There were more choking sounds from Garrett.
"You have a dirty mind," I scolded, pushing his water closer to him.
"Seeing you in that costume really tripped the wire on that one," he replied.
"What am I going to do about the straw situation?" I complained, taking a scoop of the thick orange milkshake.
"Welcome to my world. Small-town America, where unrequited and disastrous love has a nuclear fallout radius that affects everything."
"Yeah, this straw thing is not going to work for me," I said, picking up the long spoon that had come with the shake. I dumped a good portion of the salt shaker on my french fries, then used a fry to scoop up some of the shake.
"Don't make that face. Ice cream and french fries are the best," I scolded. I picked up a fry and scooped up some of the bright-orange shake and handed it to Garrett. He recoiled.
"Taste it," I ordered, making an airplane motion then popping the fry into his mouth.
40
Garrett
The ice cream-covered fry wasn't that bad, I hated to admit.
"Is that a small smile I see?" Penny teased. "I told you it's good!"
I nodded. "It's good. I don't think I'd eat another one though."
"You need to have more fun. When people are released from cults, don’t they go crazy and do all the things they've been missing, like Kimmy Schmidt on that Netflix show? Did you go to clubs or ragers when you left the cult?"
"No," I sighed. "But my brother Archer went hog wild with tattoos, fast cars, expensive art, and women. I was more concerned with building an empire big enough to crush my father."
"Wow. Well, it looks like you managed," she said.
"Almost. Not quite."
"What was your first holiday like after the cult?" Penny asked, taking another bite of the toxic orange milkshake.
"Weirdly enough, it was Halloween."
"Did you do anything fun?"
I thought back to that cold fall more than twenty years ago. "The winter had come early that year. Remy wasn't yet old enough to join the military. He and Hunter had procured money from… somewhere, and we all had taken a bus to Harrogate. We slept in an abandoned house. Harrogate had Halloween events, but it wasn't anything as extravagant as now. Remy found a pillowcase, and he was very insistent that I have Halloween. Mace still hadn't complete shaken off the cult conditioning, and he was convinced we were about to bring about Armageddon. Of course that didn't happen. Remy took me trick-or-treating. I collected an excessive amount of candy. Archer stole most of it, then he ate too much and got sick."
"That doesn’t sound too terrible," Penny said.
I hadn't thought about that memory in years. Whenever I thought of fall, I always remembered the dread and the cold.
"Remy was really proud of that ghost costume," I said wryly. "He colored the eye holes with a black permanent marker."
"Maybe we should dress you as a ghost for old times' sake," Penny said.
"I thought you wanted me to be shirtless in a leather Roman harness."
"I mean if you're offering, I'm not going to say no to a shirtless man."
* * *
With all theinnuendos at dinner, I thought for sure we were going to end the evening on a high note. But instead, Penny drove me back to my house. This was turning out to be the biggest issue with losing my license—I had no control over where we went.
"You want to come inside?" I asked her, kissing her and tucking a curl behind her ear.
