Damn,” I breathed, looking around. “Have you ever been in a boat like this?”
This thing was loaded. Besides the upper deck with its full bar and lounge area, the cabin had a kitchen, two bathrooms, a primary bedroom with a king-size bed, and another room with twin beds in it. It was bigger and nicer than my apartment—and the view was better too.
Emma shook her head. “No. I’ve only ever seen something like this on TV. How much do you think this cost?”
“I don’t know, but I’m gonna google it.”
Amber’s luggage sat in the middle of a spacious living room. Two large Louis Vuitton bags. Emma walked around them and flopped down on the sleek white leather couch. “Can we just hide in here for a few minutes?”
“You don’t think he minds?”
“He’ll probably completely forget we even exist,” she mumbled, resting her head on the cushion. “Amber has a way of making people do that,” she said tiredly.
I sat down next to her. She’d sat in the middle so no matter which side I took I was going to be just slightly inside her personal space. My heart completely lost its shit.
We were both still in our borrowed bathing suits, wrapped in towels. She’d closed her eyes and I peered at her. Her skin was sun kissed. She smelled like the sunblock we were both wearing and her long hair was wet, over her shoulder.
I didn’t mind staying behind with her one bit. I was glad I was asked. I hadn’t been ready for the date to end three hours ago and something told me
I wouldn’t be ready for it to end later either.
“Kittens feel like a million years ago,” she said, opening one eye to look at me. “I miss the kitten part of the day.”
“We can go back tomorrow if you want. We can go after work. Or before. I’m sure Jane wouldn’t mind.”
She turned away from me and went quiet for a moment. “I should probably try to spend some time with my mom. I don’t know how long she’ll be here.”
I nodded. “Right. I didn’t think about that.” Damn. “If Neil’s coming, I could always go as your plus one,” I offered.
“All right. I might take you up on that.” “So how long is she staying?” I asked. “I honestly don’t know.”
“Well, where does she live?” “Nowhere. Anywhere.”
She stared out into the galley, deep in thought. “You know what I wish?” She paused. “I wish I could ask questions and always get the truth.”
“You don’t get the truth from her?” She scoffed. “No.”
I peered into the galley too. “How about we make a deal. If you ever ask me what I’m thinking, I’ll always tell you the truth.”
She looked at me with a raised eyebrow. “What if it’s embarrassing?” “The truth isn’t supposed to be pretty, right? It’s the truth.”
She smiled. The first real smile I’d seen since her mom showed up. “Okay,” she said. “What are you thinking right now?”
I laughed. “Wow, just coming in hot.” “Well, you said I could.”
I smiled at her. Then I looked away when I realized what the answer to the What Are You Thinking question was. I glanced back at her. “This is going to be harder than I thought.”
“Oh, it’s that bad, is it?” She looked amused. “It’s not bad. It’s just, you know, my thoughts.”
“Okay.” She tucked her leg under her. “How about this. I’ll do it too.”
Now I arched my eyebrow. “You’re going to tell me what you’re thinking when I ask?”
“Yup.”
“So you and I are never going to bullshit each other. The stone-cold truth, on demand, no filter, whenever we want it. That’s what we’re agreeing on?”
“Yes. The truth, whenever we want it,” she said.
“I guess we’ll always know where we stand, right?” “Right.”
“We have a deal then,” I said.
“We have a deal. So what are you thinking?”
I puffed my cheeks. “Damn. All right. Here we go.” I looked her in the eye. “You know, this exercise is a flawed experiment because the second you asked me, my brain started to catalog all the things I’d rather you didn’t know and now that’s the stuff I’m thinking about.”
She smiled.
I paused for a moment. “I’m thinking that I like you a lot more than I thought I would. I’m thinking that I probably smell because it’s hot and all my deodorant washed off in the pool, and that this place would be the perfect place to kiss you like I’m supposed to, but I wouldn’t because of the deodorant thing. I’m thinking that this whole thing with your mom and Neil feels weird and I can’t put my finger on why. I’m thinking that I don’t like her because she’s ignoring you for some guy she just met, and I feel bad that I don’t like her because I know you do. And then I’m wondering if I’m too hard on people, because I can’t stop thinking about what you said earlier, that you should always choose empathy, and if you can choose empathy with someone like that, I should be able to do it with people I love
—but I can’t. I’m thinking your bathing suit looks too tight and it looks uncomfortable like it’s going to leave lines on your skin. I’m thinking about what those lines would look like when you take it off—not in a s*xual way, but also sort of in a s*xual way.” I felt my face starting to heat up a little. “Aaaaand now I’m wondering if I’ve said too much and what you’re thinking.”
She was grinning. “Wow. That’s… a lot.” “Yeah. I agree.”
“Do you regret this deal?”
“Right now, in this moment, a little bit, yeah.” She laughed.
“Now you,” I said. “What are you thinking?”
She looked at me thoughtfully. “I’m thinking that I’m embarrassed that you noticed my mom is ignoring me. I’m worried you think something’s weird about Neil and her, because what if you’re right? I’m thinking that you do smell a little like sweat, but that I like it for some reason. And I’m also thinking this would be a good place for you to kiss me, but now that I know you’re self-conscious, I hope you don’t because you’ll be uncomfortable. And I also think my bathing suit is too tight, and I’ll have lines when I take it off, and that I really, really want to take it off because it’s starting to hurt.”
“You like the way I smell?” I grinned.
“I do. Also, I’m sorry you have to kiss me. It sounds like a tough job,” she said, putting out her bottom lip. “But you might want to.”
