my heart that I hadn’t had in a few days…maybe weeks.
I could hear Cole moving. He was chuckling. Once I had another snowball perfectly shaped, I stood up and got hit with snow on the side of my head. I grinned and moved farther around the truck. I made it around the front before turning back and lobbing the snow at him as he came around the tailgate. It hit him in the face.
He blustered with fake annoyance as amusement poured over him, a deep chuckle filling the air and sending my heart into a frantic beat, with my skin tingling more from the laugh than from my frozen fingers.
I kept dancing around the truck, but he was chasing me.
Just as I ended up back where I’d started and stood from my crouched position, he lobbed another ball. I moved to the right, and the snow hit Ty in the chest. I hadn’t even heard him come down the stairs. I’d blocked out everything but Cole and me.
Ty stared at the snow dripping off his jacket for a few seconds before smirking.
“Ginny started this, right?”
I laughed. I hadn’t started a snowball fight in years. In so long it seemed like another person had begun the ones when we were kids.
Ty bent to scrape up snow, and I took off running, slipping and sliding even in my snow boots. My heart was full of happiness as Cole and Ty continued throwing balls in my direction.
I screeched, and the screech caused the door of the storage room to pop open, our siblings and cousins pouring from the building. Pretty soon, we were all lofting and throwing snowballs. There were no teams. There was no men against women, or Waterses against Abbotts, or any other combination. It was a free-for-all.
We moved from the parking spots to the empty lot beyond them where the foot of snow lay untouched by shovels or hands. We were grown adults acting like children. And none of us cared.
There were screams and grunts and amusement in the air.
Cole had not let up once. He had been throwing each one of his snowballs at me, even when Grace and Mayson had tossed some in his direction. I ran toward the lone, ancient oak tree residing at the back of the lot. I was going so fast I had to use my hands on the bark to stop myself, and I still slid around it. My fingers were numb, my nose was numb, and I was drenched with freezing water, but I was still grinning like the Cheshire Cat.
I peeked out from behind the trunk and was surprised to find Cole so close. I screamed, turning to leave, but I tripped on a tree root. As I started to fall, Cole caught my flailing arms in an attempt to stop me from going over, but it was too late. I was already falling, and my lack of balance took him with me. We ended up in a pile on the ground with me on my back and him on top.
We were both covered in snow and smiles as laughter broke from my chest again.
“Sorry, I brought you down with me,” I said, looking up into his pale-green eyes. They were twinkling.
“I don’t think you’re sorry one bit. Look at what you started.” He smiled, but he didn’t once look at the group squealing and throwing snow at each other.
The heat of his body settled into me, but I didn’t push him off, and he didn’t move. We just stared at each other, grins on our faces and in our eyes. The seriousness he’d worn during his phone call and my melancholy from the day before gone. Joy left behind.
“Ty didn’t seem surprised at all when you started this,” Cole said.
“Nope.”
“You’ve surprised the shit out of me, though. Multiple times today.”
“That’s what you get for calling me predictable.”
“I don’t think that was the word I used.”
“Ginny?” Stephen called out.
We were hidden from the others by the old oak, but it wouldn’t take them long to find us.
“I need to know something,” Cole said, as we both ignored my cousin. I just stared, the air between us full of an unfamiliar charge. One I wanted to touch. One I was unaccustomed to but welcomed.
“Would you have kissed me?” he asked. “If the others hadn’t shown up.”
“Ginny?”
I pushed at him, and he rolled off. The snow was now clinging to both sides of me and him. I stood up, looking down to where