I didn’t realize how hungry I was until someone decided to feed me. And even though it’s scary, knowing that any meal may be my last, that based on my long, long history, thiswhatever it iswith Laine has a couple of months left at best, how am I supposed to walk away now that I’ve had a taste of what it’s like to be full?
I’ve floated along this entire week in a horny dream state, and after what Laine managed with Grandpa Sumney today, well.
Business wins are my love language. I snap a picture of the permit, then text it to Marisol.
“Extremely important question,” Laine says as she slides behind the wheel of my truck. She insists on driving tonight on the strong condition I don’t hang out of the window. “Ice cream before or after minigolf?”
“Minigolf?” I laugh. “Our courtship’s beginning with minigolf?”
“It’s beginning with every date I should’ve taken you on in high school.” Laine leans over to waggle her eyebrows at me. “Plus, I’mamazingat minigolf. Branson dyke, remember?” She rests her arm along the back of the truck’s bench seat and around my shoulders. “Got to impress my new lady.”
“Show her you can provide.” A wry smile rises on my face.
“That’s right. First comes minigolf, then comes marriage, then comes Zoe with a—”
“Whoa, stop right there!” I twist in my seat to face her. “Are you going to make me wait until marriage?”
Laine smiles and jostles me by the shoulders toward her. “Maybe.”
“Laine Woods, are you secretly a prude?!”
Laine arches an eyebrow while her lips curve in a smirk. “Youdoremember how we met, don’t you?”
“The first time? Or the second?”
“You remember the first time we ever met?” Her right hand caresses my shoulder, playing with the strap of my sundress.
“The first time I saw you, at least.”
“Tell me.”
I close my eyes, summoning the picture of Laine I’ve thought of a thousand times. “You were in the meadow behind your house, lying onthis old picnic blanket staring up at the clouds. Your hair was fanned out behind you, and you looked so … thoughtful. So serious. I remember staring at the sky all afternoon trying to figure out what you were thinking about.”
We’re quiet for a long moment. Then Laine shakes her head. “You were so gay. Like, right out the gate.”
“Hey!” I laugh, leaning into her touch. “Well. Yeah.”
“I wish I’d known,” she says softly, and we’re quiet again, all the way to the ice-cream shop.
It’s an early August evening in Blue Ridge, the air thick with unspent rain. We eat our ice-cream cones one-handed down Main Street, because Laine won’t let go of my other one. She pauses mid-sentence to lick my scoop, then kiss me with summer-sweet lips for so long, a cold tendril of melt weeps down my fist before she lets me go. She licks that, too. My heart is aloft, beating above us, watching how Laine laughs at my stories, how she teases. When she smiles at me, she feels like home, if home was what I’d always desperately wished it would be.
When we reach the minigolf course, she makes a big deal of picking out our clubs just to make me laugh.
“We could make it interesting.” She squints one eye at me.
“You said you’re amazing! Why would I make a bet I’m sure to lose?”
“If I win,” Laine continues as though she didn’t hear me, “I get to take you out next Friday night. If you win, you get to pillage my body.”
We shake on it.
By the fourth hole, Laine’s kicking my ass so hard, there will be no pillaging.
Fuckingathletes.
She’s pretending to help me with my swing when a loud, crackly voice clears behind us.
“Charlaine Woods, is that you?”
