I half expect him to walk away, maybe even exit the parking lot, stomping silently down the road until he gets all the way back to his house. But then his lips twitch, and I don’t know if it’s a trick of the light or if he’s getting feisty, but I swear I see a sparkle in his eye. He reaches for the bowl, his biceps flexing as he lifts it, then turns and follows me to an open picnic table behind the Dairy Barn. I settle in across from him and take a long, lascivious lick of my rapidly melting ice cream.
But Dan just stares at his bowl. “What the hell did you order for me?”
“Triple brownie delight,” I say around a mouthful of ice cream. Because this isn’t a real date, so who cares if I talk with my mouth full?
“What’s the delight? A sugar coma?”
“If you finish the whole thing, you get a free T-shirt,” I say. I nod at the back window of the Dairy Barn, which sports an array of faded, dusty T-shirts in the colors of the building.
“Lucky me,” Dan says.
“I would like to see you in the pink one,” I say.
Dan plucks a cherry off the top of his sundae and places it between his teeth. He snags my gaze with his, his lips quirking into a smile before he gives the stem a tug. “If you want to see me in the T-shirt, I’ll just buy the T-shirt,” he says.
My entire body goes molten, and I’m surprised my ice cream doesn’t melt into rivulets dripping down my wrist.
“Now, this is a good date,” I say, watching him scoop a heap of ice cream and baked goods onto his spoon.
“That’s what I like to hear.”
CHAPTER 21
DAN
I’ve spent many hours of my life sitting on these picnic tables behind the Dairy Barn, usually some combination of hot, sweaty, mosquito-bitten, and sticky. I wasn’t kidding when I said I’m not much of a sweets guy. I never have been. I came to the Dairy Barn to make sure my brothers stayed out of trouble, but I wouldn’t say I formed precious memories here.
Sitting across from Carson is different.
That’s in spite of the metric ton of ice cream she has sentenced me to. Despite all my grousing, I manage to get through about half, and I only feel a little bit like I might die.
“That was good, but the serving size was diabolical,” I say as I toss the reminder into the trash.
“Grace and I tried to take one down as a team in sixth grade, but we barely got farther than you did.”
“What were you going to do with one T-shirt?”
“Joint custody, duh,” she says. She turns to head for the car, but I make my way back toward the line. “Where are you going?”
“I told you I’d buy the T-shirt.”
“Come on, I was just kidding,” she says.
I lift an eyebrow. “I wasn’t.”
Thankfully, there’s a temporary lull, and I’m able to get thepink Dairy Barn T-shirt without too much of a wait. I throw it over my shoulder like a bar towel, then pull out my keys. “Okay, next stop,” I say.
“You mean the triple brownie delight didn’t end your night?” she asks.
“I mean, I think I’ll probably sugar crash like a toddler at a birthday party in, like, forty-five minutes, but I can power through,” I tell her, leaving out the part about how the triple brownie delight was actually really delicious and I enjoyed every bite. Especially the ones she took off the spoon I offered her. I focused entirely too much on her tongue, wishing I could taste her, covered in vanilla and chocolate. It’s that thought that inspired the idea for our next destination. “The night is young. The sun hasn’t even set yet.”
“Okay, then. Where to?”
“It’s a surprise.”
I almost never talk about my childhood. People I met in college heard I was from a tiny town in the middle of Indiana and immediately tuned out. Not that I minded. My years in Cardinal Springs were defined mostly by my desire to escape it. My earliest memories are of the aching emptiness and confusion when my baby sister came home from the hospital but my mom didn’t. After that, I remember trying not to disappear in a house full of chaos and grief until I got old enough to realize that disappearing was actually exactly what I wanted to do. As part of a big family who experienced a big tragedy in a tiny town, I always felt like I was being watched, studied, picked apart. My teen years were an exercise in finding places where nobody noticed me. Where nobodysawme.
And to my utter surprise, I find myself telling Carson all of this as we head down the rural highway leading out of town. Whenever I pause, she gently asks another question, andsuddenly I’m talking again. I keep my eyes on the road and the passing cornfields, but I can practically hear her listening beside me. And it feels good, revealing parts of myself to her. The more I talk, the more I want her to see me. I want to let her into every part of myself. It’s the same feeling I get when I see something I want to sketch, my fingers itching for a pencil so I can explore it on paper. I hear a question in that gentle-yet-confident voice of hers, and Iwantto talk.
