He was overthinking things. Lina didn’t do that. She lived in the moment while he worried about consequences and intent. As if to push the point home, he looked at her from across the table, and she tossed a celery stick at him.
He picked it up off his lap and lobbed it into the trash can ten feet away without looking. It was a skill he’d perfected as a teenager.
Lina fanned herself in feigned awe, coaxing an embarrassed smile out of him, no matter how hard he fought to keep a straight face. It was impossible to feel cool around her for more than two seconds. She threw him off kilter, while still accepting him the way he was. Accepting his family. It made her quite an attractive and intimidating package, all wrapped in one.
He wished he would have just asked her out like a normal person. He would have still felt out of his depth, but at least they wouldn’t be stuck in this dumb lie where he questioned everything they said and did, wondering if any of it meant anything.
Maybe she hadn’t wanted to kiss him at all, but felt obligated to play along. Or she was fine with kissing him, but only for fun. There was that overthinking again. He finished his turkey sandwich and stood up to clear his plate. Lina was done too, so he took her plate as well and brought them to the kitchen.
Kip, Heather, and Josie arrived just as they finished cleaning up lunch, and the whole group got to work putting up the massive artificial tree, freeing it from the beat up cardboard box it lived in most of the year. Alec and Dillon pushed the couches out of the way while Mom and Josie got out the lights and ornaments.
Lina pulled out her phone and turned on some Christmas music. Then she began spreading out the flattened branches, working her way methodically around the tree. Heather, who had been standing back looking a little lost, went to join her.
“She’s a gem, this one,” Mom nudged Dillon with her elbow. “I really like Lina.”
“Me too.” Dillon sighed a little too despondently.
Mom’s eyebrows dipped. “I sense a ‘but’ at the end of that.”
“But … we’ll see.”
She didn’t pry further, for which he was grateful. He untangled the strings of lights while Kip tested them out and started winding them around the tree.
Josie handed Dillon a pile of ugly Christmas ornaments from his elementary school years, the ones with a badly cut circle around his school photo glued to a pine cone or a star made from craft sticks. He tried to casually tuck those in the back of the tree, but Lina came over to investigate.
“What are you doing back here? Hiding ugly ornaments?”
“Doesn’t everybody do that?” he asked, hiding the two he had left in the crook of his elbow.
Lina peeked over his arm and plucked one out. “Oh, Dillon. This is adorable. You can’t hide this back here.” She reached for the one he’d placed deep in the tree, but he was faster. Except the tree shook, and while he was grabbing that one, Lina reached in and stole the other ornament from under his arm.
The resulting scuffle turned into a tickle fight, and the ornaments went flying. So did the tree. Dillon grabbed the tree and righted it before the whole thing fell over.
“Are you two okay back there?” Josie asked, doubled over with laughter.
Dillon’s face burned as he turned to see all eyes on them. Everyone looked so happy for him. Well, Alec looked sort of nauseated at the same time, but that begrudging, atta boy, was there too. His mom was practically awash in happy tears.
It suddenly felt like pressure. It was a rare thing for Dillon to be the fun-loving center of attention. And it was all because of Lina. She was this burst of joy who made everything better, except she wasn’t really his.
***
Lina could tell the stress of the situation was weighing on Dillon. She didn’t totally understand it, but she felt for him all the same. Not everyone could be an actor. So, after the decorating wound down and Josie and Heather had finished showing off their Black Friday finds, Lina suggested a walk. She took Dillon’s hand and dragged him outside before anyone else could invite themselves along. His family no doubt assumed they wanted some time to themselves. It wasn’t exactly a wrong assumption.
As soon as they were clear of the windows, she dropped his hand and picked up the pace, looking around their family farm with real curiosity. Having grown up mostly in tiny apartments, open space like this was a foreign concept. The dogs whined from the chain link pen where they’d been banished. Heather was still afraid of them, so Kip had corralled the dogs as soon as they arrived. Lina stopped to pet each one, even though she was rewarded with slobber.
Then she headed toward the modular mountains of hay. They were under what she’d describe as a giant carport: open, but with protection from the rain. She ran her hand over one of the bales, noting the sage green alfalfa leaves in tiny tear drop shapes. Naively, she’d always pictured straw the way they showed it in story books, golden and stick straight.
Dillon leaned against the haystacks with her. The hay dwarfed them both by at least twenty feet.
“How do you stack it that high?” she asked. The answer was tractors, of course, but she hadn’t seen one up close or paid much attention on the rare occasion when she passed one on the road. They were suddenly more interesting knowing it might be Dillon in the driver’s seat.
“Come here, and I’ll show you.”
She followed him over to another of their giant carports where the different tractors were parked in neat rows. Dillon pointed out each one, explaining the process, from the wide tractor that mowed the hay, to the baler that took the swept up piles and turned them into bales. Last of all was the wagon that picked up each bale and stacked them against its giant forklifts. It was a far cry from the pioneer days of Laura Ingalls stomping down hay with her dad.
“Do you want to go for a tractor ride?” Dillon looked a little embarrassed at offering. If he only knew how much she’d been hoping he’d ask. Like a little kid, she’d been dying to scramble up to the seat at the top the moment she saw them.
“Which one?” she asked.
