I turned at the sound of Dusty’s voice. He hadn’t moved the snowmobile and was watching me, definitely up to something. “What?”
“I’m praying the electricity stays off too.”
"I think you'll be nice and comfortable snuggled in with my grandma and grandpa."
I waved off a laughing Dusty while a burst of heated anticipation raced up my veins.
Moments later, I stood by the fire, tempted to fling my whole body onto the flames to thaw out. What I wouldn’t give for a bubble bath or some hot chocolate. Grandma wrapped me in a large blanket and helped me to pull the loveseat closer to the fire for us to sit.
I should have known she would have been itching to get me alone. And what a cozy setting for baring my soul. Who doesn’t overshare while watching flickering flames and hearing a fire snap? She had me and she knew it.
Grandma cheerfully settled in next to me and dove right in. “So, what’s going on with you and Dusty?”
I opened my mouth to deny everything when she added, “And don’t you lie to me, Lou. I may be old, but my eyesight is still 20/20.”
“Really? 20/20? That’s amazing. Why don’t you sit right there and tell me all your secrets?”
Grandma’s eyes narrowed. “Maybe not 20/20, but it’s good. You’ve been acting strange and wonderful and happy since he got here. Spill.”
The fire crackled. The house was beginning to darken. When I thawed out sufficiently, I would need to run downstairs to grab the lanterns from the basement.
“It’s been fun reconnecting. He’s an old friend, if you recall.”
“Pish. You are both burning this place down with your looks and your jumping on his back and talking about kissing. Might as well just strip his shirt off and have your way with the man.”
“Grandma!” I dropped my head in my hands, laughing and mortified all at once. “What’s your hearing level at?”
“Lucyyyy.”
I put the quilt over my head. “I don’t know what’s going on, okay? I don’t know what’s come over me. I’m so flirty with him. He is with me, but it’s like I can’t turn it off. When I think I need to, he says something that gives me a great opening, and I realize I don’t want to turn anything off. I like who I am when I’m with him. It’s so different from any guy I’ve ever been with. It’s scary. I just…I don’t know. It’s probably nothing.”
Grandma patted my leg. Then we sat there in silence for a few long moments until she said, “Want to know a secret, dear? About finding the right one? Something I’m very glad someone told me when I was dating your grandpa.”
“There’s a secret for that? Yes, please.”
She bumped my shoulder, pulling the quilt off my head. “Not everyone figures it out.”
“I’m waiting.”
“The secret is that when you’re with the right person—the person who helps you be the best version of yourself—the relationship will feel very different than all the rest. Maybe that’s what you’re feeling.”
“It hasn’t even been 24 hours since he got here, Grandma. I shouldn’t even be thinking like this. Plus, he lives in a whole different state.”
“Well, I’m not telling you to run off and marry him tonight, sweet pea! I’m just saying, don’t be afraid to let in something good if it’s there.”
Grandma sat sweetly rubbing my arm, in a spot not even close to where it was half-frozen a few inches lower. Her sweet floral perfume was close to overpowering the log fire, but her simple words wrapped around me like a fuzzy blanket.
“Is that how it felt for you and Grandpa?”
She burst out laughing. “A dancer from Chicago who got swept off her feet and married a handsome, stubborn rancher from Wyoming? Yes. It felt very different.”
I fingered the blanket, smiling. I had heard the story of their meeting my whole life. How they met at college and he kept dropping his pencil in class so she would have to pick it up and hand it to him. From old pictures, he had clearly been a looker. Even from a granddaughter’s perspective, I understood how it felt making my grandpa burst into laughter. A hard-earned belly laugh, rich and genuine, didn’t come by often or easily and it took only once or twice to get a craving for it. Once you heard the burst of his raspy laugh, loud and reckless from a joke you told—you were a goner. You’d gladly spend the rest of your days trying to do it again. He had that spark about life. Oh, he was crotchety in his older years, but he was a man with a teasing glint in his eye if you looked close enough, and laughter was never far away.
“What happened? How did he get you? I mean, I know the story of you two at college, but I guess I never asked how your thought process went. How did you go from a dancer from Chicago to…” I motioned around the farmhouse, “this?”
“Honestly, it wasn’t hard. That’s what I mean when I say it will feel different. All of my other relationships before Bob were never easy. It was like trying to put a square peg in a round hole, as they say. They were good times, good people, most treated me nicely, but I was never truly comfortable in the relationship. I was always worried about what I said or didn’t say. How I looked. I was more conscious about how I presented myself. With your grandpa…” She paused, somewhere far away, giving me the impression she was back at college, picking up yet another dropped pencil by the rascally cowboy who sat behind her.
“Now, I know it’s going to sound cheesy, but I can’t think of any other way to describe it. It was like our souls knew each other. He loved to tease me and could drive me completely batty, but there was this overall feeling that I could completely be myself around him and he would love me for it. It was refreshing and easy to want to be with him. He was a safe place for me to land. Not to say there weren’t difficult things that came up here and there or some bumps to smooth over. Every relationship has them, but he was a breath of fresh air to me. And I told him so and do you know what he said?”
