“I mean, we could.” Lila Mae grinned over at him.
“And here I was thinking we were just going to get ice cream and eat it on the tailgate of my truck.”
“We’re doing that too,” Lila Mae said.
Trap cut her a look out of the corner of his eye. “First Thanksgiving, and now marriage?”
“And kids,” Lila Mae said. “I want to talk about those too.”
Trap’s jaw strengthened, but then he nodded. “That’s an easy one.”
“Is it?” Lila Mae asked.
“Yeah.” He looked over at her. “I want kids and you want kids, right? There. Conversation had.”
Lila Mae laughed and shook her head. “Oh, come on, Trap. There’s more than that.”
“Is there?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said. “How many? When we’ll have them, if you want to be married for a while first, settled into the cat sanctuary, build a bigger house, or have a certain number of clients.”
Trap blinked at her. “Are you serious?”
“Yes.” Lila Mae gave him a little shove.
“I hadn’t thought about all that,” he said.
“Well, you need to. For example, Rock and Clover had a baby right away, but Gun and Camila aren’t even pregnant. They got married within a week of each other. So see, there’s more discussion there.”
“Yeah, but that could come later, right? You know,afterwe’re married.”
“Ah, so youdowant to talk about marriage.”
Trap chuckled and opened the passenger door for her. “I suppose I do.”
“Oh, don’t you sayI doright now, honey.” Lila Mae patted his chest and then climbed into his truck, being careful to tuck her long skirt under her leg so it wouldn’t get caught in the door.
Highland River Gardens sat on the east side and a little bit north up near a bend in the river. The apple orchard sat just across the highway and south, and Lila Mae let the darkness surrounding them insulate her in a little bubble as Trap drove back into town. He played the radio on low, and neither one of them said anything more about marriage.
This level of quiet comfortableness with another person was also new and somewhat foreign to Lila Mae. She and Trap spent a lot of time together simply listening to the wind or talking about mundane things. He wanted a dog and to eat most of his meals outside, and Lila Mae loved watching him sit on her back deck while whittling something she’d use in a future garden, or pot, or Cat House.
He’d finished the first initial four for her, and she could house sixty-five cats at Feline Friends now. She currently only had about a third of that, and her population seemed to fluctuate around the twenty-count mark. Most of the cats got treated for minor injuries or diseases and adopted out in only a couple of weeks. The harsher cases might stay with them for a bit, and Lila Mae had taken on four permanent residents besides Cleopatra.
“Do you want to get married outside?” Trap asked.
“I don’t know,” Lila Mae said.
“Do you want to get married here in Texas?”
She swung her attention to him. “Yes, of course.”
He nodded, and her eyes had adjusted to the dark enough to be able to see the tension on his face.
“Did you think I would ask you or your whole family to go to Atlanta? Or Baltimore?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Your family is there, and you have a great big plantation. I thought maybe you’d want to get married there.”
She shook her head. “No, I have a new life here in Texas, and this is where I want it to continue.”
