He hadn’t given her a chance to protest. Instead, he eased her off his lap and continued trolling the movie as if she wasn’t almost combusting with lust while she sat beside him.

Cosima’s ringtone pulled her out of her reverie.

“Merry Christmas, Simmy,” her mother’s cheerful voice came through the line, making her smile fondly. She could just imagine how much her father had to do to convince Dorothy to wait until a reasonable time to call Cosima. Not that five a.m. was reasonable under any circumstance.

“Merry Christmas, Ma. And you too, Daddy, because I know you’re listening in.”

The rumble of her father’s deep laughter sounded through the phone.

“Just want to make sure you’re okay,” Dorothy said.

“I’m great. I’m just here having a cup of tea and listening to music while I get my dishes ready.”

“You’re cooking? That’s a lot of effort to be by yourself.”

She contemplated playing it off but decided to take a page out of Tristan’s book and just tell her mother the truth. “I won’t be alone. I’m spending Christmas with a friend. We hung out yesterday too.”

“What have you been doing?” her mother asked at the same time her father exclaimed, “What friend?”

“We went ice skating yesterday, and that was fun,” Cosima said, deciding that was infinitely better for her mother to hear than Tristan having her on her living room carpet acting like she had a leading role in The Exorcist.

“I’m so happy to know you won’t be alone today,” her mother said. Cosima heard the same undercurrent of relief that had been in Tristan’s mother’s voice, and she couldn’t help but chuckle. Those two would get on well together. She waited to feel bad for getting too ahead of herself even thinking about her and Tristan’s parents meeting, but that didn’t come. Instead, the same sense of rightness that she felt when she thought of how life threw them together fell over her. Her past had taught her that things could be good until they weren’t, but Cosima couldn’t help but feel like Tristan was the answer to the short letter she’d written to Santa as an angsty fifteen-year-old, old enough to know he wasn’t real but devastated that her crush had decided he liked her cousin Tamara better. Her request had been simple: I want love to be easy. Not that she was in love with Tristan…just yet. But every time he laughed, used his hands for emphasis when he told a story he found intriguing, or smiled that smile that awakened butterflies and hope inside her, Cosima could feel the foundations being built.

As much as she wanted to explore the physical chemistry between her and Tristan, she was anxious to be in his presence even more.