A/N Hello! So I've been missing ezria a lot lately and the holidays are coming up so that's pretty much where this idea came from! Obviously, I'm obsessed with T-Swift's album so that's where the title came from lol. Also, if you follow I Almost Do, it will be updating Friday/Saturday! Enjoy!

"Mom, yes, I'm fine," Aria assured her mother as she stood at the gates of the airport, "Yes...I love you too...I'll see you in a few hours." Pressing the button to end the call, Aria heaved a sigh of relief. Her mother was worried about her flying in the snow, and wouldn't let Aria hang up the phone until she had told her mother she was fine about 100 times. As much as she got frustrated with her mom, Aria was happy to be coming back home for the holidays. It had been two years since she had left Rosewood and began college at Columbia university and she neglected a visit since. There were a lot of memories there that Aria still wasn't ready to re-open.

She found her seat on the plane and was happy to find it was a window seat. As Aria waited for the plane ride to begin, she took out a torn and tattered copy of her favorite book. To Kill A Mockingbird. After a few minutes, she watched a blond haired boy take a seat next to her, and nonchalantly looked Aria over. Aria didn't look up from her book as he sat down next to her and took a peak at the book she was reading.

"To Kill A Mockingbird?" He asked, catching her attention. Her eyebrows knitted together, as they did whenever she was frustrated with someone. Usually, she wasn't this hostile but she needed all her thoughts to be clear before returning to her hometown.

"Yes, it's one of my favorites," She breathed out and then realized how annoyed she sounded. Aria glanced over at the boy and gave him a shy smile, "It has a special place in my heart, I guess." It was true. Even if she refused to reopen the wounds Rosewood had left her with, she would always remember the year she would sit in the back of a classroom listening to a silky smooth voice discuss the book. In fact, she had many good memories in that classroom. But it had also been where it all came to a tragic end.

"Yeah, I read it in high school," the boy told her, and Aria was beginning to become more and more frustrated with his presence, "It was okay." Aria nodded her head, and was pleased when she found that the end of the conversation. She turned back to her book, not paying much attention to the words, but rather the memories they brought her.

Ezra sat at his desk, a pounding headache effecting his ability to think. It was the last day before he got his holiday break and all he had to get done was grade a few papers. It seemed like it would be an easy task but he was beginning to prove his earlier thoughts wrong. Most people loved the holidays, and in the past Ezra Fitz had been one of those people. But the past two years had changed him. He found himself alone for the most part which only made things worse. For a while, he and his roommate, Hardy, would spend Christmas eve drinking beer in their apartment and getting as drunk as possible in order to erase the past. But three months ago, Hardy had proposed to his long term girlfriend, Spencer Hastings, and had since moved in with her. It left Ezra all alone on the night that was meant to be spent with loved ones.

Deciding he could finish these few papers in the morning and drop them off with the dean, Ezra began to pack up his things from his desk. His copy of To Kill A Mockingbird fell to the floor with a thud and Ezra cussed under his breath. Something so simple yet it pissed him off. That was the way most things worked nowadays. His thoughts were broken when he saw an incoming call lighting up his phone screen.

"Hello?" Ezra said, annoyance clouding his voice. There was a chuckle on the other end and Ezra knew immediately, it belonged to Hardy.

"Did you hear who's coming home for the holidays?"

Aria was greatly relieved when she heard the attendents voice tell them they would be landing soon. The whole ride, the boy next to her had tried to make small talk. It was wasted for Aria was in no mood to talk. They began to land and Aria closed her eyes to enjoy the last short minutes of the ride. The last few minutes before she was forced to reopen the past.

20 minutes later, Aria was waiting outside the airport waiting quietly for her father to pick her up. She smiled fondly to herself when she watched the familiar black Sudan pull to the cub and her father step out to help with her bags. Her father pulled her into a warm hug and in that moment she was glad to be back in Rosewood. They both climbed back into the warm car and Byron began to bombard Aria with questions about college. She answered them happily and was glad that he didn't ask her questions of why she hadn't come home sooner. Aria was far too embarrassed to tell him the real reason.

After an hour drive from Philly, Byron pulled into the Montgomery house and began to unload Aria's bags from the trunk. Aria took a minute to take in the Rosewood scenery that she had missed so much. Everything looked basically the same; the houses were all in neat rows and the trees were all trimmed perfectly. If there was one thing about Rosewood, it was that the town looked spotless almost all the time. Secretly, Aria missed it as opposed to her new New York lifestyle. It was home, and there was no way around that. The moment she entered her old house, her mother was wrapping her in a huge hug and Mike was patting her on the back. Yes, it was good to be back.

Aria spent the rest of the day unpacking and she was happy when Mike offered to help her. As they unpacked, Mike was graciously telling her all the gossip she had missed. He told her how Spencer was engaged, how Hanna and Wren had gotten together and broken up many times over the past few months, and how Emily was happily single. She was glad to hear that Spencer was happy now, as she had taken the news of Toby very hard. That was another reason Aria hadn't liked the thought of revisiting Rosewood. Mike and Aria chatted for hours about the town gossip and people but something felt wrong. It felt as though he was leaving something out. She knew exactly what -or who- it was but just couldn't bring herself to ask. She really shouldn't have been interested anymore in the first place.

"Aria, Mike, dinner!" Ella called up to them and thoughts from her childhood came rushing back at Aria. Then a thought of one of the very last dinners she had in this house hit her and burned her like a scalding pan. She had resented that day for a long time. Mike, Byron, and Aria all took their designated places at the dinner table and smiled at the fact that everything felt like the good old days. They chatted away for hours and Aria was playing a game with herself to see who would be the first one to slip and say the name she'd been dying to hear. It was her father.

"In the meeting we had the other day, Ezra started..."He saw the look on his family's face and immediately stopped. He turned to Aria, "Oh honey, I'm so sorry I didn't mean to-" She cut him off.

"It's fine dad. He works with you. I'm here now, there's no way I can avoid it any longer," Aria breathed out and felt her mother take her hand. There was a dull ache in her head that began to throb louder and louder as she thought of Ezra. She missed him. But she really shouldn't have seeing that they were practically less than strangers now. Aria was a grown up, she should be able to hear an old lover's name without feeling this ache in her chest. She politely excused herself from the dinner table, praying that the pain would go away.

Let me know what you think and review! :)