Maybe This Christmas

By Susannah Nix

Two best friends. Ten Christmases. One happy ending.

When best friends Alexandra and Lucas share a first kiss on Christmas night their senior year of high school, it feels like the best years of their lives are ahead of them.

Then Alex goes off to college, and Lucas stays behind to work at his dad's construction business in the small beach town where they grew up. Life, as they say, happens. And somewhere along the way these two high school sweethearts find they don't have as much in common as they once did.

Lucas's life is on Beaufort Island, and Alex is all about getting away and moving on. So he makes one of the hardest decisions of his life and lets her go.

But every year when Alex comes home for the holidays, fate conspires to reunite the two former lovebirds on Christmas Day. Year after year, through good times and bad, Lucas and Alex meet up, catch up, and reconnect on the anniversary of their first kiss.

Is it too much to hope that one year they'll find their way back to each other permanently?

Maybe even this Christmas.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Haver Street Press
• Release date: Oct 22, 2019
• ISBN: 9781950087037

Susannah Nix

Susannah Nix is an Award-winning and USA Today bestselling author of rom-coms and contemporary romances who lives in Texas with her husband. On the rare occasions she's not writing, she can be found reading, knitting, lifting weights, drinking wine, or obsessively watching Ted Lasso on repeat to stave off existential angst.

Book preview

One

Alex

December 25, 2010

She 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 she’d borrowed from her mom—a 1997 minivan they’d had since she was five—pulled 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. They’d 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 she’d 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 they’d find out what colleges they’d been accepted to and where they’d 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 song—badly. Other voices joined in, mangling I’ll Be Home for Christmas.

Then Lucas started singing. He stood out from the others because he had an incredible voice, like something you’d hear on America’s 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 do—he wasn’t bossy or imposing—they 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 O’Hara, she thought he was a dweeb, but only in the way that everybody’s a dweeb when they’re twelve. She’d 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 didn’t 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! He was the only person on earth besides her grandmother who could call her by her full name and live to tell the tale.

Alex met him halfway, and he wrapped her up in a hug that lifted her off the ground. He was taller than she was now, which felt strange because they used to be the same height. Last year he’d had a big growth spurt and shot up from five seven to five eleven. Puberty was a hell of a thing.

Lucas spun her around twice, then set her back down in the sand, giving her arms one last squeeze before letting her go. Gabby hugged her next, and then Linh. All of Alex’s best friends were here: Chris, and Oscar, and Farley, and some others who weren’t best friends but were still friends. They were her people.

Someone put a beer in her hand, and someone else turned on some music. Gabby dragged Alex over to an empty pair of camp chairs, near where Oscar’s younger sister Ana was making s’mores.

Did you have trouble getting away? Gabby asked over the Neon Trees song blaring out of the speakers.

Not much, Alex answered. Her mother always looked aggrieved when she left the house on Christmas Day, but Alex’s sister was old enough now to want to go out with her friends too.

They’d both stuck around long enough to help with the cleanup and watch A Christmas Story, as was their family tradition. Alex’s dad had been snoring in his chair and Mia had already left to go to a movie with her friends when Alex’s mother had reluctantly surrendered the keys to the minivan.

Chris wouldn’t come out until the Cowboys game was over.

Gabby and Chris were twins, but their similarities ended at their superficial physical resemblance. Chris was the star quarterback of the football team, the first black student council president in the history of their high school, and as extroverted as they came. Gabby played cello in the school orchestra, hated PE class, and was much quieter and less outgoing than her popular brother.

Ana handed Alex a s’more. Alex was still full from her mother’s pecan pie, so she passed it on to Gabby. Nearby, Linh and Oscar were talking about the SAT. They both wanted to go to Texas A&M—Oscar for engineering and Linh for veterinary medicine.

Everyone had spent most of November and December scrambling to get their college applications in—except Ana, who was only a sophomore. Gabby was applying to music schools and Chris was applying to all the top football schools. Farley was probably headed to Yale like his lawyer father.

Alex and Lucas were the only ones who didn’t have a clear idea of what they wanted to do. She was applying to a bunch of schools around the state, and even one or two long shots farther away, but it was hard to pick a top choice when you didn’t even know what you wanted to study.

Unlike most of her other friends, Alex had no idea what she wanted to be when she grew up. All she knew was she wanted to get out of here and see the world. To live somewhere other than the mint green house on Bell Street with her parents.

Freedom. A change of scenery. New experiences.

She couldn’t fucking wait. Not that she wasn’t wistful about losing all her friends, but she was also excited to get the hell out of here.

Lucas was in the same boat as far as college applications and life aspirations went. They’d talked about it, just the two of them, when the others weren’t around. How weird it felt not to have a preference, and how almost anywhere would be an improvement over staying in Beaufort.

They were applying to all the same schools. Secretly, Alex hoped they’d end up at the same place. They hadn’t said that part out loud to each other, but she was pretty sure Lucas felt the same way.

Alex didn’t really have a best friend so much as she had a best friend group. But if she was forced to choose just one person to be her desert island best friend, she’d definitely choose Lucas.

He was the friend she felt closest to, and the one who seemed to understand her better than anyone else. She drove him to school every morning and back home after drama rehearsals every evening. They spent a lot of time talking and texting, just the two of them—more time than she spent with any of her other friends.

She hadn’t planned it that way, but that was how it had worked out. Because they were in drama together, but also because they happened to have a lot of the same classes. It was just the way their schedules had shaken out. Linh was in Bio II and Chem II this year, and Oscar was in Honors Calc and Physics II. Both of Chris’s electives went to football, while Gabby’s went to orchestra and an independent music study period. Farley was in drama with Alex and Lucas and had used his other elective for yearbook because he said it was a good way to meet girls.

Alex and Lucas had both had a free elective this year after Drama IV, so they’d decided to take Photography I together, just for the hell of it. They hadn’t learned a thing about photography, but they got to spend a lot of time roaming around the school during sixth period on the pretense of taking pictures.

Look at those two. Gabby pointed across the fire, to where Oscar was sitting in the sand talking to a junior named Sarah. Alex didn’t know Sarah very well, but she was pretty and seemed really into talking to Oscar. They were leaning toward each other, and Oscar’s arm was almost-but-not-quite around her. Do you think he likes her? Gabby asked.

Alex looked at Gabby, narrowing her eyes. "What if he