“If I say yes, does that mean I can hang up now?”
“Yes, but don’t cry. I’ll see you next week.”
“Sounds good. Take care of Bob and Willie for me.”
“Ugh. Between your redneck names and Cade’s baseball names, our kids are going to be on talk shows, blaming everything on us.”
I hung up the phone and debated taking my dinner back to the bunkhouse but decided to step into the family room. The sunken family room held probably fifty pictures strewn around the walls in frames. It had been years since I had really studied the images. On my way to the couch, one photo caught my eye. It was a grainy picture of me, Kelsey, and Tessa. It looked like I was around nine, which put the girls at about five years old. I was on our concrete patio, holding our new kittens. The girls were on both sides of me, and when the camera snapped, Kelsey was looking down at the fur balls in my lap with a big smile on her face. Tessa had a look of pure adoration, but when I looked closer, her gaze was on me, not the cats.
I was playing Jake’s game this summer. How could we not with an eighty-thousand-dollar truck on the line? The problem was how easy Tessa was to be with. She was cool and funny and dorky in the most appealing way possible, and it was easy to get caught up in it all. In her. But the fact of the matter was, I was not marriage material. I wasn’t even boyfriend material. She had crushed on me her whole life, and the last thing I wanted to do was break her heart with this stupid game.
13
Tessa
Isat on the front porch swing, waiting for Logan to pick me up, wearing cute white capris and a flowy, navy top. This was the first time I had somewhat dressed up for Logan. And it wasn’t even really for Logan. It was for the nice people in the restaurant we would be sitting at soon enough. Mom had run the fruit stand today while my dad used me for manual labor, thinning fruit trees all afternoon. My shoulders were stiff from the work, but it was nothing compared to the dull ache in my lower back. The hard porch swing made an uncomfortable seat, and I sunk down lower to ease the pressure.
The sun cast a happy glow about the farm, but my mood slowly darkened the longer I sat on the porch. There was no cloud of dust in the air telling me Logan was headed up the gravel driveway and no text on my phone explaining why he was now seven minutes late. Though both of our previous dates had ended up being fun, I wasn’t sure I was in the mood for more flat conversation while trying to pull out just enough of the real Logan so I wouldn’t kill him.
Now, he was working at my house nearly every evening, and while we had great fun teasing and tossing mild insults back and forth, I was beginning to feel restless. Where we should have been more like friends, in many ways, he still felt like a stranger. He held back so much. It was like anticipating eating a really delicious club sandwich with so many flavors and layers but then being handed a plain ham-and-cheese on white Wonder bread. Logan definitely had the potential of a club sandwich, but he wasn’t bringing it to the table.
I mean…which was good because we had an agreement. I’m just saying that I’d like abiteof a really good sandwich. Not the whole thing.
I checked the time again. Jake needed to add a clause in the agreement that said every minute Logan was late for our dates, I got a thousand dollars extra from the truck sale. I bet that would get him here on time.
I probably wasn’t being fair. He was only nine minutes late now.
No. Nine was unacceptable. Five was okay. That was…traffic—a tractor broke down or cows on the road.
I picked at the salted-caramel-and-chocolate brownie I had saved him, left over from my offering at the fruit stand today. I hated to admit he was right, but people were excited about the treats. I’d even received a few special requests and had one or two customers stop by for the sole reason of seeing what I had made that day. It was almost embarrassing that I hadn’t thought about doing this sooner. It was something my family had never done, so I never considered it.
TEN minutes now.
Nothing like having your date forget all about you. I cracked my knuckles and took a large bite out of the brownie. My stomach was nearly ready to claw its way out of my insides. We still had a forty-five-minute drive into Salmon. Jake wanted us to have a fancy dinner, but since I had stipulations of not wanting to be seen by anybody local, Jake had reserved us a spot at The Sassy Heifer, a local fancy steak restaurant in Salmon. It wasn’t throwing mud or assembling furniture, so it naturally sounded amazing to me, and it was theonlyreason I was still rooted to my spot on the uncomfortable porch swing.
TWELVE minutes. I was going to kill him.
The front screen door squeaked open, and I turned to watch my mom hobble out with only her cane.
“I thought you’d be gone by now.” She took a few steps out onto the porch before sinking onto the rocker next to the swing.
“I was supposed to be.” My trained eye took in the movement in her legs as she sat. “You’re looking good. Look at how far you can bend your legs.”
She sighed and looked down. “Well, I might be showing off a tad for you. It hurts really bad.”
I breathed a laugh. “Relax them, then. You don’t want to pull anything.”
She sighed and straightened her legs back out, leaning back against the bench. “When is this all going to be over?”
“Look how far you’ve come. Two weeks ago, you could hardly move anywhere by yourself. Now, you’ve scaled the stairs, manned the fruit stand, and made it outside without any help.”
“I’m a medical marvel,” she said dryly. She sighed and straightened up in her seat, pushing a strand of blonde hair behind her ear. “Alright, enough whining from me. I’ve been hearing from your dad that Logan Marten’s taken you out every week since you got home. I swear I might as well be living in another country stuck back in my bedroom. You’re helping me do leg lifts every couple of hours. Couldn’t you have mentioned to your dear old mom that the boy you’ve been in love with forever has been asking you out?”
I snorted. “It’s nothing. Trust me. That was a long time ago. Logan’s nice, but I’m not interested. This is just about two people passing time together over the summer.”
She peered at me, arms folded, leaning back on the bench. “Why aren’t you interested?”
“He goes through women as often as a stick of gum.” Even as I said it, I cringed inside, judging him so completely. But still, if what one hears from his own occasionally overly dramatic sister is true, I was probably not too far off.
