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He opened a bottle of champagne and looked at me. “Okay. Let me in on this or I’ll totally feel like I’ve made a fool of myself.”
“No!” I chuckled, almost on the verge of one of my little snorts. “It’s not you at all. I remembered something from Sally’s drawing.”
“Tell me.”
“So, back at my last place, my home was near a garden that used to attract a lot of bees in summer. I didn’t mind them, but I was also really scared of them.”
“I can’t blame you.”
“One day, I was out on a date. And halfway through, I felt something sharp inside my—well, in the lining of my—” I tried to say “panties”, but that made me laugh harder.
Elijah nodded, catching on. “Say no more. I mean, do, but you can omit that detail.”
“I panicked and told my date I had to go home because I had a bee in my underwear. The idiot thought it was an invite for him to call me to his place so he could free the bee.”
That was it. I began laughing so hard tears ran down my eyes. Elijah joined me, and whatever silence had been there between us suddenly felt like it belonged in a distant past.
“Wait!” I went on, rubbing my eyes and hoping against hope that the mascara company had meant it when they said this shit was waterproof. “There’s more. So, I got out of that date and rushed back home.”
“Did you get the bee?”
“That’s just it. So there I am, in my living room, fumbling and flailing around like a crazy person. I reached into my undies to get the bee out—hoping I wouldn’t pass out from an anaphylactic shock. Guess what I found?”
He shook his head cluelessly.
“The damned seed of an orange. Yes, that’s what was poking my butt all along. An orange seed.”
Elijah snorted into his champagne glass as I dried my tears.
“Someday, when Sally is old enough, I’m going to tell her this story.”
I paused the second these words slipped out of my mouth. Maybe it was too soon? Maybe I shouldn’t have said them? I...
Elijah’s eyes looked purer than I’d ever seen them.
“You mean you’d like to be around to watch her grow?”
It... why did this come so naturally to me?
I nodded softly.
“I would.”
“You have no idea how happy that makes me.”
The air was suddenly abuzz with a thousand cicadas, each making music in tune with the chattering of my heart.
With Noah and Benjamin, I felt like I was on an equal level. Like we were lovers who could banter and be friends and fight like kids.
But with Elijah, it was me reliving the times I’d had a hundred unfulfilled schoolgirl crushes on boys ten years older than me.
Like seeing someone who’s ever so slightly forbidden and thinking how good it could be if you were together.
Until now, that had only been a figment of my imagination.
Those romances existed in the age-gap steamy novels I liked to read, each a testament to the kind of desire I ached for.
Elijah was all of that, bundled up in a real, living form. And he was telling me things that made me go weak in the knees.
