We both froze. Maybe we'd knocked a glass off the counter. Maybe something outside the room had echoed oddly.

A ceramic plate lay in shattered pieces on the floor.

Above it, Abe's neighbor cousin Emmett stood with his hands apart and his mouth open.

Which wouldn't have been that bad, except that Emmett was eleven with a mouth as big as Texas.

And that the doorway behind him was filled with Abe's aunt Claire, Grandma Krasner, various cousins-and Abe's mom.

And my mom.

Well, shit. "Hi," I said weakly.

Aunt Claire arched her brow. "Something you two wanted to tell us?"

I wanted to curl up in a hole and die. "Um..." Absolutely nothing came to mind.

Abe shrugged and threw his arm around my shoulders. "We're dating."

Oh my God. My stomach swooped and then sprouted wings, which, seriously, was not something you wanted your stomach doing. I stared at Abraham so hard I thought my contacts might pop out. Then down at my feet. My cheeks were hot enough they could boil water.

"You're dating?" With my mom's mouth open like that, she kind of looked like a fish.

I smiled tentatively. "Sort of?"

"Sort of?" Abe looked offended. "What do you mean, sort of?"

"Um." Oh, shit. When had my life turned into a farcical comedy? I hated being the center of attention. I felt like a rabbit. A very red-cheeked rabbit.

But Abe was right.

I made myself bring my chin away from my chest, to an approximate parallel path with the ground. "Not sort of. Yes. We're dating. Surprise!" If my arms hadn't been frozen, I might have done jazz hands.

It was probably a really good thing my hands were frozen.

"All right, nothing to see here." Grandma Krasner started herding people away from us. "Leave the young ones alone."

Thank God. Thankgodthankgodthankgod. Maybe I could remember how to breathe now.

One of the younger cousins, now out of sight, let out a confused whine. "But I thought they weren't dating!"

Grandma Krasner took my gaping mother's arm, and then her gaping daughter-in-law's arm, and then she closed the pantry doors again quite firmly.

Oxygen in, oxygen out.

"See?" Abe smiled down at me. "That wasn't so bad, was it?"

I stared at him.

He tapped my cheek. "Are you still in shock?"

"What colors?"

He frowned.

"For the wedding," I clarified. "Which our mothers are planning right now."

He grinned slowly. "Red, black, and gold."

That snapped me out of my shock enough to frown at him. "You can't have the Leopards colors as your wedding theme."

He raised a brow. "Why not? You asked for my input. They're my favorite colors."

I rolled my eyes again, because if I was regressing, I might as well do it one hundred percent. "We're not actually planning a wedding, doofus."

"Aren't we?" he asked lightly.

Oh my God, what? What just happened there?

He took my hand. "Come on. Let's go see if there's more pie."

Pie? How could he switch topics so easily? "Aren't you full yet?" I asked helplessly.

"Never," he swore.

"Are you ready to face them?"

He looked thoughtful for a moment. "You know, I have no problem charging straight at a two-hundred-pound player and flying through the air, but facing our mothers is a little more daunting."

I laughed. "Good thing you have a good teammate."

He kissed me fiercely. "The best."

For the most part, we got away without too much interrogation during dessert, but I was pretty sure that was because someone had made the universal declaration that we were to be left alone. Everyone kept sneaking peaks at us, though, especially the moms.

And everyone definitely stared when we said good night. Abe brushed his lips over mine, I turned bright red, and everyone under fifteen started giggling.

And a few over, too.

As we walked the ten minutes home, Mom couldn't restrain her dazed remarks. "You're dating Abe."

"Yup." I glanced over at my dad, who hadn't said much about it, but who grinned widely.

"You." Mom still sounded floored. "And Abe." Like she might float away, in fact. "I don't believe it."

"Well. It's happening. Why don't you believe it?"

She sounded far away. "You and Abe. Oh my God." Then she snapped out of her daze and her voice intensified. "Are you going to get married?"

"Mom!" I glared at her. I knew this would happen. "No, we're not."

"You're going to get married," she said dreamily. "Sharon will be so excited."

"We're just dating," I said loudly, like there was the slightest possibility I could drown out her fantasies. "We're relaxed. Taking it slow."

"Sharon and I used to talk about this when we were pregnant together and she found out she was having a boy and I was having a girl..."

"Mom!" I danced in front of her and waved frantically. "Stop it! Snap out of it!"

She raised her hands. "Snapped." But then her face did that melty thing again. "You two look so good together. How did it happen?"

