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I’m dragging more and more as each week passes.
The following Friday I feel like I could sleep for twenty hours straight, and the week after that, even more so.
By the week after that, I’m catching catnaps at my desk when I have an extra ten minutes. Jamison and I text when we can during the day, and then at night we FaceTime for hours.
The range of topics we cover every single night is vast. We’ve talked about everything from our childhoods and funny stories with our brothers to what’s going on at the lodge and with his mom.
Usually we’re covering the trivial and the deep all within the same few minutes.
“Grinny makes good meatloaf.”
“Mmm, I will do my best to pretend I like it, but it’ll be difficult. I dipped everything in ketchup until I was fifteen and then never wanted it again…”
“What does that have to do with meatloaf?”
He laughs. “Sometimes people put a ketchup-y thing on the top.” He shudders. “It feels wrong.”
“Hmm. Seems kind of like ketchup on a burger which feels pretty right to me. Who was your first kiss?”
“A girl I met at a week-long YMCA camp. We both had braces. It wasn’t great.”
I laugh.
“Who was yours?”
“A tourist named Kyle.” I grin at the scowl on his face.
“He sounds like a twit.”
I shake my head. “Not at all. He tasted like strawberry-watermelon Hubba Bubba.”
He scoffs at that. “Everyone knows Hubba Bubba loses its flavor.”
“Who did you lose your virginity to?” I ask.
He doesn’t hesitate. “Charity Farling. She’s the daughter of some of my parents’ friends.”
“Oh, do you still see her?”
“I do, yeah. She lives in Boston…with her husband and three children,” he adds, grinning.
“Do you ever regret not being the one she married?”
He makes a face. “That has never once crossed my mind. No.”
That makes me unreasonably ecstatic.
He’s already heard the details about Regg and Danny and didn’t gloat when I told him he was right about Danny. He knows how Danny has avoided me since he admitted his feelings, and that I’d heard he was leaving Landmark. He’s not threatened that I’m sad about Danny, which I appreciate. I’d worried when he’d gone caveman on me that he’d be the jealous type and I didn’t think I could handle that. He’s apologized more than once about reacting that way.
I personally think he was just freaked out about his mom, exhausted, and we were still in such a tentative place with each other that it was the perfect storm.
I think he might know more about me than I’ve even admitted to myself, many of our conversations going much deeper than I’m used to.
The hurt I’ve always held inside about Granddad not treating me like my brothers, despite his love.
The shame I’ve felt for how much I miss my parents when I don’t even really remember them when Grinny and Granddad have done everything in their power to give us the best life.
How I’ve felt attached to the lodge as a way to show them how grateful I am for the way they’ve raised us, the way Grinny gave up so many years of her life when she should’ve been a doting grandma who could hand us back to our parents after a little visit and instead was a full-time parent to five kids.
