Page 36 of Christmas Chemistry


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The relief I felt at her lack of recognition registered. If indifference felt like this, how would I react if faced with one of my former bullies?

Maybe this wasn’t a good idea.

“You okay?”

Marley. I’d almost forgotten. My eyes had been so fixed on the entrance ahead. She squeezed my hand and broke the trance, forcing me to meet her gaze as she stepped directly in front of me.

“What do you need, James? A pep talk or permission to leave? Both are okay, and I can knock out a top-notch speech in favor of either right now.” Her warm hands traveled up my forearms, stopping to rest gently on my elbows, and her cheeks lifted in a reassuring smile.

She looked lovely in her plaid dress and pretty hairstyle. I liked the heels, not because I cared about her shoes, but because the extra height brought her all the way to my chin, so I didn’t feel like such a big oafish beast the way I usually did.

Her expression grounded me as she raised a palm to my shoulder. “Hey, you’ve got this.”

Closing my eyes, I leaned into her touch. “I want to stay, to go in there,” I said. “I just needed a minute.”

“Take all the time you need.” Her eyebrow raised. “We can even pop into the hotel bar if you’d rather pay twenty bucks for a drink instead of getting a free one in the ballroom.”

I huffed. “Are you trying to convince me to walk into a potential minefield by pointing out the reunion has an open bar?”

“Is it working?”

I managed a grin for the first time that night. “I think so.”

“Great. So, we’ll go into the ballroom. We can do a lap, so everyone sees how awesome and brilliant and amazing you are. We’ll stay just long enough to make sure they feel like total dumb-dumbs for ever being mean to you. Then we can grab our free drinks and leave.”

“Sounds like a plan.”

Marley would make this bearable for me. I could already tell. Another group walked by, and this time I got a solid wave from Will Yardley, one of my misfit-sorta-friends from high school. I smiled at him.

There were name badgeslined up alphabetically on a table. I groaned when I noticed they had our yearbook pictures printed on them.

Ourfreshmanyearbook pictures.

Good lord. Seventeen-year-old me would have been bad enough, but the picture of fourteen-year-old James presented a cautionary tale on all the things that could go horribly wrong during the early teen years. The camera angle had been awkward to begin with, so my round moon of a face, covered in angry red acne, looked even more enormous. Also, what the hell was I smiling at? I had taken that yearbook picture at freshman orientation. That grinning, squinty, pimply-faced kid had no idea what he was getting into.

Marley must have heard me groan. She grabbed my badge off the table and pinned it on me like a medal. Reaching up to pull my head down, her warm breath tickled my ear as she whispered, “Absolutely adorable.”

“Thank you.” I exhaled.

She winked before grabbing one of the blank name stickers and writing her name in artful script—calligraphy skills on point—and adding a smiley face to it.

“A smiley?”

“I’m putting good juju into the universe for you.”

We walked into the larger room and were confronted with a scene that could have played out at a high school dance, rather than a party for late twentysomethings.

An enthusiastic middle-aged deejay holding an oversized headset to his ear held court in the corner. He bopped along to an EDM remix of some eighties hip hop. The song had a passable beat, but the dance floor in the center of the room remained mostly empty. A few brave souls along the sides played at moving around, but even they kept stopping to talk in groups.

I hadn’t been expecting fake snow and Santa in the corner, but other than four large Christmas trees, it didn’t seem like there was much to the theming. The blandness of the nondescript hotel ballroom soothed me.

There were 125 people in my graduating class, and at least ninety-five of them were in the room right now, huddled and chatting softly. Naturally, the largest gaggle was at the bar.

“Let’s get this party started!” the deejay shouted into his microphone, switching the music to another EDM mix, this time of Billy Idol’s “Rebel Yell.” The people who had been half-heartedly dancing gave up and left the floor.

I assumed that, thanks to social media, my old classmates weren’t complete strangers to one another, but most had probably lost touch. Coming out of our wealthy private school in Seattle, almost everyone went on to college. While some had stayed to attend the University of Washington, the majority had possessed the means and desire to go out of state.

“This reminds me of my middle school dances,” Marley said softly as we moved to stand at an unoccupied tall table. “Except instead of boys on one side and girls on the other pretending not to look across, it’s full-grown adults who don’t know how to act.”