I glanced at her. I didn't usually talk about my romantic life with my mom, but she looked so happy that it seemed cruel to deny her a few details.

So after we got home, we curled in the living room and I spent an hour talking to her about Abe. Dad graciously disappeared for most of it, but right before I headed to bed, he stopped me and asked in a gruff, almost embarrassed voice. "Are you happy?"

He was sweet. I smiled at him. "I am."

When I finally said good night and ducked into my bedroom, I was only there ten minutes before I heard a tap on my window.

I spun around. Abe stood outside.

My mouth fell open and I pulled open my window. I tried to whisper fiercely, though I couldn't work up much indignation, and my lips tugged up. "What are you doing here?"

He grinned. "But soft! What light?"

Now I pushed the screen aside. "But seriously. This is ridiculous."

He touched my cheek. "Going for four days without you is ridiculous."

My lips twitched. "You're not going to fit through my window."

But I'd underestimated him. Abe was strong and limber, and able to twist and slide with grace and power that my body couldn't command. Soon, he was sitting on my bed, and I was trying to cover my fit of giggles. I'd checked three times to make sure my door was locked.

He dragged me down onto the bed as soon as he'd finished closing the blinds. "Much better," he murmured after he'd discarded his shirt and lifted off mine. I didn't respond, just ran my hands over the planes of his chest.

And then I remembered. "Oh. I called it."

He didn't stop kissing me, and spoke softly against my skin. "Hmm?"

"My mom asked if we were getting married."

He laughed silently. "Actually, I think I called it."

"What?"

He just smiled at me, and then I stopped being able to think when his hands were making me crazy. "Do you promise to stay quiet? Otherwise I'm going to have to stop."

"I promise," I said immediately.

And I did. But it wasn't easy.

Chapter Twenty.

America turned into a giant Christmas mall after Thanksgiving.

I liked Christmas. There were sparkly lights and festive trees and those ever-present carols. I liked carols, Rudolph and Frosty and chestnuts roasting on an open fire.

Hanukkah, festival of lights and holiday of impossible transliteration, had songs more along the lines of being assailed by raging foes and terrible sacrifices. And suffering. Most of our holidays were about the suffering.

Loved those songs.

Still, I liked carols and Christmas too, and it never really bothered me unless I was trapped in a mall with the songs on repeat and the tinsel everywhere and the Christmas villages and the relentless advertising. Then I was like, Whoa, calm down, America. Don't worry, we haven't forgotten to be consumers. We're fabulous at consumerism. Wasn't this a religious holiday once?

I mean, I guess I'd prefer having people shove merchandise in my face rather than their religion, but still.

I woke up one week after Thanksgiving to weird sounds and the faint smell of pine needles, and padded out of my room to see Lucy wrestling a small, round tree into the corner. There was some contraption at the bottom, and pine needles everywhere. She saw me looking and beamed. "I got us a tree!"

Sabeen and Jaz also trailed out into the living room. Jaz lifted her brows. "Uh, you know Tamar's Jewish and Sabeen's Muslim, right?"

Lucy's face underwent a transformation from joy to surprise to crushed regret. "Oh."

Sabeen glanced at me with one of her lurking smiles. "I'm cool with a tree."

I shrugged, wondering if anyone had made coffee yet. "Me too."

The next day, however, I discreetly place the menorah my temple had mailed me one year at college in the windowsill.

When Lucy noticed the new addition, she shook her head. "We are so fucking multicultural."

I laughed. "Gold star, team."

Even the office was festive. Staff kept bringing in leftovers from holiday parties, and readers and advertisers and remote employees sent in gift baskets. The holiday party was scheduled for the seventeenth, by which point I was sure I'd have turned into a giant ball of packaged sweets and baked cookies.

The first real snowfall of the year came the first week of December. My childhood had been filled with snow, men and angels and days, but ever since we moved to California it became a rarity. We went to Big Sur and Tahoe for skiing occasionally, but it was less a matter of weather and more a matter of travel. We didn't wait for the snow; we went to it.

Here, it was different. The light flurries brought an air of excitement from the skies. Everyone walked around with a faint smile on their faces as the flakes floated down from above. It was soft and light, fine and powdery, and though everyone said it had no staying power, it formed a dusting of white along the sidewalks. Children spun in circles with their tongues stuck out, and instead of pulling them along, their adults actually laughed.

Hanukkah came two weeks into the month, when the sun hit its lowest point and the wind howled through the city like a wolf that'd lost his mate. I shivered constantly, except when I lay beside Abe, whose heat stayed even the fiercest breeze.