“There’s something about your body you don’t like?” he asked.
Lila Mae laughed. “Trap, honey, I’m a woman. Of course there’s something about my body I don’t like.”
He blinked at her. “All right, fair enough, but I think you’re perfect just how you are.”
She leaned her temple against his. “You have to say that because you’re my boyfriend.”
“No, I don’t,” he said. “I say it because it’s true.”
“Would you have a problem with me doing plastic surgery?”
He didn’t answer right away, but that sort of provided the answer that Lila Mae needed.
“I want you to be happy,” he said, slowly, diplomatically. “But I guess ‘have a problem’ isn’t the right way to phrase it. I really do think you’re beautiful, and I don’t ever want to make choices for you. But I think my momma is beautiful too, and she’s almost sixty-five years old, and she looks like it. Sheshouldlook like it. She doesn’t need to look like she’s thirty. She earned the lines on her face. They become part of her, you know?”
Lila Mae nodded, though she didn’t really know. “I don’t know how I’m going to feel,” she said. “In thirty-five years.”
“Yeah, of course.” Trap chuckled. “Who would?”
“But I see your point.” She focused back on the app and swiped several times. “I don’t think there’s any Chinese on here.”
“We can go,” he said, but Lila Mae leaned further into him, almost refusing to get up.
“I don’t want to.” She met his eye. “I just want it to be us tonight. No waitresses and no other conversations with everyone in town.”
“We don’t have to converse with everyone in town.”
Lila Mae scoffed. “Trap, you know everyone, and they know you, and we have at least three or four conversations with people every time we go out.”
“That’s not true,” he said.
Lila Mae cocked her head and glared at him. “It so is, and you know it.”
Trap’s eyebrows drew down in the most adorable way possible. “I guess I’ve never thought about it. It’s just a normal trip to town.”
“Yeah, normal for you.” She handed him her phone. “Let me go do my hair. You pick something for us to eat, and then we’ll go out to the river.”
He took her phone and looked at her as she stood. “And you’ll tell me stories about your family?”
“Yes,” she said. “You don’t think we’re too different, do you?”
“No,” Trap said, and he seemed a little surprised by the question. “Do you?”
“I’m not sure yet,” Lila Mae said, and then, before she could do anything that would capsize their relationship completely, she added, “Let me go do my hair. I’ll be right back.”
She hurried into the bathroom and looked into her own eyes in the mirror. “It’s okay if you’re different,” she whispered, and then used her foot to close the door behind her. She didn’t want someone exactly like her anyway.
She thought of the question her family asked her every time she spoke to them, which wasn’t often, but still:How are things in Texas?
Lila Mae thought through that question and how she’d answer it right now, in this moment. “I’m happier than I’ve been in a long time,” she said to herself, and though she’d whispered the words, they rang with truth and finality.
Shewashappier than she’d been in a long time, and Trap was a big part of that.
They’d grown up living two very different lives, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t build a cohesive future together, and Lila Mae certainly didn’t need to sabotage it before the foundation finished curing.
Her momma had once told her that the reason she and Daddy got along so well was because they agreed on a few major important things: religion, how to spend their money, and how to raise their kids.
She and Trap hadn’t made it that far in their discussions yet, but having a different upbringing wasn’t a relationship killer, and as Lila Mae worked her hair out of her ponytail, she thought through which story she could tell Trap that night.
