Nix - Maybe This Christmas

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, incidents, tirades, opinions, exaggerations, prevarications, and dubious facts either are the products of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or personsliving, dead, or otherwiseis entirely coincidental.

Maybe This Christmas. Copyright 2019 by Susannah Nix

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means without written permission from the author.

FIRST EDITION : October 2019

ISBN: 978-1-950087-03-7

Haver Street Press | 448 W. 19th St., Suite 407 | Houston, TX 77008

Edited by Julia Ganis, www. juliaedits.com

One

Alex

December 25, 2010

S he could see the campfire from the parking lot, with two dozen or so people milling around it. The party was in full swing already; she was one of the last to arrive.

Alex got out of the car shed borrowed from her moma 1997 minivan theyd had since she was fivepulled on her denim jacket, and walked down to the sand. A nearly full moon hung in the sky overhead, casting a silvery glow over the Gulf of Mexico.

The sound of laughter reached her over the crashing of the waves, and she stopped for a moment to watch her friends. Theyd been spending Christmas night together like this since their freshman year of high school, ducking out of family gatherings after the last of the Christmas dinner dishes had been washed and escaping to Pelican Beach at the east end of the island.

This was the last Christmas she and her friends would all be together like this. After this year, everything would change.

Alex had lived on Beaufort Island all her life, in the same mint green house on Bell Street with the same rusty porch swing. But in a few months shed be leaving the Gulf Coast barrier island, along with most of her friends.

It was their senior year of high school, and they were graduating in June. Over the next few months theyd find out what colleges theyd been accepted to and where theyd be going in the fall. Almost all of them would be leaving the island at the end of the upcoming summer, driving over the bridge to the mainland and setting off for bigger and brighter cities than their poky beach town.

It seemed both a million years away and right around the corner.

Someone had started singing a Christmas songbadly. Other voices joined in, mangling Ill Be Home for Christmas.

Then Lucas started singing. He stood out from the others because he had an incredible voice, like something youd hear on Americas Got Talent. He was in theater with Alex, but he was also in choir, both at school and at his church. When Lucas started singing in his clear, pitch-perfect baritone, everyone else went quiet and quit goofing around.

Lucas always had that effect on people. He gave off this quiet intensity that made people take him seriously. He never told anyone what to dohe wasnt bossy or imposingthey just seemed to do whatever he wanted without being asked. Like he exuded natural leadership pheromones or something.

The first time Alex had met Lucas OHara, she thought he was a dweeb, but only in the way that everybodys a dweeb when theyre twelve. Shed also thought he was sort of cute, but in a boring, uptight, slightly dorky boy-next-door sort of way.

That was six years ago, when they were in middle school, before she got to know him. Now she didnt think he was the slightest bit boring, or uptight, or dorky. But she did still think he was cute.

Alex listened for a minute, standing alone on the beach, unnoticed beyond the circle around the fire. When the song was over, she joined in the chorus of clapping and cheering as she stepped into the firelight.

Lucas walked toward her with his arms flung open wide. Alexandra!