Free All I Want For Christmas Is You by Jessica Scott

shrug off his concern.
    But he’d convinced her to cross the street with him and let him buy her lunch.
    She’d confided in him that day. Told him about the boyfriend who hadn’t just run out on her, but had emptied her bank accounts and run up her credit cards first. He’d left her broke and betrayed everything Sam thought that she’d had with him.
    They’d been dating for a month when she’d dropped a land mine on both of them.
    She was pregnant. And since they hadn’t yet made love, she hadn’t had to tell him that it wasn’t his.
    God, he could still see her face when she’d told him the news. She’d braced for him to walk out on her.
    But he hadn’t. And over the years, he’d gotten used to the careful balancing of her independence with her relationship with him.
    “I never pushed you on the paperwork for Natalie because I never thought I’d have to,” he said now, sitting on a snow-covered road behind a stopped tractor-trailer in the middle of central Maine. “And we managed to make this stuff work without being married.” He looked at her then, and crossed the boundary he’d never broken with them before. “I get that you have your stuff. We all do. But I never thought you’d take her away from me. I never thought through what would happen the day you decided you’d had enough. I loved you—I still love you—and I always thought that was enough.”
    “You make it sound so simple.” A ragged whisper. “It’s not.”
    “Yes, actually it is.” He forced his voice to remain level. To stay calm and not shout at her that she was destroying everything he loved in this world. “That this isn’t just about Natalie, but about the life we’ve built together. This is about you and it’s about me and about us. And things are a little fucked up right now but you’re doing exactly what you’ve always been afraid I would do to you. You’re running away.”
    Her mouth opened, then closed again. He wanted her to fight, to deny what he said. To tell him he was imagining things. But she didn’t. She simply bit her lips together and looked away, avoiding his eyes.
    It was an old familiar story in the military. Too many soldiers deployed to return home to find their spouses shacked up with someone else. Too many soldiers strayed while they were deployed, figuring deployment meant they didn’t have to honor their marriage vows.
    He’d done neither. He’d always believed she would do the same.
    But now the ugly suspicion settled around his heart, and he had to ask. Had to know. “Is there someone else?” he asked flatly.
    Better to excise the wound than to let it fester.
    “No.” She turned away, looking out into the swirling snow. “There’s no one else.”
    He dropped his head back against the headrest, lashing at his temper that was fraying at the edge. “Then explain to me what happened, Sam. Because if you’re going to destroy everything we built together, I deserve to know why.”
    She flinched when he spoke. His deceptively calm words hurt. He knew that. Could see the evidence on her face.
    She didn’t answer. Not right away. He waited patiently, let the silence stand between them, growing until it was a live thing, crackling with energy that snapped and hissed.
    “Because I don’t feel anything anymore.” Words like shattered glass. “Because nothing between us feels alive. It feels like we’re going through the motions, waiting for bedtime when we can both roll over and pretend to be asleep.” She finally dared to look at him. “I can’t pretend to feel something that isn’t there anymore. I can’t do that to Natalie.” She looked away again. “And you deserve someone who can make you laugh. Someone who isn’t broken.” Her voice cracked on the last sentence.
    He glanced at the truck in front of them. Let her words sink in. Weighed them against the woman he knew. The woman he loved.
    She was lost, utterly and completely lost. He remembered feeling that way, feeling the