“Family in town for Christmas?”
“The entire family. Megan and her wife Stacey are bunking down at my place. Megan is the sole introvert in our family, so she needs to have quiet time, which is why they stay with me whenever they’re in town.”
Ben gave me a questioning look.
“I know when to leave her alone,” I told him. “They drove up from Boston yesterday, and after the stress of that, the energy level of the dogs, my excitement to see them, and a night of cribbage, she’s pretty wiped out. We’re going cross country skiing later, so she needs to recharge her battery before that.”
“Makes sense,” he said. “What’s cribbage?”
I stared at him. “What? How do you not know what cribbage is?”
He smiled and shrugged.
“They don’t have it in Hawaii?”
He shook his head, his mane of hair floating around him in a way that made me want to reach out and bury my fingers into it to see if it was as soft as it looked. “If it has, I somehow missed it.”
I frowned. “But I thought it was big in the Midwest.”
“Might be. All anyone wanted to play in Wisconsin was euchre when I was out there.”
“Huh, never heard of it.”
He threw his hands up, grinning, and mimicked my disbelief from a moment before. “What? How do you not know what euchre is?”
I clammed up for a second. He was treating me like I swore I wouldn’t treat him.
What do I do, what do I do, what do I do?
Maybe acting a little more like myself would be okay after all? Maybe?
“Well,” I said. “Clearly it pales in comparison to cribbage, or I certainly would have heard of it before.”
He waved a hand at me. “Describe this king of all games.”
“No way. I won’t be able to do its glory justice. It’s way easier to explain while playing. I’ll just have to bring a board over next time I – crap, I’m sorry, I’m not trying to invite myself over again.”
“You didn’t invite yourself over the first time,” he said.
Of course he was super polite. Of course. It made me feel like an even bigger asshole for immediately breaking my own promise to myself, and to him, not that he knew it.
“You know what I mean,” I said, and, feeling the need to explain myself, I just. Kept. Going. “I can be pushy. And I know you said you hate it when people pry, which is pretty close, so please tell me to back off. Seriously, sometimes I don’t even realize I’m doing it. I won’t be insulted. I probably need more of that in my life, actually. Most of my family let me bowl right over them because they know how I am and that I don’t mean to, like, insert myself into their lives like they don’t have plans or something. My brother’s wife says it’s because…uh, you know what, never mind.”
Wow. I almost told him I shared a character trait with sociopaths. That would have been a fun conversation to have the second time meeting someone.
He placed a heavy hand on my shoulder. “Ella, it’s fine. It’s nice having someone else in the house.”
He squeezed me and then let go, and I stared down into my coffee afterward, trying to think of something to say to break this uncomfortable silence.
Too much silence, I realized.
Shit! The dogs!
I whipped my head up. They were nowhere in sight.
“Faaak,” I said, the word strangled as I pushed away from the island. “Sam! Fred!”
Ben pointed to an open doorway behind me. “They went that way.”
