The cool morning air drifted in through the open car window, lifting my dark blonde curls so they danced around my face. There was a very distinct smell in the air—cinnamon and pine—and while I was in a completely different town with completely different people, the familiar scent cast my mind back to Christmas the year before.

Back to baking shortbread with my ex-boyfriend.

Back to drinking white chocolate mochas with my ex-best friend.

Back to dreaming about my future, about leaving my small town to embark on the beginning of my adult life.

That's the thing about Christmas. It's the one time of the year where everything feels timeless. Where you could be anywhere or anyone. Where memories blend together like snowflakes melting in the spring sun.

I used to pity that girl—the one from my memories. Young and naïve, high on a fantasy sold to her by a jerk of a boyfriend and a traitor of a best friend. And while a pinch of sadness still twinged my heart when I thought about her now, about the pain she'd endure after losing her father and boyfriend, and the tough lessons she'd have to learn while she navigated a new path—a new life—there was finally a sliver of happiness that pierced through the pity. Because there would be good amongst the bad.

There always was.

And, sometimes, that good came in the form of a golden-haired Prince Charming and his two equally charming best friends.

"Can you roll up the window?" Dex moaned from the backseat. "It's so damn noisy out there."

Apparently, 'charming' was now codeword for 'whiny little baby'.

I rolled my eyes, pressing the button to bring the window up and waving the nostalgic smells of the outside world goodbye. We'd been on the road for all of twenty minutes, and Dex had already managed to complain about the music (Noah's Mariah Carey playlist), the temperature (James liked the heat all the way up), and, now, the inevitable noise of passing traffic.

Sitting in the passenger seat, I eyed him through the rearview mirror. "You're such a whiner today."

"Just today?" James mumbled, peeling his twinkling blue eyes from the road to throw me a wink.

One that may or may not have flipped my heart right out of my chest.

It was a good thing that I'd closed the window.

"He's right," Dex confirmed. He leaned forward to poke his head between his blond best friend and I, unknowingly breaking the tension that swelled between us like currents of electricity. "Whiner is an integral part of my DNA makeup. Extract it, and the rest of me crumbles."

"No kidding," James quipped, earning him a gentle shove from his chestnut-haired best friend. "You're in for a long car ride, Watson."

Noah took a break from swiping right on Tinder to watch their exchange from the backseat, mirroring my amused smile with one of his own. He'd known Dex and James since high school, and I was glad to see that the latter's playful back-and-forth hadn't lost its charm over the years. It was annoying as hell, but I secretly lived for it.

"Well," Noah added wryly, "you know what they say."

James smirked, catching the humor dripping from Noah's voice. "No, Noah. What do they say?"

"That a road trip is the defining test of any relationship."

The pointedness of his inference caused a schoolgirl heat to dance on my cheeks. Sure enough, he was throwing me a coy grin in the rear-view mirror, confirming that he was indeed lacing his innocent words with a not-so-innocent subtext.

The confirmation only made me blush even more. I couldn't stop my eyes from swinging back to James. Did he catch it, too?

But our reliable driver's eyes were fixed on the road, flittering between stoplights and pedestrians while his brow creased in concentration. "Oh, they do, huh?"

I felt the heat on my cheeks dissipate, but the hint of excitement shooting through my veins remained. I cleared my throat, bouncing off of his skepticism. "And who exactly says that?"

"Practically everyone." Noah tried to shrug nonchalantly, but his lopsided grin was far from nonchalant. "And those who don't say that Christmas is the ultimate test of any relationship. So, you know what that means."

"No, Noah." I tried to squash his teasing expression with a firm look of my own. "I have no idea what that means."

He leaned forward in his seat, just as Dex had seconds before. "It means," he cooed, "that we're in for a double whammy."

"He might have a point." Dex nodded just as enthusiastically—if not a tad less pointedly. Trust him to miss the true undertone of our exchange. Dex grinned. "If we can survive the holidays on the road together, we can survive anything."

"Anything." Noah drew out the word with as much subtlety as a reindeer in a china shop. "Anyway, that's my hypothesis."

Dex laughed. James chuckled. My cheeks were pink again before I could blink. "Theory," I suggested. "Hypothesis is a dirty word. I'd go with theory."