She was flirting? I beamed. “I might not want to,” I said. “I might not want to.”
“Oh, you will.”
She twisted her lips. “Hmmmmm. Well, I do love a man with confidence.”
“I’ve never kissed someone for the sake of breaking a curse before,” I said.
“Me either.”
“Good. We’ll be unencumbered by technique.”
She laughed. It was a loose, tinkling sound and I loved that I got it from her. When she came down from it, she sighed. “I just hope she doesn’t do anything bad to him.”
“Is that why you’re worried about this?” I nodded in the general direction of the pool.
“There are only two types of relationships my mom gets into. The ones where they ruin her life and the ones where she ruins theirs.”
“And which kind is this?” “Definitely the second one.”
I shook my head. “I don’t know. He seems like a smart guy. He can probably handle himself.”
“Yeah,” she said, but it didn’t sound like she believed it. She peered over at me. “Tell me about your mom, Justin. What’s she like?”
Now I blew out a long breath. “Well, she’s funny. Hardworking. She reads any book she can get her hands on and she remembers everything she
reads, even years later. She had me really young. Same age Amber had you, actually. She’s a good mom, always shows up for us—school stuff, birthdays. She makes these Italian cookies every Christmas and Easter that make me think of my childhood.”
She smiled softly. “She sounds really great.” “Yeah. She is.”
“But?”
So she sensed the “but.” “You know, if you would have told me yesterday that today I’d be sitting half naked in a million-dollar yacht with you, I wouldn’t have believed it,” I said, changing the subject.
She laughed. Then she gazed at me with those kaleidoscope eyes. “I’m glad you’re here.”
“You are?”
“Yeah. I am.”
The corner of my lip twitched.
“You know, I just realized you’re the first boyfriend my mom has ever met,” she said.
I grinned. “Boyfriend?”
“You know what I mean.” She gave my knee a little push.
“No, I’ll be your boyfriend. Sign me up. I mean, we’re not supposed to be dating anyone else, so we are technically exclusive. It’s not far off,” I said.
“Isn’t this whole thing so weird? What we’re doing?” she asked.
“I don’t really care if it’s weird. I’m just glad it’s happening. And not because I want to break a curse either.”
She smiled.
I cleared my throat. “So how does the boyfriend thing even work for you?” I asked. “You know, with you moving so much. If you get into a relationship, is it just long distance or…?”
“Well, right now relationships aren’t working. That’s why we’re doing this, right?”
“I mean, yeah. But if you did like someone. You know, in theory.”
She shrugged. “It hasn’t happened yet. By the time I’m ready to move on to the next assignment, it’s usually just sort of petered out.”
“And if it didn’t peter out?”
“I don’t know. It’s never happened.”
She looked back into the room at Amber’s bags. “I should probably look for Stuffie,” she said. But she didn’t get up. She peered at the luggage like she dreaded opening it and I wondered if she might find something in there she didn’t want to see.
“Are you unpacked yet?” I asked, changing the subject.
“Yeah. All done the day we got here. It was just two bags.”
I raised my head to look at her. “Two? What about all the stuff you accumulate?”
“I don’t accumulate. I don’t get attached.” “To what?”
She shrugged. “To anything. You know how you get a new phone and you save the box? I don’t do that.”
“You don’t save your phone box? What if you need it?”
She gave me an amused look. “Have you ever actually needed your phone box, Justin?”
“Well, no—”
“There you go. I bet you have a whole closet full of clothes you never wear anymore. A bin full of random wires and chargers that don’t go to anything—”
“They go to something.”
“You’ll never use it. Most of the stuff we hang on to we don’t actually need. My entire life packs into two large suitcases. And if it doesn’t, I leave whatever doesn’t fit.”
“That is almost terrifying,” I said. “No wonder you abandon plants.” “I prefer the word ‘re-home.’”
“You don’t want to live somewhere? Like, find a forever home where you can plant things in the earth?”
She looked back at her mom’s luggage. “Maybe one day. But so far I haven’t found a home I’d want to stay at forever.”
“Maybe home isn’t a place. Maybe it’s a person.”
She blew a soft breath through her nose. “Maybe it is.”
She got up and went to the first bag and laid it on its side to unzip it. “What exactly are you looking for?” I asked.
“A stuffed animal,” she said, rummaging around the clothes. When she didn’t find it in the first bag, she went to the second one. I knew exactly when she spotted it because she made a little happy gasp.
I watched her from behind, clutching something to her chest. “You got it?”
She nodded. “I never thought I was going to see him again.” Her voice was a little thick. She turned with a bright smile and showed me a droopy, gray, dirty unicorn with a floppy horn and a missing eye.
“Wow,” I said. “He looks… old.”
She looked down at him like he was a baby. “Yeah. Have you ever seen those YouTube channels where they restore dolls like this? I want to do that one day. Have his stuffing replaced and have him cleaned. Get his eye sewn back on.” She brushed a gentle thumb across his forehead.
I watched her looking at this doll lovingly and just smiled softly at her.
I knew that feeling. The feeling that you’re getting back a piece of your childhood. Like at Christmas when Mom would hand me a tin of her cookies and I’d be catapulted back to six years old eating them with Dad in front of the fireplace.
I deflated again, remembering what this Christmas was going to look like. And the Christmas after that, and the Christmas after that…
Amber’s voice floated up from the deck. “Emma? Justin? Lobsters are ready!”
We made eye contact. Like maybe neither of us wanted to go back to the real world. But we did.
The real world doesn’t like to wait.
