Page 97 of Snowed In with Benefits

“I get it,” I tell her, breaking the thickening silence. “You’d be horrified if you stayed for Christmas and found out that we don’t exchange gifts.”

She laughs a little, but the smile doesn’t reach her eyes.

“I get it, too,” Beau says. “Family.”

She nods. Emmett grunts. There’s a beat of awkward silence where none of us quite know what to say. The awkwardness is new, a reminder of the awkward tension that was all around when she first got here. I knew how to melt that. I don’t know what to do with this.

I do my best. Slapping my thighs, I look up at her, still perched on the stairs. “I think it’s about dinner time. You’re not leaving before dinner, are you?”

She gives me a little smile and shakes her head, then comes all the way down the stairs. We go into the kitchen together, leaving the other two in the living room to process the news their own ways. It feels off. We’ve gotten into the habit of all of us hanging out together in the kitchen while she and I cook, and the fact that they’re abstaining makes the day feel wrong.

The kitchen smells like every meal we’ve made together. Coffee and garlic and whatever spice she grabbed last. I’ve memorized the way she moves through this room, which drawer she opens first, how she hums under her breath when she’s deciding what to cook, the way she stands on her toes to reach the spice shelf even though I’ve told her a dozen times to just ask. I’ve been watching her become herself in this kitchen, meal by meal, and now I’m watching the room start to become a museum of someone who hasn’t even left yet.

“What are we making today?” I ask her, keeping my voice light.

She deliberates for a beat too long. It’s like this meal has more weight than the others, like it’s the last meal we’re ever going to cook together. Maybe it is.

“How about a potato sausage skillet?” she asks. I don’t like that she’s asking. She’s been a lot more confident lately, and I hope that change stays, no matter where she goes or who she’s with. There’s a cold heaviness in my chest that I do my best to ignore while we’re cooking.

We move together through the cooking process naturally, every motion anticipated by the other, like we’ve been doing this for weeks. We have been doing this for weeks, and the fact that we can still work as a single unit now, after knowing that it’s almost over, makes that cold weight feel a little heavier. I keep trying to think of something to say that will lighten the mood, but there’s nothing. Just “pass the salt” and “do you need more butter” and stupid practical things like that. I can’t get my brain to engage. It’s frustrating and disheartening.

“Soup’s on!” I call when it’s done.

The other two slink into the kitchen like they don’t feel like they belong here. Emmett takes his seat. Beau grabs two plates, one for him and one for Josie. I grab the other two, one for Emmett and the other for myself. We sit down the same way we do every night—Josie next to me, Beau across from us, Emmett at the head of the table.

“Food’s good,” Beau says.

Emmett grunts in agreement.

“It’s fantastic,” I correct him. “It’s warm and delicious and glorious.”

Beau snorts. Normally he would give me shit for liking her cooking so much. Tonight, he just snorts. It’s like he’s afraid to say too much. Emmett doesn’t say much of anything at all. I find him gazing at Josie like he’s memorizing her face, and I can’t blame him. She brought a light into our lives that was never there before. She broke him out of his shell, and that’s not an easy feat. She brought summer into the house in the dead of winter, and now she’s going to take it with her when she goes.

I look at my brothers and I see what she gave each of them. Beau, who spent three years behind walls and came home harder than he left. She made him soft again. Not weak. Soft. The kind of soft that laughs at breakfast and goes to the window just to stand next to someone. Emmett, who checked on her three times that one night and thought nobody noticed. She gave him someone who wasn’t afraid of his silence, who sat with him in his workshop and didn’t need him to fill the quiet. And me. She gave me someone who laughed at my jokes like they mattered, not like they were a performance. Someone who made me feel like the words I said actually landed somewhere instead of bouncing off the walls of an empty room. We’re all about to lose the specific thing we were starving for, and none of us are going to say it out loud.

I savor every bite of her amazing cooking. I don’t know what it is about her cooking in particular, just that it makes me feel alive in a way that no food has ever made me feel. Every bite is an explosion of flavor. Every flavor is specifically chosen by her, and that’s what makes it special. She plays it safe, but not too safe. She knows what she’s doing with a pan of food, even if she still thinks she doesn’t.

I wish she would stay long enough for me to convince her. I hope that she keeps cooking once she’s back in her old life. I hope she grows the confidence to know that anybody who tells her it’s bad is manipulating her and shrinking her the way that Preston was. I open my mouth to say something. Something real, something that isn’t about food.

What comes out is, “These are really good potatoes.”

The most useless sentence I’ve ever spoken. I’m the one who always has words. I talked this woman out of a panic attack on her first night here. Now I’m complimenting potatoes because the real words are too heavy to lift. I wish for a happy ending to all this so strongly that my hand shakes a little bit. I occupy it quickly with another forkful of food to hide the tremors.

“Good work on the barn,” Emmett says quietly.

Beau and I agree quickly. Josie blushes.

“It was you guys,” she says. “I just helped.”

“Couldn’t have done it without you,” Beau says, then stops talking. He buries himself in the food and the mood gets pensive all over again.

After dinner, Beau starts washing dishes. Josie jumps in beside him to dry, even though she cooked. Nobody argues with her. I think we all understand what this is. One more routine. One more moment of normalcy. Just one more dried dish between this moment and her departure. Beau washes the dishes slowly, like he doesn’t want the moment to be over too quickly. Emmett and I hang out in the kitchen, which is also a break from the norm. For me, I just don’t want to miss a moment with her. I’m sure it’s the same for him.

After the dishes are washed, we sit in silence for a moment. Beau looks at her for a long time, deep into her eyes. She looks back. It’s like they’re having a conversation without uttering a word, and I’m pretty sure I know what it’s about. After a minute or two, Beau takes her hand. He doesn’t say anything, just leads her to the stairs.

I’m on the same wavelength. She’s not leaving without a proper goodbye. I follow them out of the kitchen and feel Emmett behind me, a half-second slower. We all head up the stairs together as Beau leads her toward his room—the room she’s been staying in this whole time, the one that will be his again after she leaves.

The stairs creak under our weight the same way they always do, but somehow this feels different than any other time I’ve climbed them. Everything feels different. Every step is a countdown, and that thought makes me grip the railing harder than I need to.