Noah shrugged again, picking up his phone to resume his matching-spree. "Works for me. I even made a list."

"A list?"

"Of criteria," he clarified.

I turned in my seat, narrowing my eyes at him rather than at his reflection that time. "What are you talking about?"

"Well, every good theory needs stakes, right? So, I thought I'd raise them." He whipped his phone around so that I could see what was lighting up the screen.

Surprisingly, he wasn't on Tinder for once.

He wasn't on Bumble, either.

He wasn't even on Grindr.

"Buy a tree," I read aloud, "bake gingerbread, build a snowman—"

"Oh, jeez," James murmured under his breath. His eyes deviated from the road, rolling to the roof and back while irritation contorted his chiseled features. "Are you kidding me?"

I frowned. "I don't get it."

James frowned back. "You wouldn't."

I didn't get time to question his strong aversion to the seemingly harmless list. Noah forced his phone so close to my face that the ping of a Hinge notification caused me to jump in my seat. I ignored the crude subtext of the message, grabbing the device to read each itemized sentence in his Notes App for myself.

15: Overdose on hot cocoa.

16: Watch Home Alone. One and two.

17: Go ice skating.

I jerked my head back from the screen. "So it's like a to-do list?"

"It's so much more than a to-do list, Madison." Noah tutted, peeling his phone from my hands to reply to his latest conquest. "It's the perfect way to turn up the heat on our friendship. To really put it under the microscope, you know? After all," he teased, making even less of an effort to hide his insinuation than before, "a relationship that withstands a real Christmas—let alone a Christmas on the road—is a relationship that's destined to last."

"You mean friendship," I corrected him, swallowing the bashful smile tugging at my mouth.

Noah barely bothered to conceal his. "I'll keep you updated on my findings."

I turned to face the overcast horizon, but I couldn't seem to escape the playful glint radiating from his dark eyes, his very being. "You do that."

He answered me with a low chuckle before leaning back into his leather-lined seat. But the more that I thought about it, the more I wondered whether he had a point. Whether this road trip was actually the universe's way of testing us. In particular, its way of testing me and James.

But I quickly concluded that that was stupid.

First of all, we weren't actually going on a road trip. At least, I wasn't. My friends were just driving me home on their way up to some fancy ski resort where their families celebrated Christmas every year since forever.

Second of all, there wasn't even a me and James to test in the first place.

But there had been. Once.

Our fling was brief, but it had been strong. Strong enough to chisel some of the ice I'd used to encase my heart, to protect me from more pain after my life had frayed at the seams. Even after all the time that I'd spent with James since—as friends—it was hard to forget the way I'd felt when his lips grazed mine all those months ago, or how fast my heart had raced when he clawed at my dress after we danced at our favorite nightclub, when his hands begged the obstructive fabric to move out of the way so he could unleash his desire onto me, so that he could feel mine against him ...

No, everything with James had been far too intense and wonderful to ever be forgotten.

But that was a long time ago. It was before we'd pumped the breaks on our blossoming connection so that I could take some much-needed time to mend my fractured heart. It was before I'd spent every waking hour that I wasn't in my own dorm room in one of the guys' rooms, snacking on their food and learning the ins and outs of Call of Duty for the sake of Dex and Noah's new streaming venture. It was before I'd become so ingrained in their friend group that, if we were the human body, I'd be the fourth limb.

In simple terms, it was before I'd become just as much a friend to James as Dex and Noah were. And while I loved being James' friend, I couldn't lie to myself. I wanted to be so much more.

That wasn't to say that I regretted the choice that I made back then. I knew that it was the right one; if I would have jumped straight into something before I was truly ready, it surely would have been futile. It would have been over long before Christmas rolled around. I was glad that I took that time—time to heal, to grow, time to find myself amongst the depression, anxiety, trust issues, and grief.

I just wished that it hadn't taken me so long.

James' arm brushed against mine as he reached over to turn down the heat. He didn't notice. But I did. I jolted back like he was an electric fence. Like he was made of currents too dangerous for me to withstand. Because he was. Like a proton to an electron, I found everything about him utterly irresistible.

