“What?” The word came out muffled and slow as I was careful to say it and not spray it.
“Being too cute. You gotta stop.”
My mouth was currently bulging out like a chipmunk gathering nuts for the winter. I didn’t look at him. I went over the steps in my head of how one chews and swallows and did so with careful exactness.
We finished our dinner around dusk. The sky was an orange haze due to several wildfires a hundred miles to the west. The water reflected the reddish-yellow hues, giving the air around us an orange glow. Technically, my night had been a disaster, but now with that all behind me, for the first time, being with Logan didn’t feel like we were checking off items on Jake’s date list. We’d gone rogue, and now the night seemed brimming with possibilities. I suspected Logan wasn’t ready to be done either, because he jumped off the truck to open the passenger door and pulled out the bag of treats.
“In case we’re not done eating your feelings,” he said as he flung the bag between us before jumping up next to me once again. “Chocolate or candy?”
“Why is there an ‘or’ in that question?”
He dumped a handful of both into my lap. “I like the way you think.”
Eventually, we lay back on the tailgate of his truck, pointing out stars that would peep in and out of the sky from behind the hazy wall. The night felt strange. Nice, but unusual. Logan was a muted version of his usual flirtatious self, and as much as I craved a moment like this, I wasn’t sure what to do with it, especially under our dating guidelines.
He cleared his throat and lay on his back, looking up at the sky. “Can I ask you something?”
I shrugged and popped a handful of Skittles into my mouth. “Sure.”
“What all went down on your wedding day? I heard the gist of it from Kelsey a while back, but while I was meeting the man himself, it kinda hit me how little I actually knew.”
“You were there.”
“You remember that?”
He was one of the faces in the crowd that I remembered. Looking out in the audience before my life changed, I had found Logan’s curious eyes burning into mine.
“This has already been one of the most embarrassing nights of my life, thank you very much. I’m not exactly dying to go into the details of the other one.”
“Really? Themostembarrassing?”
“Yup.”
“You’re telling me, out of all the embarrassing nights in your past—I’m thinking specifically teenage years and a particular laundry room—a light tackle of your ex-fiance’s mistress is the worst?”
I leaned over and smacked a laughing Logan against his stomach. His hand gripped my wrist to stop another attack.
“We agreed to never speak of that, therefore it does not exist to me.”
“I didn’t agree to anything. And it most certainly exists in my mind.”
“You’re the worst,” I said, pulling my hand away.
“I’ve always wondered. Why did you come barreling into the laundry room in the dark?”
A soft laugh escaped me as I thought about that night, reliving the awkwardness. “I was trying to see if I could make it all the way there and back without turning on any lights.”
A deep rumble escaped his chest. “A perfect storm.”
I waited a beat before I asked him something I had always wondered. “Why didn’t you ever tell anybody? I thought for sure I’d be the laughingstock of the entire basketball team.”
“I felt bad for you. And a little for myself.” He broke off to laugh and pinch the bridge of his nose. A grin etched its way onto my mouth while I waited for him to continue. “You were fourteen. I couldn’t tell anybody that story. Out of context, I’d be thrown in jail.”
“You started calling me Jailbait.”
“Only when nobody else was around.”
The night settled to the sounds of the rushing water and the chirping of nature. The scent of both the mountains and fields combined with the crisp summer evening had me filling my lungs with air just for the sheer pleasure of it.
