He smiled despite himself.Didn’t that just about sum up everything to do with Blair?
He’d been thrown off balance from the childhood memories and revelations, but more than one thing could be true, and the otherthing was that… he was happy? He thought so, anyway. He didn’t have a lot of experience with happiness. He did contentment well. Satisfaction. Pride.
But when was the last time the anticipation of a simple pleasure with a favorite person had had him just plain happy?
Probably not since his years with Allie, actually.
And of course, his relationship with Blair was entirely different from his relationship with Allie.
He turned the canoe around and started paddling.
He told himself to shelve the Dad stuff. Blair wouldn’t be here much longer. Which meant his foray into uncomplicated happiness was necessarily short-lived. Which was fine, honestly; uncomplicated happiness made him feel simple, and he didn’t like feeling simple.
Blair just… switched his brain off sometimes.
He would have laughed at himself, but he caught sight of her on the deck. She hadn’t seen him yet—he hadn’t replied to her texts, so she didn’t know he was out on the lake. She was leaning her elbows on the railing, staring down at the water. She had her hair in a French braid, which he’d noticed she did when she went off on the bicycle. He could see her as a girl, reading on the terrace, mindlessly twirling the braid. He could see her as a girl, being damaged by her parents.
But the girl existed inside the woman, the woman who was a mogul and a mother, and scarily good at both.
He drew close, and she caught sight of him. She shrieked and, grinning, waved—and then ran off.
He dragged the canoe onto the shore, wondering where she’d rushed off to.
He climbed the stairs, and suddenly she appeared in the half-open Dutch door.
“Welcome to the pop shop.” She bent down so she was obscuredby the closed half of the door and sprang back up holding a can of orange Crush.
He sucked in a breath.
It wasn’t a big deal. It was a can of pop.
“They still have this in the vending machine at the laundromat!” she exclaimed.
It was at once the nicest thing anyone had ever done for him, and too much.
Because itwasn’tjust a can of pop. It was an unmistakable gesture of caring.
“I’m not a Sprite person, though, so I decided to copy you.” She disappeared again and popped up holding a second can of orange Crush. She held out a hand. “That will be ten leaves, please.”
No, he told himself. It wasn’t too much. It wouldn’t kill him to allow himself a bit of lightheartedness. There was no one around to see him.
He cleared his throat. “Ten! It used to only be two.”
“That was a lot of years ago, old man. Haven’t you heard of inflation?”
“They didn’t teach inflation in my MFA program.”
“Right. Well.” She wiggled the fingers of her open palm, and was he going to go around hunting for ten leaves with which to “purchase” a can of pop?
Apparently he was. Because after he bought the pop, they would go to the hammock, because that was what happened after the pop shop. They would swing and laugh—well, she would laugh, and he would love hearing it—and talk. It was likely that one thing would lead to another. Dinner was still a couple hours off.
Ten leaves was a harder ask than she probably appreciated, because the property was filled with coniferous trees. There were some oaks near the road, though, so he said, “I’ll be right back,” and jogged around the cabin. The lowest branches were higher thanhe could reach. He jumped and managed to grab two leaves. Oh, and there were two more on the ground. It took him a while, and it was extremely undignified, but eventually he managed to amass ten leaves.
He jogged back around the house, whereupon he ran into his dad.
He was standing on one side of the door and Blair was standing on the other. His dad was talking and Blair was a deer in headlights, eyes wide. The picture they made would almost have been funny—Dad at the pop shop—if it hadn’t been so… what?
It was that same feeling of panic he’d had when Blair had appeared at the pool house demanding to read the chapters he’d falsely promised her. He’d thought to himself then that he didn’t “do” panic, but what was this clammy-hands, stomach-churning, shaky-legs feeling if not panic?
