I nod and stare into my peppermint hot cocoa.
“What you said about how I behaved toward you when I started,” he says. “You’re right, and I’m sorry. I’ve never been good at softening blows, conveying hard truths in comforting words. I don’t get emotional about these things, but you do. Deeply. And I didn’t understand that or empathize.” He stares down at his coffee and sighs heavily. “I regret that.”
“Don’t beat yourself up. We’re very different people with very different visions for this place, Jonathan. I think, even on our best behavior, we were bound to clash.”
He glances up, fastening his gaze on me. “What’s your vision?”
I smile, because it’s impossible not to when I talk about the bookshop. “I want it to keep its heart. I want it to be a community cornerstone that welcomes with open arms anyone who wants to come in. I want it to be personal, set apart from online and chain bookstores. I want to keep its soul.” Searching his eyes, I ask him, “What about you?”
He seems to hesitate for a moment, searching for the right words, before he finally says, “I…want it to be an efficient, modernized business that’s financially secure enough to survive, so that ‘soul’ you speak of has a home for as long as possible.”
Hearing him say that, my heart does a double axel and sticks the landing, a joyful rush of relief.
“Cheers to that.” I knock my cup gently with his.
After a moment of silence, Jonathan says, “Gear shift.”
“Ready.”
“What’s with the red dress of torture, Gabriella?” He’s doing that thing again where he’s very diligently not staring at my breasts.
I laugh. “Oh, that. So, last night, after—you know—I convinced myself in a whirlwind paranoia that you were using your sexual wiles to seduce me out of the job.”
His eyebrows shoot up. “What?”
“You had mistletoe motive, or so I thought—”
“What the hell is ‘mistletoe motive’？”
“C’mon, Frost. Stay with me. Hanging mistletoe is a tryst trap, a sensual snare. Like your alleged motives. You tracking?”
He bites his lip and stares up at the ceiling. “Tracking.”
“So, I figured you’ve got this seductive sabotage angle, driving me home last night, playing chivalrous with that sexy Darcy-offering-a-hand-up-to-his-carriage business—”
“Wait, what?”
“Making my legs all noodley, kissing me—”
“Hey, you kissed me, too,” he points out. “We kissed each other.”
“Fair. We kissed each other. That was a m-mistake—” I falter, because it’s hard to call those incredible kisses mistakes, but they were.
Weren’t they?
“The point is,” I continue, “we kissed, yes, but everything leading up to it, that was all you. And I couldn’t figure out why. So I assumed the worst. Until you proved me very wrong this morning. And now I realize that while we don’t exactly gel in our personalities or managerial styles or bookstore visions, you haven’t been out to make my life a living hell, and at certain angles I’m not too hard on the eyes, and so maybe you’re a little hot for me, and sometimes a kiss is just a kiss.”
He’s silent, his eyes dark and intense. “I haven’t wanted to make your life hell, Gabriella. And I’m not trying to seduce you out of a job.” Jonathan stares down at the tabletop, tracing a whorl in the wood grain. “And you definitely aren’t hard on the eyes, from any angle. But I’m not so sure about that last part.”
“The kiss? Or, kisses, rather?”
He nods.
“I’m with you. I don’t just kiss people to kiss them. I don’t feel sexual desire for them out of the blue, either. Not until I feel emotionally connected. Which sort of stumped me at first, when I realized I was…” I clear my throat as a blush heats my cheeks. “Into you. I’m demisexual, and I’ve never wanted someone I didn’t deeply like after growing close with them.
“But then I reasoned, while I haven’t liked you very much for most of the time I’ve known you, Mr. Frost, I’ve forged a bond with you—our love for this place, our shared responsibilities, even the way I can predict what’ll irritate you as much as what’ll please your money-counting Scrooge heart. It’s a deeply fraught bond, but a bond nonetheless. There’s familiarity and ironically enough, a bizarre form of safety in our dynamic and its predictability. A sort of…intimacy. That makes you, unfortunately, fair game. But what about you?”