“So, all done with me, tell me what you’ve been doing. I know who…”
“Don’t hate me,” I began, and she gave me a gimlet stare. “We saw Torched…”
She swore at me in French.
For ten minutes.
It was epic.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Days Like This
Christmas morning dawned with a pinkish-hued sunrise that I watched through the huge picture windows in the living room with my head tucked against Coop’s abs. Instead of choosing who got to sleep with me last night or me going to sleep with one of them, we dragged out sleeping bags and gathered all the pillows and crashed together around the tree. With the soft glow of the Christmas lights and the fireplace crackling to set the mood, Ian had strummed Christmas carols on his guitar and we’d sung them, sometimes really badly, and laughed.
So much laughter.
Archie insisted we each open one present. He also picked out the presents for each of us.
Jake got actual boxing gloves that had all of us laughing, but then again, Jake had just grinned.
For Ian, there were a series of different guitar picks that had my face on them. Wow. Ian loved them, but I died at Archie’s utterly serious, “Now you can finger her whenever you play…” comment.
The guys loved it, though.
For Coop, it was an amusing Dr. Freud therapy ball. Kind of like a Magic Eight Ball with a twist. That, and a bunch of inkblots that made no sense until he held them up with a delighted grin and said, “They’re you. He used your face to map inkblots.”
Archie smirked. “We see her everywhere, there must be a diagnosis for that…”
And that had my face burning. My gift though… I’d assumed it would be a charm, but it wasn’t. It was a photo of all five of us from ninth grade. I barely even remembered that day, just that we had all been laughing. I was hanging off of Jake’s back for some reason, my arms looped around his neck, as Coop and Ian flanked us, and Archie was in the front with his arms spread wide. We all had these wild grins on our faces.
Oh.
“We were getting ready to go camping.” The four of them convinced me camping would be fun. They weren’t wrong. It also involved bugs. But I could live with that. Jeremy had driven us out to a campsite, made sure we had everything, and then given the guys this stern lecture out of my earshot.
Thank. God.
I hadn’t really paid attention then, but I knew exactly what it had to entail now. It had been right at the beginning of our first summer together that bridged freshman and sophomore years.
“I love it,” I’d told him, and the guys laughed at me.
Archie didn’t intend to open a gift, but screw that. I dug around until I found one of the ones I’d gotten for him and thrust it in his hands. Thankfully, the guys had backed me up. He eyed the package and then me. He shook it once. “A card redeemable for sex whenever I want it?”
I rolled my eyes, and Jake hit him with a piece of popcorn. Still laughing, Archie opened it. Considering what he’d just gotten me, I thought it was on the appropriate side.
“You utter sap,” Archie mumbled, before chewing his lip as he stared down at the framed photo I’d wrapped for him.
“But I know how much it meant to you,” I teased him, and he turned it around to show the guys. It was me and Archie at our first mini-golf ‘date’ that I hadn’t known was a date. We’d gotten in one of those photobooths and taken goofy pictures. There was a scrawled note included that he’d written when he asked me to go in the first place.
Don’t ask me why I’d kept the note, but I’d tucked it away in my yearbook. So yeah, maybe I was a sap.
He dropped a kiss on my lips as he stared at the photo. “Don’t think I don’t know this means you want to go mini-golf again…”
The bubble of emotion around us swelled a little brighter. It was well after midnight before we went to sleep, but I hadn’t been this excited to wake on Christmas morning in forever. Coop stroked his fingers through my hair as we watched the sunrise. Eventually, I climbed out of the pile of them and he padded after me.