Christmas in Coconut Creek (Dirty Delta, #1)(94)
“You’re getting ahead of yourselves,” I said, squashing the moment. “This is all assuming I’d even be leaving in the first place, and I don’t see any job offers on the table. I had one interview.” I leaned back against the counter and crossed my arms. “I’ve learned my lesson about getting my hopes up. I’m not going to extend that to this.”
Only now the “this” I was referring to felt shamefully double-sided. “This” wasn’t just the chance to fly again, or teach, or simply feel like I was fulfilling a purpose beyond existing aimlessly. I was a damn good fucking pilot and that wasn’t something I stopped believing in—it was my ability to take care of the people I loved. The “this” that was up in the air at the moment was a coin flip between a new job and an entirely new life.
What if I did go to Colorado? Would Ophelia still want me out there? Would she want me to reach out to her for a real date or bring her coffee or be with me like I’d known for weeks I’d want to be with her?
Or were we still just playing a big old game with one another like we said we would? Practicing how to be better for other people, when other people wouldn’t hold a fucking candle in a hydrogen room.
“You are daringly pessimistic this morning, brother.” Mateo inched over and patted me on the back. “I like to think all the stars in our lives are aligning and everything you’ve ever dreamed of is about to bite you in your grumpy fucking ass.”
I rolled my eyes and watched Ophelia dip down to pull my plate out of the oven. The gentle curve of her hips made me want to sling her over my shoulder and take her down the hallway without another word.
“He’s hungry,” Ophelia defended me. “And he barely got any sleep last night,” she added.
A bee sting of pride stabbed into me and Cap’s lips pinched shut like the teeth of a zipper. I followed O to the table like a chaser follows whiskey: good-intentioned and sweet on her heels, pulling out one chair for the two of us and sitting her right on my lap.
“Yeah, these walls ain’t as thick as you think,” Cap complained, curling his lip in disgust. “Hey, I have an idea. How about you two put some of that, frankly concerning, amount of stamina to work and help take down these Christmas decorations?”
“No!” Ophelia and I protested in unison.
Tally’s attention lifted from her sparkly outstretched finger to us.
“You can’t take the decorations down until after New Year’s.” O tapped her finger impatiently on the table. “Everyone knows that.”
I didn’t know that.
In fact, the only reason I didn’t want to take down the decorations was because it felt too much like pressing go on a countdown. In the same way I liked to keep her on me physically, the thought of removing all those material reminders of the last few weeks with Ophelia was like running my fingers through still-wet paint. It wasn’t time yet. Give it a chance to dry on its own.
“So let me get this straight…” Mateo squinted, doing a dramatic look around the house. “You show up and convince this man to let you make the place look like the inside of Santa’s fucking workshop.” I grimaced as a finger was pointed in my direction. “Pick a tree that sheds like a goddamn Labrador—I’ll be finding pine needles in my asshole until I’m ninety.” Ophelia tugged her bottom lip into her mouth to conceal a laugh. “Staple a pineapple to my garage with industrial grade hardware…and now you expect me to be the sorry son of a bitch who cleans it all up?”
“You’re talking with your hands like your mother,” I pointed out.
“Don’t you dare bring my mother into this.”
“Phee is right,” Tally spoke up, reading something off the screen of her phone. “There’s some Pagan, Christian, folklore tradition that says you gotta keep the decorations up until the sixth because that’s when the Three Kings arrived at the manger.”
“Do I look like a fucking apostle to you, Natalia?” Cap replied humorously, setting his sights on O sitting in my lap again. “This one sure as hell ain’t the Virgin Mary.”
It took but one completely unexpected jibe to have me choking on a piece of ham. Worried eyes pinned me to the back of my chair as I beat my chest with a fist to dislodge it. So violently, actually, that my eyes started to water until I was crying, not only from the lack of oxygen, but from laughter, sucking in heaping gasps of air between fits.
It was clear that I wasn’t in any real danger, and Mateo’s joke still played on a loop, setting me off again once I’d caught my breath. A real, honest-to-God, howling laugh that I couldn’t restrain.
Ophelia’s girlish giggling joined mine. Behind it I could make out the deeper chuckle that was Mateo, stacked on top of Tally’s own warm bellow of amusement.
In the grand scheme of things it wasn’t even that funny, but sometimes things just tickled you the right way. Laughter indicated more than levity; it was a looking glass to happiness, fulfillment, pleasure.
I was a bubbling mixture of all of those things, finally spilling over.
31
“Okay.” I pressed my fingers to my lips. Hot tub jets sloshed warm water around my torso, and the only thing illuminating Frankie and I save for the full moon was a soft red glow of lights beneath the water. “Worst date you’ve ever been on?”