“Hello my love,” Mum said as I walked through the front door. She pressed a kiss to my cheek. “I saw a new outcrop of anemone by the supermarket earlier and thought of you.”
“Oh amazing,” I said, “the one in town?”
“No, is there some there, too?”
Mum and I discussed autumn wildflowers for a few minutes whilst we waited for Dad and Amy, who came in together from outside. I’d thought I’d heard tinkering around in the workshop, but I was surprised to see Amy had been part of it.
Dinner was Mum’s classic lasagna, which, from the smell of garlic and red wine wafting through the house, I could tell she’d been working on all day. I knew from experience being the designated stirrer that the ragu alone took a solid four hours to cook. Phil tried to recreate it sometimes, but he was almost never patient enough to let it cook that long, and I could always tell.
“So darling,” Mum said as we tucked in, “when are you going to let us meet your girlfriend?”
I immediately turned to glare at Amy next to me, but she just shrugged. “Wasn’t me.”
“Aha!” Mum said, jabbing her fork in my direction. “I knew it.”
I sighed. “It’s still really new, Mum. I don’t know if we’re there yet.”
Mum frowned. “Have you not been hanging out with this girl since summer started?”
I dropped my cutlery noisily on my plate and turned to Amy again. She did the same and threw up her hands.
“Still not me!”
“Oh please,” Mum said, “do you really think I don’t know when you’re seeing someone?”
“Honestly?” I asked. “No, I don’t. It’s never happened since I’ve lived at home, anyway.”
“Exactly,” she said. “You’ve been holed up in that house by yourself for the last four years. Of course I was going to notice the head of brown curls always in your passenger seat.”
I rolled my eyes. Mum could be sonosy. So deep in other people’s business. But I guess that was her job, after all. At least she was here, noticing things, instead of halfway around the world like Morgan’s mum.
“It’s like you forget we share a driveway,” she said, resuming her dinner. “Anyway, you’ll bring her round next week.”
I looked around, as if searching for the version of me that had agreed to this. “Will I?”
“You will,” Mum said, locking eyes with me and nodding so aggressively that I couldn’t help but nod along. Satisfied, she took a massive bite of lasagna, humming happily as she chewed.
Chapter33
Morgan
Jack and I woke up together in my house on a Friday morning a few days before the gala.
“You should meet my family,” Jack said against my temple. We were tangled in my bed, my leg flung over his hip, his face squished between mine and the pillow, our arms wrapped around each other. I could see the edge of the tattoo on his back, and I was tracing the lines over and over with the tip of my finger, tickling his skin with my fingernail. It was chilly – we’d yet to experience the second summer that inevitably came every year – but the body heat we were sharing was still just a side benefit to the proximity. Either way, wild horses couldn’t have dragged me even an inch away from Jack until the moment I had to leave for work. I wished desperately I could call in sick again. We could make love, I could read a book, we could just never leave the house … but Jack had to leave for work soon. They were scoping a new job – the biggest one they’d ever taken on, apparently – and Jack’s dad had decided to foist all of the admin onto his unwitting son.
“We haven’t even told our friends,” I said instead.
“Mmmm,” he groaned. “Maybe we should do that, too.”
“Nooooo, not the bubble,” I said. “You know Chloe is going to be insufferable once we tell her.”
“It’s been four weeks, babe.” My heart clinched at the casual “babe” – he said it constantly, my actual name apparently lost to him, but I got butterflies every time.
“Exactly. Weeks. That’s nothing.”
“Your call,” he said, but he sounded grumpy. “But we can’t hide this whilst we’re in America.”
The Ren Faire was just a month away, and I’d been thinking every single day about how magical it would be to walk hand-in-hand with Jack through the festival.
