Let It Snow: Three Holiday Romances by Myracle, John (good book club books TXT) 📕

“It is true, Addie,” he said.

I changed tactics. “Okay, even if I do, why is that necessarily bad? People change for each other all the time. Take any love story, any great love story at all, and you’ll see that people have to be willing to change if they’re going to make things work out. Like in Shrek, when Fiona tells Shrek that she’s sick of his burping and farting and everything. And Shrek’s like, ‘I’m an ogre. Deal with it.’ And Fiona says, ‘What if I can’t?’ So Shrek takes that potion that turns him into a hunky prince. He does it out of love for Fiona.”

“That’s in Shrek Two,” Jeb said. “Not the original.”

“Whatever.”

“And then Fiona realized she didn’t want him to be a hunky prince. She wanted him to turn back into an ogre.”

I frowned. That wasn’t how I remembered it.

“The point is, he was willing to change,” I said.

Jeb sighed. “Why does the guy always have to be the one to change?”

“The girl can, too,” I said. “Whatever. All I’m saying is that if you love someone, you should be willing to show it. Because, Jeb, this is our one shot at life. Our one shot.” I felt the familiar tightening of despair. “Can’t you just try, if for no other reason than because you know how important it is to me?”

Jeb stared out the driver’s-side window.

“I . . . I want you to follow me onto a plane and serenade me in the first-class cabin, like Robbie did to Julia in The Wedding Singer,” I said. “I want you to build a house for me, like Noah did for Allie in The Notebook. I want you to fly me across the ocean at the prow of an ocean liner! Like the guy in Titanic, remember?”

Jeb turned. “The guy who drowned?”

“Well, I don’t want you to drown, obviously. It’s not about drowning. It’s about you loving me enough to be willing to drown, if you had to.” My voice caught. “I want . . . I want the big gesture.”

“Addie, you know I love you,” he said.

“Or even the medium gesture,” I said, unable to let it go.

Frustration and anguish warred with each other on his face. “Can’t you just trust in our love, without asking me to prove it every single second?”

Apparently not, as demonstrated by what happened next. No, not “what happened.” What I did. Because I sucked and I was a jerk, and because I downed thirty-eight quarters worth of beer shots, if not more. Or maybe not thirty-eight, but a lot. Not that I can blame it on that, either.

Jeb and I went inside to the party, but we went our own ways because we were still fighting. I ended up in the basement with Charlie and some other guys, while Jeb stayed upstairs. I heard later that he joined some theater geeks who were watching An Affair to Remember on Charlie’s parents’ flat-screen TV. It was such a horrible irony that it would have been funny, except it totally wasn’t.

In the basement, I played quarters with the guys, and Charlie egged me on because Charlie was the devil. When the quarters game broke up, Charlie asked me if we could go somewhere to talk, and like an idiot, I stumbled obediently after him to his older brother’s room. I was a little surprised, because Charlie and I had never had a heart-to-heart before. But Charlie was part of the group of guys we hung out with. He was arrogant and smarmy and pretty much an overall asshat, to steal a term from a Korean guy at school, but that was just Charlie. Since he looked like a Hollister model, he could be an asshat and get away with it.

In his brother’s room, Charlie sat me down on the bed and told me he needed advice about Brenna, a girl from our grade he sometimes hooked up with. He looked at me in an I-know-I’m-cute-and-I’m-going-to-work-it way and said how lucky Jeb was to be dating someone as great as me.

I snorted and said something like, “Oh, yeah, whatever.”

“Are you guys having problems?” he asked. “Tell me you guys aren’t having problems. You guys are golden.”

“Uh-huh, that’s why Jeb’s upstairs doing God knows what, and I’m down here with you.” Why am I down here with you? I remember wondering. And who shut the door?

Charlie pushed for details, charming and sympathetic, and when I got teary, he moved in close to comfort me. I protested, but he pressed his mouth to mine, and eventually I submitted. A guy was paying me all sorts of attention—a really cute and charismatic guy—and who cared that he didn’t mean it?

I did. Even during the moment of betraying Jeb, I cared. I’ve replayed that moment again and again, and that was the part that killed me. Because what was I thinking? Jeb and I were having problems, but I still loved him. I loved him then and I loved him now. I would always love him.

Only yesterday, when he never showed up at Starbucks, he sent the message loud and clear that he no longer loved me back.

Chapter Two

A ping on my windowpane intruded into my pity party. It took me a minute to pull myself back to reality. There was another ping, and I craned up from my bed to see a heavily bundled Tegan and an even more heavily bundled Dorrie standing atop a drift of snow. They beckoned with mittened hands, and Dorrie called in a glass-muted voice for me to come out.

I clambered to my feet, and the strange lightness of my head reminded me of my hair disaster. Crud. I looked around, grabbed my throw blanket off my bed, and put it over me like a hood. Holding the fabric beneath my chin, I walked to the window and jerked it up.

“Get your booty on the dance floor!” Dorrie hollered, the sound of her suddenly much louder.

“That’s not