“The meteor shower isn’t supposed to really get going until around midnight,” she said.
“I’m sure we can keep ourselves busy until then,” he said drily.
She laughed. “Hungry?”
He nodded, reaching for the cooler. He unlatched it and flipped it open, tossing her a paper plate. “You make this?” he asked as he opened the container of fried chicken.
“You’re kidding, right? This is from the café.”
He grinned as he loaded up a plate. “You might have learned to cook in the last ten years. How would I know?”
“Well, I haven’t. At least, not like this.” She put two pieces of crispy fried chicken and a slice of cornbread onto her plate.
Mark shrugged. “It’s what restaurants are for, if you ask me.”
She smiled as she bit into her chicken. “Agreed. Oh man, that’s good.”
“Missed this kind of food when I was overseas,” he said.
She looked at him, surprised. It might be the first time he’d ever volunteered information about his time in the Army. “Nothing beats good Southern cooking. What did you miss most?”
“Dessert,” he answered without hesitation.
“You’ve always had a sweet tooth.”
He nodded as he polished off his first piece of chicken and started in on the second. “Chocolate cake. Every time I came home on leave, I’d buy myself a chocolate cake.”
“And eat the whole thing by yourself?”
“Yep.”
She laughed. “Good thing I remembered to pack cookies for tonight.”
Mark had almost finished his second piece of chicken and showed no signs of slowing down.
Jessica finished her first and picked up her cornbread. “Do you keep in touch with any of the men from your unit?”
He chewed and swallowed a bite of chicken. “E-mail sometimes. They’re in Syria now.”
It must be hard for him being here while they were over there. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what it was like for you, Mark. We had never talked about the Army or anything. You completely blindsided me when you enlisted.”
He was silent for a moment. “It was something I needed to do.”
“I get that. But I would have supported you, you know that, right? I’d have waited for you.”
“I couldn’t ask you to do that.” He had a faraway look in his eyes that was as disconcerting as it was frustrating.
“With all due respect, that was my decision to make.”
***
“I did what I had to do.” Mark had heard the frustration in her voice, but he couldn’t apologize for what he’d done. He’d done it for her as much as he’d done it for himself.
“If you could go back and do it over, would you change anything?” She crawled closer to him on the blanket, her brown eyes shining in the near darkness.
“No,” he answered truthfully.
She grumbled under her breath, something about a “stubborn, stupid man.”
