He didn’t know what possessed him then. “Industrial-sized bottle of lube and a giant box of condoms.”
She looked up at him, the card open in her hands, her eyes round.
“I’m kidding,” he said.
“Well. Well . . . I mean, I am quite certain that . . . in high school . . .”
“I wasn’t getting up to anything in high school. Not here. Can you imagine? Me being my father’s son, I would’ve been chased out of girls’ bedrooms with a shotgun.”
“Oh. Well. I mean, I assumed that . . .”
“Did you make assumptions about me?”
He was inching way too close to the thing that had been haunting him these last several days.
“I wondered. Of course I did. I am the lame younger sister. Of course I always wondered what you and Matthew were doing. You were so much cooler than me.”
“Well, for obvious reasons, neither Matthew nor I really came online until we left here. But we were very cool in college.” He and Matthew had actually been roommates at the University of Oregon, which they’d decided to attend together.
“I guess so. And as the younger sister, I guess I never thought the logistics through. I just thought you were both cool.”
He chuckled. “Well, I was from the wrong side of the tracks, and Matthew . . . you know. Once we got to college we cut loose. It wasn’t so easy in a town full of people who all thought they knew us.”
“Right.”
“Is that your problem?”
Don’t ask about that, you idiot.
She blinked. “My problem?”
“Yeah. You said that you . . .”
“Oh, I remember what I said. Thank you. But no. I’m not gay, and I’m not from the wrong side of the tracks, as I think you know.”
“That isn’t what I meant. What I meant is when you live somewhere all your life, people have an expectation about who you are. Which is really what I was up against too. Folks thinkthey know you. And because of that, they think they know what you want, or at least what you ought to want.”
“Oh. Well. I’ve always been weird. I’ve always been the girl with cages of animals in her room, the one you could bring a sick bird to. But yeah, guys are reluctant to date that girl.”
“Not now, though.”
“It would take a very particular kind of man to sign on for all this.”
It was true in some ways, but in others, her comment irked him. The idea that somehow men wouldn’t see she was a great girl. Sweet and caring.
“Then what is it?”
“Well. I’m twenty-seven. After a certain point, it gets weird. In college I felt like an outsider. When I came home, I hadn’t met anyone yet. Then I just still didn’t. You are right about the hometown thing being weird in some respects. You can’t really casually hook up with somebody unless . . . I don’t know. Unless you really think about it. Unless you know what you’re doing. I didn’t know what I was doing. Or even what I wanted.”
“So at this point, some of the problem is the barrier of having never done it.”
She snorted. “Done it. This does remind me of high school.” She looked up at him, and suddenly her blue eyes were grave. “Remy . . . if you . . . I . . .”
She didn’t ask. She didn’t verbalize what he thought she might. But his heart stopped all the same, his stomach went tight. Here they were, sitting on the bedroom floor that he’d once called his own. He had lived here, and so had she. Her parents had been very trusting to allow that. To let him live in the same house as their teenage daughter. God knew he would never, ever have done anything untoward then.
He was thinking about it now. But then, she was twenty-seven.
As she had just reminded him.
