Page 58 of Fate Fiction

“It’s a date.” I said with a smile.

He got up and kissed me on the forehead, glowing heat rushed to my cheeks. Once he was out of sight I opened my notebook again.

If nothing else I want this to serve as a scrap of proof that magic may still exist. Call it dehydration in the wilderness, or call it fate.

Whatever it is, I want to bottle it and get drunk on it months from now.

eleven

. . .

Evan was waiting for me outside the cabin to walk to dinner together again. His hair was damp from the shower and I noticed he gave his beard a trim. He was cleaned up in athletic pants and a slim fit black t-shirt that snugly hugged his shoulders. The same broad, strong shoulders that I had wrapped myself around earlier. He had presented himself as if he were in fact treating a run of the mill dinner as a true date.

“Hey,” I began to question my own choice in wardrobe after opting to remain in the jean shorts and tank top I had tossed on. I wanted to wear a flirty dress and twirl around like the lead in a romcom, except all of my flirty dresses were hanging in a closet three hundred or so miles away.

“Shall we?” Evan softly smiled and extended his hand. I grabbed it, soft and warm still from the shower. Our first true date and it would be in the kitchen of my aunt’s house, and a double date with my aunt and uncle. The nature of tonight’s dinner would be a secret shared only between us two.

We had sat at that same table this morning but now things had changed, everything would be blown up and romanticized. Instead of pensively sitting at the end of the table across from Evan, I decided to sit beside him. We subtly grabbed the other’s hand out of sight or briefly rubbed the other’s leg.

Sue, naturally, noticed the shift and gave me an all too dramatic wink when setting plates down. I rolled my eyes.

Sue had been going all out on meals thanks to a certain guest's willingness to pay a premium for his week’s stay. What would usually be a cost-effective meal was now a high end feast. Filet mignon, roasted baby potatoes, and creamed spinach with freshly baked rolls. Sue had never made anything remotely close to this in all my years coming to camp. The meal was an exclamation point on the day, which already was a more notable one in my recent memory.

Randy gruffly thanked Evan for the work he had done, to which Sue playfully slapped him for “making a guest work on his vacation.”

Evan had to jump in as defense, saying he had made the offer to continue to help, and that he was happy to do it.

“Honestly, it’s exactly like how it is when I come home to visit my father,” he retorted. Sue threatened Randy that if he tried to do something like that again she would refund Evan’s trip. Randy, who was as motivated by money as he was the satisfaction of a hard day’s work, quickly shut up.

There was a lull in the conversation and Evan sparked a mischievous grin and redirected the conversation, plopping his head in his hands as his elbows rested on the table.

“Sue, I have to know, what was young Dani like?”

I perked up from moving creamed spinach around my plate and gently jabbed Evan in the side.

Sue smiled, she had almost three decades of material on me. My most embarrassing moments were lived out on this property. “Dan was a wild child, and then a very odd teenager, she went through this phase where all she’d wear were these tight pants with neon color studded belts, right Dan?”

“You don’t need to bring up my very temporary lapse in judgement regarding my fashion choices.”

Middle school was a bitch to all of us in its own way, and for a short period of time I’d emulated Hayley Williams and every MySpace model. Incredibly poorly.

“She’d come in here to straighten her hair every day, the smell of burnt hair lingered for weeks. And she would sit at the table and draw these weird little figures constantly. Actually I think I have one of them, hold on.”

Sue got up and walked down the hallway to a cork board stuck on the wall, it was littered with phone numbers and receipts, and apparently a relic from my most mortifying era. She unpinned a wrinkly piece of paper and brought it to the table. Bella and Edward from Twilight, drawn in the style of Tim Burton. A true time capsule of a very particular time in pop culture history.

“Oh, oh wow,” Evan chuckled. “This is incredible, I need to take a picture of this. My friend Rob would love it.” He looked at me and winked.

I couldn’t tell if he was bluffing about this “friend Rob,” but I knew exactly who he was referring to.

Evan took his phone out of his pocket and snapped a quick photo. “Dani, you never told me you were an artist.”

“Career was short-lived.” I replied curtly.

Sue sat back down and the drawing remained in the middle of the table. The large Burton-esque eyes were burning a hole into my own.

“Those were some fun summers, Dan. You tried to be too cool to do anything and so sullen but you’d always manage to slip up and get excited about something.”

The last summer I was in that phase was the one before my father died. Something about experiencing death first hand made dressing every day for a funeral less fun.