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“You mean the driver didn’t feel like driving down to the ranger station,” I say, and Levi just shrugs.
“Your present came, too,” he says casually, as if I know what he’s talking about.
I blink. Then I look around quickly, over my shoulder at the Bible study group, past them to the teenagers who’ve got their textbooks open and are clearly paying them no mind whatsoever.
“My present?”
“I got you something,” he says, taking another sip of his decaf confection, that smile hiding behind his beard.
My heart just about stops, and I swear I can feel the blush rising all the way from my toes, my pulse beating faster.
“What is it?” I ask, leaning in. Something about the way he says it makes me think that Levi bought me some kinky sex toy and has chosen this venue to reveal it to me.
“Something I think you’ll really like,” he says, raising one eyebrow. “Something I think we’ll both get plenty of use from.”
I clear my throat and look away, pressing one cold hand to my cheek, as if that’ll make me stop blushing like a whore in church. Which, between the apparently-scandalous nature of this gift and the people behind me discussing the Gospel According to John, isn’t too far off.
“Are you gonna tell me or make me guess?” I ask, trying to stay cool, even though Levi is now grinning. Grinning.
“As much as I’d love to hear you guess I’m fairly certain you’d be wildly incorrect,” he says. “For starters, it’s perfectly G-rated.”
Oh.
I glance around again, just to double-check, but I don’t think anyone heard Levi tell me that my gift is G-rated, a phrase that would definitely raise some eyebrows.
“You did that on purpose,” I accuse, forcing myself not to smile.
“Guilty as charged,” he says.
“Are you going to tell me what it is?”
“No,” he says. “But it’s in my truck, if you’d like to come see it. I hate ruining a good surprise.”I’m strangely nervous as I cover my eyes, standing on the sidewalk half a block down from the Mountain Grind. It’s past sunset and cool out, an autumnal breeze blowing.
I am not well-versed in gifts from boyfriends, to put it mildly. Well, that’s not exactly true; most of them never gave me anything, which was fine with me, but Brett the trust fund kid liked to give me jewelry.
Jewelry I always hated. I’m not a huge fan of jewelry to begin with, but this stuff was just ugly — mixed metals, weird designs that were last popular in the 80s, and pieces that were just so not me it was almost laughable.
Even the ring he proposed with after I’d moved back home — you know, when he was shouting at my window — was ugly. Big, but ugly, more fit for a sixty-five-year-old oil heiress in Dallas than, you know, me.
I never said any of that, obviously, though I did try to get him to stop giving me things and he never did. Every single time I’d wear it for a while and feel like I owed him something vague and indefinable in return, and then I’d stop wearing it and a few months later the cycle would repeat.
Anyway, I hope it’s not jewelry.
“Okay,” Levi says, and I hold out my hands. He puts a box in them, too big and too heavy to be jewelry, and I’m relieved.
“Can I open my eyes?”
“Yup,” he says, and I do.
I stare at the box in my hands for a second, because while it’s defintely not jewelry, I’m not quite sure what a Webgear Nighthawk Z10 AR7220 is.
Then I turn and hold it up in the streetlamp, and once I see the picture on the front, I start laughing. And laughing. I turn back to Levi, who’s grinning, his hands in his pockets as he leans against the door to his truck.
“You like it?” he asks.
“Are you sure about this?” I tease. “It could cause brain cancer and kill all the bees.”
“I looked into it and the science suggests that those fears are unfounded,” he says.
“I told you,” I say, looking down at the wireless router in my hands.
It’s the opposite of jewelry: intentionally ugly but very useful.
“Now you can look at gifs while sitting in my living room,” he says. “We could even watch movies.”
I gasp. He frowns.
“What?”
“Watch out or I might drag you kicking and screaming into the internet age,” I tease.
“I’m neither kicking nor screaming at present,” he says. “I’m acting perfectly reasonable about this.”
I flip it over in my hands. There’s still plastic on it, shiny under the glow of the streetlights, the back of the box covered in tiny text. My heart skips a beat.
“Thanks,” I finally say, looking up at him. “This is…”
South Dakota, I think.
“Really sweet,” I finish, and hand it back to him.
Our fingers brush as I do, and there’s a second where we’re both holding onto the box and neither of us is letting go, and in that second this just feels stupid.
