“Those are all terrible names.”
“They’re not names, they’re species.”
I roll my eyes. “Well can I give them better names?”
“Nope.”
“C’mon,” I wheedle. “I’ll come up with really good ones.”
He shakes his head. “Not going to happen.”
“Why not?”
“Do you like it when people name their cars?”
I pull a face. “God, no.”
“Well, that’s how I feel about people naming fish. You don’t name your car, I don’t name my fish.”
I sigh and relent. “Sorry, boys,” I tell the fish. “If one of you starts drowning, I’ll have no way of telling John which one of you it is.”
“Fish don’t drown. And you can use their species names.”
“Raspberry sherbet, sword in the stone... geophysicist?”
John laughs. “You can call them Fish 1, Fish 2, and Fish 3. That’s the best I can do.”
I grin. “I’ll take it.”
We spread out on his couch to sip on wine and pick at half a leftover pizza he found in his fridge. We make noises about watching something on Netflix, but in the end we just wind up chatting a while. He tells me about all the local racers who have brought their cars to the shop, and all the different race car services (or, as he and the racers call them, “performance car services”) he wants to convince Fred to offer at the shop, and I tell him about the flowers Mrs. Finnamore is going to help me plant this summer around my house.
As we talk, I’m struck by the same feeling I had the other night. Being with John is just so easy. I don’t feel like I have to be cute or funny or sexy or interesting. Icanbe, if I want to, but I don’thaveto be—and that makes all the difference.
“Did you have a good time with Jim?” he asks, as he gets up to get rid of the empty pizza box.
“Yeah. He showed me all these old photos of him and his wife from their wedding day in 1949. I took some pictures of them.”I hold my phone out to show him the black-and-white photos. “Aren’t they cool?”
John takes the phone from my hand. “Damn—look at that old Porsche. Is that a 356?” He zooms in on the blurry picture. “I think it is.”
“I can ask him.”
“That’s awesome. See, now I understand why you like old people.”
I snort. “Yeah, exactly. It’s all for the cars.”
He laughs and heads off to the bathroom. I scroll through the pictures again. Jim and his wife were an insanely good-looking couple—she looked a little like Julie Andrews, and he had this really wide, dashing smile—and you can just tell from their photos that they were really in love. In practically every one, they’re beaming at each other like they can’t believe their own luck.
“Hey, you’re staying here tonight, yeah?” John calls. “I can try to hunt you down a toothbrush.”
I smile. “Yeah,” I call back. “Thanks.”
I look down at the pictures again. I’ve never really thought much about getting married—I still don’t feel that fussed about it, to be honest—but I hope that someday I have a stack of photos like this, where anyone who looks at them can tell I was really happy.
And if I happen to be imagining John standing next to me in the photos... well, let’s just keep that between you and me.
The next couple of weeks fly by alarmingly quickly. I’ve somehow gone from having no friends in Waldon to being slightly overwhelmed with them. My early-morning coffee date with Kiarais amazing—she’s just as cool as I thought, and really funny and smart—and our morning coffee dates really do become part of my daily routine. It means an extra ten dollars out of my budget every week (even though Kiara keeps rolling her eyes and saying, “Just let me pay, for Christ’s sake!”), but it’s more than worth it. Trey and I are also spending loads of time together to plan the Canada Day event, and he and Rose have John and me over for dinner twice. John’s parents even take us out for a long lunch one day in Summerside. And that’s not even mentioning all the time I spend with Jim and Mrs. Finnamore.
I spend nearly every night with John, either at my house or at his apartment. It still amazes me how easy it is to be with him. It’s so easy that it almost feels anticlimactic, if that makes sense. I kind of thought that when I met “the one,” it would be some grand, dramatic romance. But that’s probably the product of watching too many movies. And anyway, isn’t this better than drama? Someone you can be totally relaxed around, but can still make you feel all sparkly inside?
