Nancy's first mistake was volunteering to go for a last minute present. Hannah was elbow-deep in raw turkey and Carson was wrapping presents and Avery was rolling out sugar cookie dough, and Nancy somehow hasn't felt totally at home in River Heights since she left for Wilder. She loves the lights and the decorations and the carols over the intercoms in the stores, but River Heights is beginning to feel like a place she'll see only at the holidays, for birthdays. She's more comfortable in the living room than her bedroom; she looks around her old room and sees who she used to be, not who she is now. Pictures of Bess and George with their arms around her, awkward and gangly, teeth gleaming with long-removed braces. Empty frames where her boyfriends' pictures used to be. Pastel walls that seemed very chic in high school and feel impossibly dated now.
Soon Avery will paint the walls beige and take the canopy off her bed and take down the old, crinkling posters of movie stars. She is distantly aware that she should care about that. She doesn't, though.
So she feels restless and when her father says he promised to bring two remote-controlled cars to their big extended-family celebration the day after Christmas, she's scrambling for her keys before he can even say where they're on sale.
The roads are covered in ice but she takes the Mustang anyway, squinting through her fogging windshield, and passes three wrecks before she reaches the mall.
Traffic is a nightmare. All the restaurants near the mall are doing a brisk business, their parking lots full. Slow-moving cars drift ponderously through the mall entrance lanes, making the other drivers wave their fists in frustration, Nancy among them. In the lots, in the parking deck, she joins the endless river of cars searching for parking spots. Every now and then a car fishtails and skids on the ice and Nancy breathes on her mittens, shivering, pinned in place by all the cars around her, hoping for a miracle.
Her gas tank light has just chimed a warning when she pulls into a parking spot. She fastens her coat securely, knots her scarf fastidiously around her neck, but she's still covered in snow and shivering by the time she walks through the doors at the department store. She feels frozen down to the roots of her eyelashes.
The store is a madhouse. Crying toddlers and harried mothers cluster around freestanding displays and customer service desks. Bored husbands flip desultorily through sales racks while their wives sort through stacks of sweaters. Openly hostile sales clerks glare at the disarranged displays.
Nancy wrestles her way through a cluster of scrabbling housewives. She actually stayed in on Black Friday this year, hoping to avoid this kind of insanity. She tries the usual places and finally breaks down and asks one of the hassled clerks, who replies, "Housewares."
Twenty minutes later, two of the last three remote control cars are in Nancy's arms and she's working her way through the crowd to find a checkout. The children's department is a mob and the staff in housewares seem to have abandoned their posts. In the men's section she finally finds a relatively short line.
Then she discovers it's short because the person at the front seems to have exclusively selected items without price tags, and the clerk and an assistant are busily checking every single item.
She heaves a sigh and shifts the cars in her hands. The person in front of her turns. "I think we're in for a long—"
His eyes meet hers and he finishes, weakly, "wait."
Nancy's eyes widen. "Ned? Hey!"
"Hey!" He looks down at the car and belts in his own hands and manages to maneuver one hand to where he can shake hers. "It's so good to see you."
"It's so good to see you."
"What have you been up to?"
While that same familiarity they've shared is still there, she feels awkward around him. It hasn't been so long since she broke up with Michael; then she does a mental count, and suddenly discovers it's been almost a year. She and Ned keep in touch through mutual friends, but there have been no late-night phone calls, no rambling letters, no great reunion. Even so, he's always been at the back of her mind.
"The usual. You know."
"So you're back in River Heights for a case." His eyes are sparkling.
"No, no. Christmas. And Dad asked me to come get these, which was the stupidest thing I've agreed to do in a long time."
"Traffic is awful, isn't it?" Ned shakes his head. "And then after this I need to go over to the pizza place and get some gift cards for my mom's friends..."
"Oh, I wish you hadn't said that."
"Why?"
"I'm starving," she says ruefully, patting her belly.
Somehow she ends up following him to the pizza place. The tiny tables are packed and the line of couples and families waiting to be seated is out the door, their faces creased in frowns. After he buys his gift cards, Ned buys a couple of slices of the special to go, and passes one over. They find a tiny space mostly out of the snow, their hands warmed by the hot pizza.
"Thanks." She smiles at him over the slice.
"Sure thing."
"There's all this food in the kitchen, in the fridge, and none of it that we can eat until tomorrow." She sighs, folding the slice in half and biting off the tip. "How are your parents doing?"
"They're doing well." Ned chews thoughtfully. "Now I really need a drink. Great."
"A drink, or a drink?" She raises an eyebrow.
Ned laughs. "A soda," he responds. "I can just imagine how happy Dad would be if I came home with rum on my breath."
Nancy chuckles. "Remember that time there was that huge party at Omega Chi and your parents came by the next day—"
"Oh, don't remind me." He clutches at his head playfully.
They take their time with the pizza, take their time wiping their hands and finding a trash can. She doesn't necessarily want to leave; she dreads the idea of finding a gas station in all the chaos.
"I'm sure you wouldn't want to follow me back over the highway, would you? My gas light is on."
Ned pauses, absently putting his gloves back on. "I will if you buy me dinner."
Her heart is trying to race. This is ridiculous. It's Ned, for God's sake. Familiar as old shoes and just as comfortable, despite the drift in their relationship. She smiles, ignoring the tension. "Well, tonight's out—"
"And tomorrow. How long will you be home?"
