The Twelve Dates of Christmas Read Online Free Page A

that always made me end up looking like Bozo the Clown. “This is just so important, you know?”
    â€œI know.”
    I stopped pacing and stared down at him. “Do you?” I asked. “I mean, you never really seem to think about the future much. Where do you see yourself in five years?”
    â€œWe’ve talked about this before, Lexi.” He reached for my hand and pulled me down until I was sitting beside him. Blitzen woke up and shot me a baleful look before slinking off. “I’ll get my degree, then probably look for a job where I can learn the restaurant business from the bottom up. Maybe open a little place of my own someday.”
    â€œOkay,” I said slowly, “but have you ever noticed that your goals and mine—well, they don’t exactly match?”
    â€œI guess.” He didn’t sound terribly concerned. “But why worry about that before we have to? The future will take care of itself. We just need to try to be happy now and figure out the rest when it comes.”
    I gritted my teeth. “Are you kidding?” I cried. “That sounds like one of Allie’s crazy theories or something. What if the future
doesn’t
work itself out? What then?”
    He just shrugged. “I don’t know. It always does, though.”
    Almost everything about Cam was great. But that default attitude of his—
oh well, it’ll work itself out
—always made me crazy, even when he was just talking about finding a parking spot or something. But this time it was much worse. This time he was talking about our whole future.
My
whole future. How could he be so infuriatingly casual about it?
    â€œDid I ever tell you how I decided to go into medical research?” I asked, determined to make him understand for once just how important this was.
    â€œSure.” He shifted in his seat, slinging one arm across the couch behind me. “It was when your mom got sick when you were a kid, right?”
    â€œThat was part of it.” I nodded. “When I was six or seven Mom had a cancer scare, and our whole family traveled to the Mayo Clinic to have it checked out.”
    â€œYeah, I remember now.” Cam reacheddown and squeezed my upper arm. “That must have been really scary for you.”
    â€œUh-huh, I guess.” I stared blankly at the mirror over the fireplace across the room, barely feeling his hand as I thought back to that time. Back then I hadn’t even really understood exactly what cancer was. I’d just known it was something bad. “Anyway, it turned out to be a false alarm, thank God. Everything was benign; Mom was fine. But while we were at the clinic and she was getting her tests done and stuff, there was this one doctor who was supernice to me. He kept an eye on me while Dad was distracted, and even took me on a tour of his lab and let me play with his ultrasound machine.”
    â€œNice of him,” Cam said.
    I nodded. “I’m sure he was busy. All those docs always are. But he took the time to watch out for me, and I always remembered that, even though I don’t even know his name. Ever since then I’ve known I wanted to do what he did. I asked Mom and Dad recently if they remembered who he was so I could mention him in my college application essays, but they don’t remember either. So I just wrote the essays without the name.”
    â€œThat’s a great story,” Cam said. “I bet the college admissions people will love it.”
    â€œI hope so. But that’s not my point. I know we all kid around about how driven I am, how I plan out everything in my life and stuff. I guess I’m trying to tell you just how much those plans mean to me.”
    He reached over and gently pushed a lock of auburn hair out of my face, smiling down at me fondly. “I get that,” he said, his fingers tracing the outline of my forehead. “I always have, Lexi. It’s part of what makes