Her reaction surprised me. I heard her breathe again, but this time it was a little sigh, like a sigh of relief. “You’re with Conrad?”
“Yes.”
“How is he?” It was a strange question, what with her in the middle of being mad at me.
I smiled at him and fanned my face like I was relieved. He winked at me. “Great,” I said, relaxing.
“Good. Good,” she said, but it was like she was talking to herself. “Belly, I want you home tonight. Are we clear?”
“Yes,” I said. I was grateful. I thought she’d demand that we leave right away.
“Tell Conrad to drive carefully.” She paused. “And Belly?”
“Yes, Laurel?” She always smiled when I called her by her first name.
“Have fun. This will be your last fun day for a long, long time.”
I groaned. “Am I grounded?” Being grounded was a novelty; my mother had never grounded me before, but I guess I had never given her a reason to.
“That is a very stupid question.”
Now that she wasn’t mad anymore, I couldn’t resist. “I thought you said there were no stupid questions?”
She hung up the phone. But I knew I had made her smile.
I closed my phone and faced Conrad. “What do we do now?”
“Whatever we want.”
“I want to go on the beach.”
So that’s what we did. We got bundled up and we ran on the beach in rain boots we found in the mud room.I wore Susannah’s, and they were two sizes too big, and I kept slipping in the sand. I fell on my butt twice. I was laughing the whole time, but I could barely hear it because the wind was howling so loud. When we came back inside, I put my freezing hands on his cheeks and instead of pushing them away, he said, “Ahh, feels good.”
I laughed and said, “That’s because you’re coldhearted.”
He put my hands in his coat pockets and said in a voice so soft I wondered if I heard him right, “For everyone else, maybe. But not for you.” He didn’t look at me when he said it, which is how I knew he meant it.
I didn’t know what to say, so instead, I got on my tiptoes and kissed him on the cheek. It was cold and smooth against my lips.
Conrad smiled briefly and then started walking away. “Are you cold?” he asked, his back to me.
“Sort of,” I said. I was blushing.
“I’ll build another fire,” he said.
While he worked on the fire, I found an old box of Swiss Miss hot chocolate in the pantry, next to the Twinings teas and my mother’s Chock full o’Nuts coffee. Susannah used to make us hot chocolate on rainy nights, when there was a chill in the air. She used milk, but of course there wasn’t any, so I used water.
As I sat on the couch and stirred my cup, watching the mini marshmallows disintegrate, I could feel my heart beating, like, a million times a minute. When I waswith him, I couldn’t seem to catch my breath.
Conrad didn’t stop moving around. He was ripping up pieces of paper, he was poking at the embers, he was squatting in front of the fireplace, shifting his weight back and forth.
“Do you want your cocoa?” I asked him.
He looked back at me. “Okay, sure.”
He sat next to me on the couch and drank from theSimpsonsmug. It had always been his favorite. “This tastes—”
“Amazing?”