But I had to shake off that attraction. I had to face facts. James had seen so much more of me now than he was probably even comfortable with. Like at the Halloween party two months ago, when my dormmate Kara and I had done one too many shots, and James held back my hair while I threw them all up again in the ladies' room. Or when my time of the month spontaneously hit me in the middle of my chemistry lab, and I'd texted Noah to bring me a sanitary product—only for James to have met me with one instead.

Between the puke and the tampons, I was beyond sure that I was relegated to the depths of the friend zone alongside every other one of James' would-be flings.

And while part of me was left unsatisfied, a smaller part of me didn't want to ruin what we had. I was so, so grateful for him. He always went above and beyond for me, and I adored having him in my life. Even if it was only as a friend. Even if I would never be more to him than the girl he used to like back at the beginning of our first semester of college, back before he knew what I looked like first thing in the morning or how messy my room got when I was studying for exams.

James had once put his feelings aside for the benefit of what I needed, and now it was my turn to repay the favor.

But ... god, was it next to impossible. Especially right now, when his blue eyes glimmered like glaciers, finding the one beam of sun penetrating the gray morning sky. He was beautiful, and he was just as lovely on the inside. His heart was just as sweet as the taste of his full pink lips ...

I shuffled in my seat, tearing my eyes off his flawless profile and staring straight ahead as Noah and Dex started bickering in the backseat over the music again. The exit off the highway loomed ahead, and the realization that I was going home hit me in the face like a bundle of snow. Home— for Christmas. Only a few months ago, home was literally the last place that I wanted to be, especially during my favorite time of the year. But change seemed to be the flavor of the month, and I actually found myself comforted by the thought of seeing my overbearing mother again after spending so much time away at college.

Or maybe I was just happy to be reunited with my dog, Bandit.

I frowned as James took the left at the intersection. Craning my neck, I peered back in the other direction. The right direction. I wasn't one for geography, but I knew the way to the coast like the back of my hand.

"You missed the turn," I informed him urgently.

When his gaze snapped to mine, he looked just as bemused as I did. "What are you talking about?"

I motioned up the road matter-of-factly, where an architecturally-superior building stretched up into the cloud-covered sky. "You were supposed to go right. The only thing up this way is the airport."

"Right ..." James' deep voice trickled off. He arched an eyebrow, daring to express confusion over my far more understandable confusion.

But my blank stare remained, unaffected by the inference that I was losing it. Something flashed in his striking baby blues, and within a second, they found Dex's sheepish grin in the rearview mirror.

"You didn't tell her!" James accused furiously.

Dex's smile dropped, and he made a very impressive effort to sink back even further into his white leather seat. "It might have slipped my mind ..."

"Dex!"

"What?" I asked. "You didn't tell me what?"

But all that met my questioning was another bout of awkward silence.

My heart started to race—and not in a good way. I swiveled in my seat, burning holes into Dex's beet-red face. I didn't know what was going on, but I knew for sure that I didn't like it. My friends never kept secrets from me.

Not unless they were hiding something big.

"Dex," I warned, my voice coming out as a low growl, "you have until the count of three—"

He rolled his eyes playfully. "Seriously, Mads? I'm not six—"

"One—"

"Madi, you're being ridic—"

"Two—"

"Madison, you don't scare me."

I leaned further back, pinching the skin of his leg between my finger and my thumb. "Three—"

"IinvitedHollyonourtrip!" he yelped.

The confession left his mouth in what should have been an incomprehensible string of words. But it wasn't incomprehensible—not after my brain latched onto the name sandwiched right in the middle of his pained breath of air.

A name that drained my veins of any warmth that had circulated through them seconds before.

Before I could gather my composure, my face scrunched up into an ungodly scowl, my mouth bursting open to shriek, "You what?"

Dex blinked through his nerves, that grimace on his face growing wider with every passing second. With nowhere to run and nowhere to hide, he took a deep breath.

"I invited Holly on our trip."

Actual footage of me finally being able to share this story:

Actual footage of me when Dex dropped the Holly-bomb:

I did say that we were in for a bumpy ride! How do you think the gang will react to Holly crashing their trip?

I sincerely hope that you enjoy my little December treat. What date did you start reading? Drop a comment >

- Danielle