“That was the best seven minutes I’ve seen in a while,” he said, wiping tears of laughter off his face.
Something told me he hadn’t laughed like that in a while, and I felt this urge to cuddle closer to his side on the couch. Instead, I went to use the bathroom and picked up Tonya on my way back.
I cuddled her instead.
“Did you say her name is Tonya?”
I was surprised that he remembered. “Yeah.” Then I ducked my head and blushed a little. “My sister thought she looked like a tiger a bit, and I really liked Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes, so she wanted to give her to me for my fourteenth birthday. But somehow, we decided she was a girl, so I couldn’t call her Tony the Tiger.”
He chuckled. “So, you naturally called her Tonya.”
I nodded. I was glad he understood and didn’t make fun of me. It was one of the best memories I had about my time in my childhood home. Of course, I’d had to keep Tonya mostly hidden because boys weren’t supposed to have soft toys, let alone teenaged boys. But somehow Tonya had survived, and I had too.
Maybe Luke read something on my face, because he reached over and squeezed my wrist, giving me a little smile.
“Did you always like animation and cartoons?” he asked as he let go and settled back into his corner of the couch.
I grimaced. “Not growing up. We weren’t really allowed to watch TV. We helped around the farm a lot.”
“Did you have other siblings or just your sister?”
“We had a younger brother, but he died when he was an infant. Nobody explained it to us other than God called him home, but now I think it must’ve been SIDS.”
When I made eye contact with him, Luke was frowning. He caught my questioning expression.
“It’s… the whole religion stuff. It’s so foreign to me.”
I laughed a little. “Yeah, I can understand that. It was what it was. I wish we hadn’t been forced to be such little adults all the time and that we could’ve stayed there.” I thought for a moment. “What I mean is… if I’d believed in those things, if I’d been happy there and not felt like an outsider all my life, maybe I could’ve been part of that church and….”
“But then we would’ve never met and I’d feel sad about it.” Luke smiled.
I didn’t say the obvious, that he couldn’t feel sad about someone who he didn’t know even existed.
“Did your sister get out?”
“Yeah, she did. She was engaged to a son of the pastor and that was a huge honor to our family and all, except she hated him. So, she ran away.”
At Luke’s wide-eyed expression, I shook my head. “Not like that. Well, kind of like that. But she had resources and she followed me to Utah secretly and she lives in Ireland now. She actually met an Irish guy in Utah who shared her less extreme views on religion, and when he went back to Ireland, she went with him.” I smiled at the thought. “She’s happy there.”
“And that’s the most important thing, isn’t it?” Luke smiled back at me.
On Friday morning, I made it a point to be up early to make him breakfast. He seemed as stunned as he had been the first time I did it, and it made me feel warm and fuzzy on the inside when he patted his stomach after finishing the meal.
“Thank you so much, Bear. This is going to set the workday on the right path.”
“I’m glad, Sir.” Then I confessed, “I might’ve also packed you lunch.”
Luke chuckled, the sound happy and light. “That’s amazing. That means I’m going to bring some takeout when I get home. I’ll let you know how late I’ll be, okay?”
He’d told me he had two appointments that day, but that he might also do some of the adminny things that you had to if you were a business owner. He seemed less than happy about that.
“Okay. I can fend for myself until you come home, even if it’s late. But if you think you don’t have time to get us something to eat, let me know so I’ll order something?”
“Sounds like a deal.”
After he left, I cleaned the kitchen, did a load of laundry and then settled in for what work I had for that day. I was doing some marketing reviews for a couple of small businesses and had a few suggestions on how they could do better. I would of course offer my own services for those upgrades, but they were free to choose someone else if they wanted to.
Around midday, I realized I needed a drink and a snack, so I wandered into the kitchen and looked into the fridge. Nothing really made me feel like I wanted it, so I poured myself a tall glass of orange juice and grabbed an apple off the bowl on the table.
