Free Once Upon A Christmas Eve: A Novella by Katie Klein Page A

left after lunch. It took me about an hour longer to get here than it should have.”
    I leave the two of them chatting about idiotic Hamilton drivers and road expansions to set a place for Jonathan at the dining room table. The dining room is known colloquially as “the blue room”—one of the rooms Mom and Dad never found time to renovate—the baseboards and moldings around windows and doors a smoky blue, walls painted a lighter shade of the same hue.
    My dad is already seated at the head of the table—slipping easily into the chair he claimed when I was growing up. Already his presence commands this room, takes up too much space, leaves too little air for the rest of us. He fidgets with his smartphone, glances up when he sees me.
    “How is school, Livy?” he asks.
    “Fine. You know, more of the same.” I open the buffet drawer, searching for the rest of the pearl-colored placemats Mom uses for the holiday.
    “Grades still okay?”
    “They’re fine.”
    “Have you given any more thought to what I said about Northwestern?”
    Back in November—Thanksgiving—when the conversation shifted to senior year and graduation, then college plans, Dad reminded me that NSU is a great school, and still taking applications. If I wanted to attend, I could always live in the guest bedroom at the townhouse. The offer was given to both Sam and me—Sam, because she wants to transfer, and me, because, well, NSU is the most logical option. State school. Not too far from home.
    “Sort of,” I admit. “I don’t know. I was kind of thinking that maybe I should take some classes here, first. Let Sam finish her last two years.”
    “You can both come,” he says. “We have plenty of space. The two of you could have the entire third floor to yourselves.”
    I set the placemat at the other end of the table—the only empty chair—and grab another cloth napkin from the drawer.
    “You know I can’t leave Mom here,” I remind him.
    “What does she think about this?”
    “She doesn’t know about this. She’d freak out. Start ranting about how we’re not her babysitters.”
    “She’s right.”
    “I’m not making a decision right now. She has another appointment in January. We’ll go from there.”
    “These are supposed to be some of the best years of your life, kid.”
    I stifle a laugh. “Yeah, well, they’re not,” I reply, biting back the “and you are partly to blame for this” perched on the tip of my tongue. It is Christmas Eve, after all.
    When I return to the kitchen, Jonathan is leaning casually against the counter, glass in hand, cheeks still red with cold, Mom and Amanda laughing at something he’s saying about one of his professors.
    He smiles when he sees me, reaches around him, hands me a glass of sweet tea.
    “Thank you,” I say, easing next to him, taking a sip.
    “Now, Olivia is the complete opposite. She loves making lists.”
    My mom nods, agreeing. “She does. They’re everywhere .”
    “That’s good, though,” Amanda says. “That way the two of you balance each other out. Like yin and yang.”
    “Oh. No,” I say quickly, shaking my head. “We don’t balance. . . . It’s not like that. Between us, I mean.”
    “Just friends,” Jonathan confirms. “And the yin-yang thing would imply that I hold some kind of list-making capabilities, and I’m pretty sure that’s not the case.”
    “You might if you tried,” I point out.
    His grin deepens. “I’m always open to conversion. If, you know, you’re up for the task.”
    A shiver of awareness skitters up my spine at the words, at the way he says this, a tingling my mother must feel from feet away, because she steals a look at us out of the corner of her eye. Sam is less discrete—watching us, intrigued, from across the room.
    The last thing I need is a game of twenty questions at dinner, or my sister demanding details where there are none, so I distance myself from Jonathan, ask my mom if there’s anything else I can do.
    “If