“Do you remember the time I chased you down at the airport?” she says, her voice dropping, too, her fingers winding between mine.
“Do you remember the time I let you win at poker?” I whisper.
She gasps, spinning in my arms to look at me. “You did not.”
I’m laughing now.
“Lucas! That is honestly the worst thing you’ve ever done to me. Worse than pushing me into the swimming pool.”
“I did not push you into the swimming pool,” I say.
Then she gasps suddenly, raising a hand to her mouth. “Oh my God. I’ve just remembered.” She grips my arm. “I put Christmas cracker jokes in all the guests’ cards last year, didn’t I?”
I smile. “You did.”
“So the Christmas card you got from me . . . the one I wrote for Louis, the one you laughed at . . .” She covers her face with her hands.
“It said, Why does Santa have three gardens? So he can ‘hoe hoe hoe’！”
“Fucking hell,” she says between her fingers. “I can’t believe you even laughed at that, to be honest.”
“Well, I thought it was cute,” I say as she settles back against me. “Remember, I liked you back then.”
I hold her as she laughs, looking up at the stars between the leaves. After a few moments, I start to smile. My eyes are adjusting to the darkness, and I can see what’s growing in the branches above us.
“Izzy,” I whisper, and she lifts her face to mine. “Look up.”
It takes her a moment, too. She laughs.
“Shall I go get Drew, or . . .”
“Shut up, Izzy.”
She’s still laughing when I lay her back across my lap and kiss her under the mistletoe.
December 2023
Izzy
“Good morning, Ms. Jenkins. This is your four forty-five wake-up call.”
I squint at the time blinking on the hotel clock, shoving my new fringe out of my eyes and feeling blindly behind me. Nothing, just empty sheets. What the hell? Is he pranking me? This would not be the first time, but a wake-up call pre–five a.m. is particularly cruel, even by our standards.
“Thanks,” I manage. “Obrigada. Did I . . . request this wake-up call? Like, did I ask you to call me?”
“I’m sorry,” the receptionist says, sounding a little stressed. “I’m not sure I understand.”
“Don’t worry about it,” I say, rubbing my eyes hard with my free hand and rolling over. “Thanks. And Happy New Year.”
I press the button by the side of the bed to lift the blinds, and there he is, being predictably ridiculous: my boyfriend. Doing push-ups on the hotel balcony before the sun is even up.
“What exactly am I doing out of bed at this hour?” I ask him as I slide the balcony door open.
Lucas looks up at me, a faint sheen of sweat on his forehead and chest. His gaze shifts up my bare legs to the sight of me in his white shirt from the night before, and his eyes smoulder. Even after twelve months, he just melts me when he looks at me like that. I scowl at him, like, Don’t distract me, and he smirks, like, I make no promises.
“We’re going swimming,” he says, standing up. He is already in his swim shorts.
“Now? No. That’s disgusting,” I say, turning back towards the bed. “Goodnight.”
I flop forward onto the cool sheets of our king-size bed. He grabs me by the ankle and I shriek as he tugs me back.
“Come on,” he says. “You will love it.”
“It’s nighttime.”
“It is about to be daytime.”
I turn my head to look outside. With all the lights in our room turned off, I can see the sky turning from black to deep indigo; the sea is a shade paler, the sands ghostly white. The majestic P?o de A?úcar—Sugarloaf Mountain—is already visible, rising dark above the horizon. Excitement flutters in my stomach.
“Swimming, like, in the sea? At sunrise?”
“Precisely,” Lucas says.
I spin just in time to catch my bikini when he throws it my way.
OK. Maybe I don’t mind getting up early. We’ve splashed out on three nights at this luxury hotel in Rio de Janeiro for New Year’s, at the end of our Christmas with Lucas’s mum in Niterói. Do I really want to spend any more of my hours here unconscious than absolutely necessary?
Once we’re down in the lobby—with a wave for the receptionist—it’s only a few steps from the hotel to the beach. The air is already warm with promise, as if the sun barely left last night, and as Lucas and I run to the water’s edge the sand shifts feather-soft beneath my bare feet. Lucas goes under first. I swim hard to reach him, the seawater cool enough to make me suck in a breath. I lunge for Lucas just as he spins to lunge for me. We pull each other under, laughing, snorting, spluttering, and end up tangled up with my legs around his hips just as the sun begins to draw a single bright line on the horizon.