“Honesty game,” I say, wrapping my arms tighter around her, holding her in place against me. “I’ve wanted to do that every minute of every day since last Christmas.”

I can feel Jack holding her breath. “That’s…” She coughs. “That’s not how the honesty game works.”

We both laugh, her bare chest vibrating against me until she finally, fully, catches her breath. She looks up at me. We’re not kissing, not talking, and somehow this feels more intimate than before. I lift a finger to trace the crescent of her scar. “How did you get this?”

Jack shivers slightly as my fingernail touches her lip. “It’s not an interesting story. I fell into the corner of a coffee table when I was four and split my lip open.”

“Everything about you is interesting,” I say quietly. I trace my finger from that white scar to her dark freckles. They dot her cheeks like points on a map, like I could chart a new destination if I connected them just right, like there’s a new ten-year-plan to be discovered in the distance between our two points. I let my finger wander through their swirling pattern, and I imagine all the things I could draw from her freckles. For a few minutes, she lets me. Jack lets me create art with the tip of my finger and the planes of her face.

It hits me ferociously. I love her. I never stopped loving her. I’m no better than that idiot Romeo. I know it’s not logical, but I fell in love with a woman in twenty-four hours, because in those twenty-four hours, she did the impossible: she made me feel safe and secure; she made me feel trusted and like I could trust. With an honesty game and emotional vulnerability, she got me to open up in a way I hadn’t opened up before. She let me be messy. She let me be true. How could I not love someone like that?

I love her, and I have to find a way to keep her. I want to find a way to have her beyond Christmas. I want to know Jack in every season.

In spring, when the mountain is out, when she wears a short-sleeve button-down open over a white T-shirt, the tattoos on her bare forearms flashing as she walks Paul Hollywood through Mt. Tabor Park, as she reaches for a beer at an outdoor patio on Alberta.

I want Summer Jack, in giant sunglasses and a carefree smile, holding tongs next to a barbecue, roasting marshmallows over a fire pit. Jack with melting Popsicle dripping between her fingers, Jack sprawled out on the soft grass.