye, like…seriously?

  “Okay, I kind of hate it.”

  He lets out a long-suffering laugh and shakes his head as he gets back to work on my foot. “You deserve fair pay and benefits and enough hours at home in a day to get a good night’s sleep. Your fear of change is gonna give you an ulcer or something.”

  I give his hand a light kick. “I don’t have a fear of change.”

  “Oh yes you do. You had a nervous breakdown every year in high school when our schedules came out because you had to figure out the best way to get from class to class. You carried the same backpack from freshman year of high school to senior year of college. You only moved away to go to school because I came too.”

  “I mean, the scholarship helped.”

  “Yeah, but you got those from other colleges.”

  “What is this, call out Amy day?” I say, feeling self-conscious all of a sudden. “You got a new job and you’re leaving me to start a new life and you want to fix me before you go?”

  “Hey, that’s not fair,” he says, retaliating by stopping the wonderful massaging. “Nothing about you needs fixing. I just want you to be happy, to get some sleep, and to be able to afford a plane ticket home for Christmas.”

  I sigh and lean back against the pillows as Josh takes my left foot in his hands. I know he wants what’s best for me, and I know this doesn’t have anything to do with him leaving. This isn’t the first time we’ve had this fight, and he’s right…I am scared of change. I’m scared that I’m really good at my job, not because I’ve got marketable skills, but because I learned how to work well with Jerrica.

  I’m scared of failing with anything else.

  “Maybe I should come to New York with you,” I say, not being even remotely serious.

  He pauses, then stills for a few seconds. “You should. There would be more opportunities for you there than there are here.”

  Okay, so he clearly didn’t get my tone. “And I’ll hav
e to live in a ten room apartment to pay rent,” I say with a short laugh, just so that he’ll understand this idea is insane.

  “You could always live with me.”

  “You just want to make sure I don’t wind up getting scurvy or something.”

  He laughs, short and breathy. “Yeah. I also like that you do the dishes.”

  “I don’t really, you always insist on drying. Besides, there’s a reason that we don’t live together. You hate that I leave my shoes in a heap by the door, I’m not always great about picking up my towels, and the only thing I have in my area of the fridge at home is an expired bottle of milk and a sad jar of mustard.”

  “Eh,” he says. “I’ve grown and matured and could look past some things.”

  He keeps working his way along my ankles and all the way up to my calves. He does such a good job at relaxing me, I’m practically a puddle of goo slipping between the cushions when he finally stops.

  I’m just lying there, listening to the sound of explosions in the background when I hear a soft, “Hey.”

  I open my left eye, squinting against the light. Josh is holding a red envelope out to me.

  I sit up and take it. “What’s this?”

  He smiles, gorgeous. “Open it up and find out.”

  I fold my legs under me, just a few inches away from him as I flip the envelope over. Some familiar Santa stickers decorate the back.

  “When did you steal these?”

  “They fell out of your purse the other day when you took your iPad out. I decided that finders were keepers.”

  I smile as I slide my finger along the top to rip it open. I pull out a cute card with a reindeer on it and when I open it up, a piece of paper falls out into my lap.

  I open it up. Inside is a one-way ticket for a flight from LaGuardia to Austin Bergstrom on January 2nd.