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A hot rush fills my eyes. I seriously need to stop crying so much, butwowis Tuck’s thoughtfulness overwhelming.
Unwrapping his own sandwich, Tuck notices me staring at mine. “You all right?”
I nod, swallowing the thickness in my throat. “I’m great. Thank you. This sounds delicious.”
And it is. I inhale it, the combination of the crunchy, tangy slaw and the buttery fish pure heaven. These days, if I’m not nauseous, I’m ravenous, so when Tuck offers me a bag of Ruffles potato chips, I inhale that too.
“I’m happy to see you eating,” he says as he polishes off the last bite of his sandwich. “I know you haven’t been feeling great.”
“My appetite comes and goes. But this is exactly what the doctor ordered.”
“Literally.” He grins.
I grin back. My heart sputters when he reaches over to thumb a stray bit of potato chip from the corner of my mouth.
“How are you doing otherwise?” Tuck grabs the empty foil out of my lap and crumples it into a ball with his. “I feel like we haven’t been able to really catch up. With our clothes on, anyway.”
Laughing, I look up at the sky. It’s periwinkle now, the last edges of the sun’s tangerine light fading to blue. Stars blink awake.
“I don’t mind the naked catching up.”
Tuck rests his arm on the back of the bench we’re sitting on. “I don’t either. Can’t wait to do it again. But I wanna know what’s going on inside that head of yours. I’ve missed talking to you.”
The ache in my throat returns with a vengeance. I drink my ginger ale. “Would you have ever guessed you and I would get along so well?”
He scoffs, gently sliding his fingers into my hair. “Not in a million years. But here we are.”
“Here we are.” My pulse thumps inside my skin as he massages my scalp. “The age difference?—”
“Does it bother you?”
I lift a shoulder. “I hate the way it looks. For me, at least. Sexism at work. You nabbed a younger girlfriend, but I trapped an older guy with money. That’s not what I think, by the way, but that’s what people are going to say.”
Tuck’s eyes are playful. “I am older, and I do have money. You also forgot to add that my younger girlfriend is obscenely hot.”
“Ha. Thank you.”
“If I could shrink our age difference, Maren, I would. I understand why you feel the way you do. I’m sorry. God help the idiots I catch talking shit. And they will, you’re not wrong about that. But I think we need to approach it like, well, so what? Let them get themselves all riled up while you and I have fun doing our own thing. And how can you ‘trap’ me if you have yourownthing going on at the same time?”
I look down at the blanket spread across my lap. The striped grey and yellow wool is nubby, worn, and very warm. “That’s just it. I don’t have my own thing going on. In fact, I feel further away than ever from figuring out that part of my life.”
Tuck gives my hair a gentle tug, urging me to meet his eyes. “You put a lot of pressure on yourself to get things right on the first try. No one does. Not many people, anyway. Hell, I joined the Navy thinking I’d be a lifer. It was a great experience, but I knew pretty quickly I didn’t want to be in the military forever. Did I have any clue what I wanted to do next? Nope. But I kept going, kept talking to people and trying new things, until I did.”
“I admire your patience. I have less than a year of school left, but I’m so over it I want to quit. Which would be stupid, Iknow, for a lot of reasons. Not least of which is the fact that I went into a lot of debt to pay for it.”
He narrows his eyes. “How much student debt do you have?”
“A lot.”
“Give me a number.”
“I’m embarrassed.”
“Why? You’re getting a top-notch education. I didn’t go to college. Didn’t have the money or the mind for it. I respect that you do. You’ve clearly thrived.”
“I’m clearly failing.”
“You’ve struggled for one half of one semester. And I think that’s because you didn’t love teaching fifth grade, so you’re subconsciously throwing in the towel because there’s nothing else you could possibly do with a master’s in education than teach that class to those kids.”
