Time passed slowly as I waited. My back ached, hunched over in the tight space. At last, the quilt moved aside. “Tucker?” I could barely see Ava now that the room was dark.
“I’m here.”
“She won’t check again.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah.”
“Should I go?” I asked.
“Get in bed with me. Worst case, I throw a pillow over you.”
In bed. “Okay.”
My eyes adjusted to the low light as Ava pushed back the covers.
“You should probably take off your shoes,” she said.
“So much for a quick getaway.”
She giggled softly. “Come here.”
I settled next to her, and she rested her head on my shoulder. A deep sigh escaped my chest. This was the most perfect thing I’d ever felt.
She curled in closer. “This is nice.”
“Yeah.”
“You said you had something to tell me that had to be in person.”
“I do.” I told her about the job and the house.
“You’ve thought of everything,” she said.
“Not really. You’ll have to get an ID at some point for the job. Do you have your birth certificate?”
“What’s that?”
“A document that lists when you were born and who your parents are. It’s something you need when you fill out forms for a job.” There were a lot more steps than that, but I didn’t want to overwhelm her with Social Security cards and all that.
I’d just been through it, and I knew the drill. I’d had to get almost everything reprinted since it was impossible to sort through all the stuff from my old house after my family died. There was so much emotion in old things. Even something as simple as a chair brought up the imageof my mother sitting on it, lecturing me as she doctored my skinned knee. A toolbox was my father trying to show me how to line up the shaft of a screwdriver in a groove.
When I got the Shelfmart job, I hadn’t been up for reliving my past to find the documents. It was easier to fill out forms and get replacements. It would be the same for Ava, although for different reasons. “Thank you,” she whispered.
I turned to kiss her. It felt different lying this way, her hair a dark shadow across the white pillow.
After a moment, she pulled away. “Tucker, can I ask you something?”
“Always.”
“How do you know if you’re a virgin?”
“You mean me?”
“No, silly.” She gave my chest a playful shove. “For girls. How do they know if they’ve had sex or not?”
My throat went dry. “I think you bleed the first time. There’s something inside that breaks.” I had a lot of second-hand knowledge, Bill telling me about how Sarah “bled like a murder scene” and they had to clean it off the back seat of his car. And some random bits from health class.
