I brought the present over to our sleigh, and she took off its wrappings gently, as if she were taking off its coat. When she opened the box itself, I saw that it wasn’t what she was expecting … but it also was exactly what she wanted. In the soft blue darkness of the hotel room, it nearly hovered from her hand, part sculpture, part air.
“I love her,” Lily said.
And I said, “I do too.”
I cued up Ella Fitzgerald’s “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” and her voice filled the room as we held each other in our sleigh, the delicate, brave bird nestled between us. Here we were, heartbeats and darkness and breath and wings and glass and love and music and nowhere else in the world we wanted to be. Here we were, and here we’d be, until we stepped off our sleigh and traded it for a plane. And what I felt was so unexpected and so important that I had to say it out loud.
“I’m excited for the future,” I told Lily. “I’m really, really excited.”
“Me too,” she replied.
And in that moment, there wasn’t any fear. There wasn’t any hesitation. There wasn’t even the constant voice of uncertainty. There was only togetherness. There was only excitement. There was only love.
“Here’s to the future,” Lily said. “A wonderful future.”
And I believed.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Mind the Gap, Dash & Lily is Rachel Cohn and David Levithan’s sixth collaboration, following Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist, Naomi and Ely’s No Kiss List, Dash & Lily’s Book of Dares, The Twelve Days of Dash & Lily and Sam & Ilsa’s Last Hurrah.
Rachel is the bestselling, award-winning author of many books, including Gingerbread, Cupcake, Shrimp, You Know Where to Find Me, and Very LeFreak. David is the author of many brilliant and bestselling books, including Boy Meets Boy, Every Day and The Lover’s Dictionary, and Will Grayson, Will Grayson co-authored with John Green.
For more information about Rachel and David, you can find them at www.rachelcohn.com and
www.davidlevithan.com, respectively.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thank you, as always, to our friends, family members, and readers, for bringing us joy, even when it’s not a holiday season.
Thanks, too, to our wonderful editor, Nancy Hinkel, as well as Melanie Nolan, Barbara Marcus, Mary McCue, and everyone else at Random House Children’s Books. Much gratitude as well to our publishers outside the US and to our agents and all of the people at the Clegg Agency and WME.
In a very strange serendipity of timing, this book was written in part while the first season of the Dash & Lily TV series was filmed. (One chapter was even written while David sat on the floor of the Rare Book Room in the Strand at three in the morning, watching the final scene of the series come to life.) So thank you to Joe Tracz, Scott Hedley, everyone at 21 Laps, everyone at Netflix, the three directors, and the perfect cast, particularly Midori Francis and Austin Abrams. We hope you all get a trip to London out of this one. (Take us with you.)
DON’T MISS DASH & LILY’S BOOK OF DARES ON NETFLIX!