"Probably just after the first of the year."
"Okay. How about in four days. By then maybe all this traffic will have cleared out."
"Don't bet on it."
As soon as Ned sees her safely to a gas station, Nancy parks at the pump and calls Bess, strangely exhilarated.
He doesn't suggest Chez Louis, for which she is incredibly grateful. She can't imagine going there with him now, remembering him proposing to her just outside.
Instead he picks her up, a fresh dusting of snow falling, and they go to Chicago. When he first had his driver's license and she didn't yet they would go to Chicago almost every weekend, to games, parties, restaurants, somewhere. She has forgotten, in the interim, all the aborted vacations, the broken dates, the hour-late arrivals while she was tracking down clues.
They go to a new place, one she hasn't seen before, with small individual heaters out on the patio. She's not brave enough for that, not while she's in thin stockings and a sweaterdress, so they sit at a window with an excellent view of the lake.
"Get anything good for Christmas?"
She shrugs. "Remember how amazing it was when you were eight years old and you scrambled out of bed on Christmas morning and there was this huge hulking thing in front of the tree, before you ever could really see it clearly? And then you rip the paper off and it's a bike or something else amazing." She traces the stem of her wineglass. "That doesn't happen anymore."
"So, nothing good."
Her eyes sparkle as she props her chin on the heel of her hand. "What did you get?"
"A few sweaters, a scarf, a very nice tie. The usual."
"No cute stuffed bears or books of poetry?" She smoothes her napkin over her lap.
"Nope." He unwraps his silverware, shooting her a surreptitious glance. "You?"
"No."
"So you're not with..."
"Michael. I'm not with Michael anymore." She runs out of ways to fidget and picks up the wrapper from her straw, twisting it around her finger. "It's been a while."
He dips his head. "Hmm."
Their gazes meet, then, and hold. She can feel the words at the back of her throat but can't bring herself to say them, not quite, and then the waiter arrives with their appetizer and the spell is broken.
They talk about the year between, his internship and her work at the newspaper and the television station. He has an apartment now, in Emersonville, and he's already talking about graduate school. His suit is smart and she doesn't exactly want him to have languished in squalor without her, but he seems so calm, so complete without her.
"What is it that you want, Ned?" she asks him, over dessert, the tip of her spoon tracing a design in the chocolate mousse. "You seem to have everything figured out."
"Don't you?" He steals a bite of her dessert and meets her gaze. "'Private investigation firm by the time I'm twenty-five,'" he parrots back from their countless conversations, across the front seats of cars during stakeouts, over local and long-distance phone lines.
She shrugs, opens her mouth to speak, and has to begin again. This shouldn't be so hard. "I remember you saying a while back that, if we ran into each other, maybe we should try again. But I don't know if you feel that way anymore."
He's in the middle of stealing another bite of her dessert, but he stops. "It's a long way," he says softly. "Between Wilder and Emerson."
"True." She scoops up a bite of mousse. "But we won't be there forever."
On the way back to River Heights they talk about movies, books, classes, Bess and George, his fraternity brothers, everything else, anything else. They carefully avoid making plans for New Year's, talking about a casual lunch and a movie after, but not that night, not the kiss at midnight, the kiss at midnight that they shared so many New Year's Eves. And then she realizes that they have not touched, the entire night, no brush of their hands, nothing, and she suddenly, desperately craves that contact.
He opens the car door for her at her father's house, following her up the walk. It's like coming home with a curfew, when her father would be waiting just inside and Hannah would be waiting with a mug of cocoa or tea, waiting to hear all the details of their date. But she's twenty now, and the woman who looks back at her from the mirror is more polished and sophisticated and even than the girl who used to stay up all night on the phone with him, until they fell asleep, breathing into each other's ears as they dreamed.
"Would it be different, this time?" Ned's hands are in his pockets and the cold wind ruffles his hair, as he stands on the porch beside her.
She smiles at him. "Yeah."
"Because, well, there were a lot of things that worked, but..."
"Like what?" She steps in close to him and reaches for his hand, and oh yes, oh yes, that immediate electric spark is still there, as soon as they touch.
"Like..."
He tries to be casual about it but it's been so long that she tilts her face up waiting like a teenager on her first date. He looks down at her, and when he takes too long her eyes pop open to see him regarding her from an inch away, so close his breath touches her mouth.
"Well, this, for example."
"You sure? Because I really think you should test it."
He chuckles. "If there's anything I doubt..."
The kiss he gives her then goes from the chaste touch of parted lips to her hands clasping desperately at his lapels, his arms around her and their tongues tangling hot and her heart hammering in her chest. He starts to pull back and she rocks forward on her heels and the earth is spinning away entirely, and he's all she can feel, all she knows.
Finally, slowly, they part and she's aware of just how cold her skin is from the wind and just how warm his skin is. "Wow."
"I think that was even better than I remember."
She nods, the air cold against the back of her throat. "Look, Bess invited me to a New Year's party. And maybe we can just start out slow and go to that. After lunch and the movie."
"I think, technically, that kiss at midnight is meant to be shared with the person you want to kiss for the rest of the year." His eyes are sparkling.
"I really don't have a problem with that," she says, and shivers a little when he takes her hand.
"Me either," he admits, smiling.