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I look down at the new jeans and soft, long-sleeved shirt she bought me in a store that was playing too-loud music that sounded like clanging metal. Could I get used to dressing like this? Could I update myself in order to stay here, if needed?
Yes. I could. I would do anything to remain with her, no matter where or when.
“Where are you taking me next?” I ask, sliding an arm around her shoulders. Pulling her close to my side and flexing my jaw at a group of passing men. She’s wearing this short, white dress that basically amounts to a long T-shirt and matching high-top Converse that makes her look too young and fresh and fuckable to be out in public, in my opinion. “I’m starving, sugar.”
“Let’s go to the food court, then,” she says, veering us down a wing of this massive warehouse she calls the mall. There is yet another endless row of sparkling windows and vivid colors and people with irritable expressions. “What do you feel like eating?”
“Besides you?” I lean over and plant a hard kiss on her temple. “I don’t know. What’s the best thing this century has to offer?”
It takes her a second to recover, that blush making my dick sweat in my new jeans. “Hmm. I’m thinking…tacos?”
“Tacos? Never had one.”
“Then it’s settled.” She sparkles as she pulls me along. “Oh, I’m excited. The plan was to ration my allowance this week, but this is definitely an emergency. I’m getting you one of everything on the menu.”
Magnetized by her enthusiasm, I match her footsteps. “What are you rationing your allowance for?”
“A laptop. I’ve been writing in notebooks, but my thoughts come faster than my hand can move sometimes.”
“You’re a writer?”
She hums. “I’m trying.”
Gone is my anxiety about being locked in a different time seventy-four years in the future. All I’m worried about now is not being able to provide for her. Not being able to buy her lunch, buy her whatever she wants. If I’m stuck indefinitely in this time, how will I get a job? Ranching techniques have probably advanced by leaps and bounds, everything becoming reliant on technology that I don’t understand. How am I going to buy Shiloh a laptop?
“What is a laptop? Are they expensive?”
She laughs. “It’s a smaller version of a computer. It’s wireless and it fits on your lap.”
“Hence the name,” I mutter, pushing five fingers through your hair. “I only need one taco, Shiloh. Save the money for your miniature computer.”
She goes up on her toes and kisses my jaw. “I’ll get there eventually, don’t worry.”
I nod, trying not to let my worry show. “Your mom won’t buy it for you?” A flash of disquiet skids across her beautiful features. “What?”
“Nothing.” She opens her mouth and closes it. “It’s just that my mom…she doesn’t even know I write. We’re not very close. After my dad left and we moved in with my grandmother, she sort of left a lot of the parenting to my grandmother, since she had to work so often. We’ve just drifted. I feel like…”
“You feel like what?”
“I don’t know. Like maybe she resents having to work so hard to support me. Like maybe she just wants to be free.” She looks like she’s debating whether to tell me something else and I encourage her with a squeeze of her shoulders. “I wouldn’t blame her. Sometimes I just want to fly away, too. Maybe she and I are exactly the same in that way, but we’ll never know because we don’t really talk to each other.”
We stop at the end of a line in the food court, three people in front of us waiting to order at a place called Baja Fresh. “Sorry, Shiloh,” I say into her hair, wishing desperately that I could suck the pain out of her body into mine. “My brother and I used to fight all the time. I mean, fisticuffs after the church sermon, after dinner, hell, on Christmas morning. It was bad. Then he got into an accident, slipped on some rocks down at the quarry and landed himself in the hospital. Scared the hell out of me. We didn’t fight after that. I don’t know, I just lost the will.” I shake my head. “Humans are just like that—we think we have all the time in the world to fix what’s broken. But we don’t. Not always.”
Her eyes are shining up at me. “You miss your brother.”
“Yeah.” The mood is getting too heavy and I just want to see her smile again, so I wink at her and lean down to kiss her mouth. “He’d love you.”
Her lips jump at one corner. “Why do you say that?”
“Because you don’t put up with my macho bullshit.”
“That is true.” She turns to face me, tracing a fingertip down the center of my chest. “Not unless I feel like it.”
