“What is that supposed to mean?” I ask with another mouthful of fries.
They are absolutely delicious. Crunchy, soft, salty. Everything a fry should be.
“Country girl,” he answers matter-of-factly, as if all country girls wear dresses.
It’s not true though. A lot of country girls adore their Wranglers.
“I’m just surprised you don’t have a pair of cowboy boots to go along with your getup,” he adds.
“I’m not a cowgirl, Evan.” This time I roll my eyes. “But I left my boots back in Yonkers.”
Another hint of a repressed smile appears on his face. “Noted.”
“However, my family doesn’t farm or run a ranch. We never owned any livestock, even though some of my friends did for 4-H. I’ve never milked a cow. I’ve never watched a chicken lay an egg. I’ve never learned to rope and ride,” I say so I can continue arguing my case.
He throws up his hands so they frame his face. “I surrender. You are not a country girl.”
“Oh, I’m a country girl,” I admit. “The city hasn’t exactly redefined me much, even after six years. I’m just not acountrycountry girl. I’m a small-town, backwoods kind of girl.”
His eyebrow lifts slightly. “Backwoods?”
“Southeast Oklahoma. Rolling hills, lots of trees, home of luxury vacation homes,” I describe. “It’s not the kind of Oklahoma a lot of people assume when they hear I’m from Oklahoma.”
He nods his head. “Magnolia Creek.”
Of course he knows. He did interrogate me in my own apartment. It makes me wonder if he did one of those huge evidence boards as he dug up information on me, and it also makes me wonderhowmuch he really knows.
But thank goodness I deleted all my embarrassing photos and status updates on Facebook from high school when you had to take a picture on a digital camera, hook it up to your computer, and then upload it along with filters and frames that seemed very cool at the time. It was not.
My teenage rants had also been lengthy, which proved that when Twitter became popular, it wasn’t the right app for me. One hundred and forty characters is not enough for my wordiness.
I nod my head. “Yes.”
“You had amazing bangs,” he adds, and he says it with a straight face, displaying no emotion so I can’t tell if he’s being serious or teasing me.
My cheeks warm at the thought of him looking through my old pictures, like the ones from spring break in my red bikini…
I sure took that seventeen-year-old body for granted. I thought my size four hips were huge, and now I haven’t seen that size in my closet, well, technically my clothing piles, for years.
He shrugs his shoulders. “What? You didn’t think to Google me?”
Google knows less about him than it does about the real moon landing, according to Mal. The articles on Evan are all pristine and perfect, nothing that feels honest or relatable. The cardboard cutouts of him that are always at the bookstores beside his bestsellers have more feelings.
“I’ve tried,” I admit. “You’re a hard case to crack.”
There’s a twitch of his lips that makes me believe he wants to smile, but he doesn’t. Instead, he just says, “I’ve told you I don’t like to live for the opinions of others.”
“Staying unknown doesn’t keep you safe from those opinions. Sometimes it just makes you lonely,” I reply, and I don’t mean for the words to come out as harshly as they do, but Evan doesn’t even flinch at them.
He takes a sip of his water before asking, “So, what about your family there?”
“My family?” I ask.
He nods his head. “From my research, everyone is there.”
They are. My dad, my mom, my grandma, my sister, my annoying little brother, who suddenly doesn’t seem so annoying now that I’ve met Evan, and Andrew. Jerk-face Andrew, who still squeezes his way into every family photo even though he isnotfamily.
“My parents own a business,” I add, and I don’t know why.
