His utter lack of concern is starting to calm me down. Maybe he’s right. I mean, never once in all our conversations over the past month did I feel like I was talking to someone with a vast difference in life experiences.
I do a quick check-in with all my pertinent body parts. Brain says it’s a little weird. Nose says he smells divine, no matter the age. Vagina has zero objections to any part of him. Heart asks to be excluded from this line of questioning.
Okay then. Guess we’re carrying on.
“You all good over there?” He grins at me, and my vagina lets me know that its “zero objections” has turned into an “invite him in.” This is getting out of control.
“Yeah, all good.” I squeeze my thighs together and think about the Dewey Decimal System.
“Your turn. Hit me with your deets.”
Oh boy. Here we go, world’s most boring origin story. “So I grew up in Oak Brook. My dad’s an insurance agent, and my mom stayed home with us. She’s an amazing quilter and spends lots of her time on that.”
“Who’s us?”
“Older sister, younger brother. Me in the middle.”
“Got it.”
He really doesn’t, but he’ll find out soon enough.
“My sister married her college sweetheart, and they have four loud children. My brother’s the world’s most immature commercial airline pilot who never gets flack at family dinners for being single. That honor’s reserved for me.”
“The patriarchy hurts us all.” He shakes his head. “So how’d you end up in Beaucoeur?”
“I got a scholarship to Rayman College and almost immediately switched from pre-med to library science.” I was elated to discover how orderly it is, putting everything in its place. “After graduation, I lucked into a job at the Beaucoeur Library and just… stayed.”
I glance over at him, still a little intimidated to be bringing this hot younger man home with me. He’s all active and outdoorsy, while I’m a stay-inside-reading type. I expect him to be totally bored by me within an hour.
We both fall silent for a bit, and then he asks, “So why don’t you have a boyfriend?”
Embarrassed heat crawls up my neck. “Why don’t you have a girlfriend?”
No embarrassment from him. “Because I needed to spend the past few years figuring out how to be an adult, and that didn’t leave a lot of room for me to be a decent partner for anybody else.”
“Hmm. I wish the guys I’ve dated had been that mature.” Just like I wish I’d been mature enough to tell them what I needed rather than swallowing my frustrations until the relationships imploded. I turn my head and watch the farmland whiz by my window, fields full of yellowing chaff left behind after the harvest.
“So how do you know Faith?” he asks, presumably as eager to get away from this topic as I am.
“She uses the library conference rooms for some of her community presentations. We’ve gotten friendly over the years.”
Faith Fox runs an educational non-profit that provides services like tutoring and adult literacy. “I take it you know her from the… the GED thing?”
I hesitate over the question, not wanting him to clam up the way he did during our first meeting, but he just nods. Maybe our texting helped ease him into sharing. His body language is relaxed, and he swirls his coffee before speaking.
“Yeah. After my family moved, it was… not a fun time.” His jaw clenches. “It was a lot harder to support myself than I realized. I ended up dropping out with a couple of months to go in the school year, but there was no way I was going to tell my dad he was right. So I made it work here.”
“That’s a lot for an eighteen-year-old.”
He shrugs. “Did what I had to do. It turns out getting a business up and running’s easier with a degree, and, well, that’s where Faith comes in.”
“She’s good like that.” Time to let him off the hook; I’d imagine talking about that isn’t fun for him. “So maybe that’s our story. Our mutual friend introduced us a few months ago, and we’ve been seeing each other since then. Your family’s out of town, so you’re doing Christmas with me.”
“Christmas with my best girl,” he says easily, and for a second I let myself imagine that he actually means it.
CHAPTERFIVE
Gabe
