It was my first holiday season on the mountain and there was another dinner. Like Thanksgiving but not Thanksgiving, all the traditional foods but on a Sunday, no mention of pilgrims. It seems Hades does not give a fuck about pilgrims. The same long tables had been set out in the street and I was so nervous. Homesick. Pining for my mom and alone, alone, alone.
I’d been hovering at the side of the table, trying to get up the nerve to take a seat, and he’d brushed past me smelling like soap and hard work.
Just sit, he’d told me then. There aren’t assigned seats.
I’d whirled around to find him standing there in his workman’s coverall, the sleeves rolled up to his elbows to display the kind of forearms you can only get from days and weeks and months of vicious work. He had a smear of dirt on his right cheekbone, mountain dust, and I reached for it without thinking. Like I was going to wipe it off. And I did. I touched his face, rubbing at it with my thumb, but the dust settled in. I didn’t know, back then, how deeply it settles onto the skin. You have to scrub, and that’s clearly where Cole was headed. He wasn’t about to sit down at dinner with black on his face.
He’d frozen still at the touch of my fingertips, his dark eyes opening wide, and my brain caught up with me a slow minute later—you are touching a man you don’t know, on this mountain, and there’s no way, there’s no way this is allowed, that this can continue, what are you thinking—
Sarah, my next-door-neighbor, brought me a plate later on that evening. Obviously, I didn’t sit down at the dinner. I bolted back to the spare apartment with its neatly made bed and blank walls.
And I have thought about touching Cole’s face every single day since.
Every single day.
Three years echoes in my head until I’m nothing but three years inside an empty brain, still standing on the street, still standing in front of him like a frozen animatronic with a software glitch. Dry mouth, dry hands that I wipe on my pants anyway. I was going somewhere. For the second time in three years, I was fleeing a holiday party. If I’m not careful, I’ll become known on the mountain for being a holiday runaway. Grief pinches my heart in my chest—I’d take the train whenever I could, but I didn’t think my mother would die so soon, I didn’t think I would only have to take the train for Christmas three times. It’s the longest break of the year, depending on your contract, and, and, and—
“It was so nice to see you again,” I say, drowning in my own embarrassment. Everyone’s got to be watching. Pinpricks in my back. Eyes boring in. Watching me, a nobody, talk to Cole, who shouldn’t waste his time. “Enjoy the party.”
I make to step past him.
He stops me, a gentle hand on my elbow.
“You did this three years ago,” he says, his voice low and edged in something soft and coaxing, like I’m also a runaway horse in addition to being a runaway employee. “Where are you going?”
“My apartment.”
“For what?”
“For—for nothing.” I straighten up and try not to feel the burn of his palm through the silver-edged tunic Sarah convinced me to wear. It skims my breasts and my waist and flows down over matching leggings and I want to take it all off and wrap my naked, sad body in the new comforter I got in the spring and never come out again. “I can’t sit here.”
He frowns, dropping his hand. “Okay.”
“Okay.” Last time I touched his face. This time, it’s worse. This time, I flee from his touch and back toward the entryway to our building, intending to sprint my ass up the narrow stairs and slam the door behind me and cry for open skies and holidays when my mother was still alive.
I’m a foot away from the first step when a sighing breath catches my attention and I whirl, cheeks already hot, tears ready to spill. “You followed me?”
Cole shoots me a look. “Yeah. It’s thirty feet and you’re sprinting out of here like something’s terribly wrong. Did you think I was going to let you go alone?”
Chapter Four
I blink the tears out of my eyes. No point, really, no point in breaking down in front of him now. “Why wouldn’t you let me go alone? Do