Page 5 of Secret Triplets, Second Chances

LARA

E very five minutes, I check my phone for a text from Jake.

It’s Christmas Eve, and I’m alone in my mom’s café, wiping down the counters, the air still thick with the scent of vanilla and cinnamon, coffee and milk. Green and red ribbons shine from the tables. Our annual Christmas Eve party was a hit.

“Are you sure you don’t want to come along?” Mom asked as Dad helped her step into her coat. Outside the fogged café windows, snow had started to gently fall. “Cathy is going to miss you.”

Cathy, my mom’s friend who owns an art museum in Minneapolis, always throws extravagant parties for her friends and donors.

I’d loved going for years, thinking it was so special to slip on a designer dress and walk among city dwellers who knew nothing about Wildfern Ridge and wanted nothing to do with the small Minnesota towns around them.

“No, that’s okay,” I’d said, giving both my parents a kiss on the cheek. “I can stay here, clean this up, and then polish up my application essays.”

That had mollified them — any mention of my college applications did. From my first day of junior year, they’d acted like college admissions was my full-time job.

Which makes it even worse that I’m not planning on sending in a single one.

I turn, planning to run the espresso machine through its cleaning cycle, when there’s a sharp noise from the window that nearly makes me jump out of my skin.

My mind scatters, and I try to remember what my mom said to do in the event of an intruder, until I turn around and see a familiar face peering in through the fog in the glass.

“Jake?” I ask, unlocking the door and watching as he walks quickly over from the window, pulling off his hat and running a hand hastily through his hair.

He’s smiling his contagious smile, the one that he can’t seem to keep off his face. I saw it on him after his last hockey game, when he scored to win it in the final period.

When he’d dropped down onto one knee, raising his stick up over his head and hollering, I had realized that there was nothing I cared about in the way that Jake cared about hockey. He was real, electrifying, so alive on the ice that it made everything about my life feel bland.

“Lara,” he breathes, and I can’t stop staring at him, smiling back at him now.

Snow falls around him, catching in his hair and on his eyelashes.

His amber eyes shine, practically sparkling, like something out of a Christmas movie.

There’s some stubble over his cheek and jaw, and again I resist the urge to reach out and touch it, to brush my thumb over it to see what it feels like.

“Can I come in?”

“Oh!” I burst out a breath and laugh at myself, realizing I’m just standing in the doorway staring at him, forcing him to continue standing on the sidewalk in the snow.

Stepping back, I gesture for him to come inside the café, take his coat and hang it on the rack like I’ve seen my parents do for a million of their guests - writers from the city, artists from NYC, important people who call the café ‘quaint’ and ‘cute’ and a ‘perfect little retreat’.

“Wow,” Jake says, looking around. “I’ve never really been in here before.”

“Never?”

He turns to face me, and I notice the snow melting on his shoulders, the scent of his shampoo and cologne. That smile is still on his face, and it makes me feel giddy, like bubbles are rising inside me, straight to the top of my head.

“Might have been in with the crew.” He runs his hand through his hair again. ‘The crew’ is what he says when he’s talking about his construction job. It always makes me feel like he’s in a boy band. “But I don’t really like coffee.”

“If you’d just let me make you a mocha, I could change that.” I glance over my shoulder, back at the machine. My mom says coffee after noon is a bad idea, but it’s Christmas.

Thinking about that, I look back at him, catch him watching me, and feel a blush rush over my cheeks.

“What are you… I mean, it’s Christmas, Jake. What are you doing here?”

“What are you doing here?” he asks, glancing around. “Where are your parents?”

This would be the part in a thriller where I realize I’m all alone in here with him, but I’ve never felt safer with anyone than I do with Jake. “They went to the city for a party.”

“And you didn’t go?”

“Someone else said they might want to chat tonight,” I say, thinking about his text earlier and how giddy I’d felt at the thought of talking to him on the phone. “So I stayed home.”

“Huh,” he says, and for a long moment, we stand still, staring at one another, something heavy and certain hanging in the air between us. I feel like I’m teetering at the top of a roller coaster, heart held aloft, waiting for the moment that we’ll go plummeting over the edge.

Clearing his throat, Jake breaks the moment. “Well. There was something I wanted to tell you.”

My heart flips, and my traitorous brain runs through all the worst possible things he could tell me - he’s started dating someone, asked someone to prom and they said yes, is bored of hanging out with me.

Instead, what he says takes a solid five seconds to register in my head.

“I got into Michigan.”

For a moment, I stand stupidly, staring blankly at him. It’s partially because I always knew that he would, and partially because I’m still dealing with the physical overload of being alone in this space with him, seeing him among the green chairs and winding ivy of my mom’s café.

“You did ?” I finally answer, and before I know what I’m doing, I launch myself at him.

He catches me, laughs, picks me up and spins me around like something out of a romance movie. I have never felt so light, so weightless as I do in his arms.

“I did,” he says, the laugh dying in his throat as we go still, and he sets me back down on the ground. I barely feel it under my feet. The only thing I can see, the only thing I can think about is him.

His arms are still around me, and the sweet, spicy smell of his cologne tickles my senses. That thing is between us, hanging there, just waiting for one of us to pick it up and run with it.

I want to be the one to do it, but every time I think about making a move, my heart feels like gelatin.

“Come with me,” he says.

The words still everything inside me besides my throat, which bobs as I swallow. Our eyes are locked, and I see the seriousness there behind his gaze. He really means it.

“Come with you?” I ask, in case I’m losing my mind, and he said something completely different. “To Michigan?”

“Yes.” He’s breathless, alive with the kind of energy I saw in him during his hockey game.

“You’re not sure what you want to do yet—” something I confided in him during one of our many text conversations, “—so come with me to Michigan. I’ll be in my own apartment, well, student housing, paid for by the school.

You could take a class or two. You wouldn’t have to commit to anything.

And I have enough money saved up from construction work to pay for both of us. ”

I want to tell him that I have enough, too — enough really that I would never have to work if I didn’t want to, but the knowledge that he’s worked so hard to save that money and would spend it on me so easily makes my words clog up in my throat.

“I…”

“You’re so smart, Lara. Maybe college isn’t right for you right now, but I know you’re way too much for Wildfern Ridge. You deserve something bigger than this place.”

Everything is happening so fast, and more than anything, I don’t want to let him down. Everyone in my life — my parents, Zachery, Jake — all have ideas about what I should do with my life.

And I don’t.

I know that I love Wildfern Ridge, but maybe that’s fear talking, holding me back.

If my parents think I should apply to college, Zachery thinks I should go backpacking in Europe with him for a gap year, and Jake thinks we should go to Michigan, maybe they’re right, and Wildfern Ridge really is too small for me.

“Okay,” I hear myself saying, and the smile that breaks over his face is enough to make anything, any sacrifice, worth it. His hands are on my waist, and he pulls me toward him, a quick tug and a silent sway that feels like it’s leading to a kiss. But doesn’t.

“Okay,” he repeats, hands tightening on me, that smile unwavering. “Okay. We’re going together.”

I feel it — that thing — trembling between us, delicate enough that a single breath might break it.

So, I do more than breathe. I think about the apartment above the café, the one my parents sometimes loan to their visiting friends, and I think about how it’s empty for the night.

Then I say, “Jake, would you like to come upstairs with me?”