“How was sightseeing? Wait, hold on,” he said. He reached for the switch on the wall and the room flooded with light. Thenhe leaned forward and peered at me before nodding slightly and resting back in the chair, which creaked loudly. “You look better.”
“Thank you.”
“I mean that you look more like yourself,” he explained.
I was already aware that my appearance earlier could have frightened away both vampires and sharks. “My eyes swell shut when I cry. I don’t do it very often,” I said. I had been holding myself together pretty well, I had thought, until I’d seen him.
“You kind of scared the shit out of me,” he mentioned conversationally. “So, here’s what I was thinking. Rather than flying home on that baby plane with Mr. Gowan, you could go on a regular airline with a big plane doing a regular route.”
I had been thinking about the drive home versus a return flight. I didn’t like things to be out of my control but more important than that, I really didn’t like to be afraid. It was a useless emotion and flying was another thing I would have to conquer.
But maybe I could conquer it in a larger plane. “That sounds like a good idea,” I answered.
“Perfect, because I already got you a ticket.”
“You did?” I asked, and he nodded.
“I didn’t want you to drive all that way by yourself, trying to hurry to be on time for work on Monday morning. I know that you’d be fine but it made me worried.”
I didn’t want him to worry—that would distract him from football. I nodded and thought that it would be easy to find out how much I owed him so I could pay it back. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome. You know, some of the guys have their girlfriends and wives here,” he mentioned. “I think they’re all sitting together.”
“Oh, that’s nice.”
“I mean, you could meet them,” he said. “Then you’d be with people.”
“I don’t mind being alone. I’m not very good at making friends, so it probably wouldn’t work anyway.”
The desk chair creaked and he glanced down at it before moving over to sit on the bed next to me. “You made friends with Kiya and the lunchroom gang. By the way, that’s a great name if they ever decide to start a band.”
“They made friends with me,” I corrected. “They’re very friendly people, and that’s why it worked. I never would have talked to them if they hadn’t done it first.”
“What about me?” he offered, but that was also wrong.
“Our friendship happened spontaneously,” I said, then reconsidered. “No, mostly it was because of you.”
“You came to my barn party. You also told me that you’d joined your gym to meet people.”
“But I’m not good at it,” I pointed out. “I joined the gym but I never made any connections there.”
“Think about trying it again,” he suggested. “If the people at the game aren’t nice to you, I would beat them up.”
“You’d beat up your teammates’ families?”
“Maybe I would say mean stuff instead, and wound with words rather than fists,” he told me. Then he stared hard at the bed. “What is that?”
“What?”
Ronan pulled down the sheet slightly and exposed more green plush. “Are you sleeping with a stuffed animal? Wait a minute, I recognize this guy. He’s from the miniature golf course.”
“He was my prize for winning,” I reminded him. “He has one eye so I named him Polyphemus.”
“Is that supposed to mean something?”
“Polyphemus was a Cyclops and Odysseus blinded him by driving a stake into his eye. If I’m remembering it right, the stake was on fire. It was so that the Cyclops wouldn’t eat him,” I explained.
“That’s a fun story. I’ll remember it so I can tell my future niece or nephew.” He waggled Polyphemus. “He doesn’t look like he’s going to eat you. This is a nice crocodile.”
