Let It Snow: Three Holiday Romances

ba-a-ack. Did you miss me?
This  time  my  grief  took  me  to  the  memory  of  last  Sunday,  the  morning  after  Charlie’s  party  and  the
worst day of my life. I’d driven to Jeb’s apartment—he didn’t know I was coming—and at first he was
happy to see me.
“Where’d you run off to last night?” he said. “I couldn’t find you.”
I started crying. His dark eyes filled with worry.
“Addie, you’re not still mad, are you? About our fight?”
I tried to answer. Nothing came out.
“It wasn’t even a fight,” he reassured me. “It was a . . . nothing.”
I cried harder, and he took my hands.
“I love you, Addie. I’ll try to be better about showing it. All right?”
If there’d been a cliff up there in his bedroom, I’d have flung myself off it. If a dagger had been lying on
his dresser, I’d have plunged it in my chest.
Instead, I told him about the Charlie Thing.
“I’m  so  sorry,”  I  said,  blubbering.  “I  thought  we’d  be  together  forever.  I  wanted  us  to  be  together
forever!”
“Addie . . . ” he said. He was still trying to catch up, but right that second, what he was reacting to—
and I knew this because I knew Jeb—was the fact that I was upset. This was his most pressing concern,
and he squeezed my hands.
“Stop it!” I said. “You can’t be nice to me, not when we’re breaking up!”
His confusion was terrible. “We’re breaking up? You . . . you want to be with Charlie instead of me?”
“No. God, no.” I jerked away. “I cheated on you, and I ruined everything, so”—a sob choked out—“so
I have to let you go!”
He still wasn’t there. “But . . . what if I don’t want you to?”
I could hardly breathe for crying, but I remember thinking—no, knowing—that Jeb was so much better
than me. He was the greatest, most wonderful guy in the world, and I was an absolute shit who didn’t even
deserve to be stepped on by him. I was an asshat. I was as big an asshat as Charlie.
“I have to go,” I said, moving toward the door.
He grabbed my wrist. His expression said, Don’t. Please.
But I had to. Couldn’t he see that?
I wrenched away and made myself say the words. “Jeb . . . it’s over.”
He hardened his jaw, and I was perversely glad. He should be furious at me. He should despise me.
“Go,” he said.
So I did.
And now . . . here I was. I stood by my bedroom window, watching Dorrie and Tegan grow smaller and
smaller. The moonlight made the snow look silver—all that snow—and just looking at it made me cold.
I wondered if Jeb would ever forgive me.
I wondered if I would ever stop feeling so miserable.
I wondered if Jeb felt as miserable as I did, and I surprised myself by realizing that I hoped he didn’t. I

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mean, I wanted him to feel a little miserable, or even fairly miserable, but I didn’t want his heart to be a
frozen  lump  of  regret.  He  had  such  a  good  heart,  which  made  it  so  confusing  that  he  didn’t  show  up
yesterday.
Still, it wasn’t Jeb’s fault that I screwed up, and wherever he was, I hoped his heart was warm.

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Chapter Seven
“B
rrr,” Christina said as she unlocked the front door to Starbucks at four thirty the next morning. Four
frickin’ thirty! The sun was an hour and a half from rising, and the parking lot was a ghostly landscape,
broken up here and there by snow-covered cars. Christina’s boyfriend honked as he pulled onto Dearborn
Avenue, and Christina turned and waved. He drove off, and it was us, the snow, and the unlit store.
She pushed open the door, and I hurried in behind her.
“It’s freezing out there,” she said.
“You’re telling me,” I said. The drive from my house had been treacherous, even with snow tires and
chains, and I passed at least a dozen cars abandoned by less gutsy drivers. In one snowbank there was an
imprint  of  an  entire  SUV  or  some  other  monster  vehicle.  How  was  that  possible?  How  did  some  idiot
driver not see a six-foot wall of snow?
Until the snowplow came, there was no way Tegan would be driving anywhere in her wimpy Civic.
I stomped to dislodge the clumps of snow, then tugged off my boots and padded sock-footed to the back
room. I flipped the six switches by the heating vent, and the store blazed with light.