To watching movies at home while Mom and I lay in a blanket fort, eating cinnamon-sugar popcorn for a Saturday night dinner after a long work week for her and a long school week for me.
To celebrations after the school year was over, whether I’d had an easy year or a hard year.
To picnics with friends where Mom’s popcorn bowl would be empty before the main dinner dishes were uncovered.
“Is it just me, or would the neighbor and the guy who died in the suit of armor make the best couple? Like, why can’t the neighbor see the ghosts too?” she says midway through the episode.
I stop the show and turn to stare at her.
“What?” she says around a mouthful of popcorn.
Her blue eyes are a little wider. Forehead a little wrinkled. One brow slightly higher than the other.
“Are you fucking serious?” I ask her.
“About shipping two characters on a TV show?”
“Iship them.”
“Obviously. They’d be adorable.”
“No one else on the forums is shipping them.”
Shit. That slipped out.
Didn’t mean to confess to beingthatlevel of invested.
But she doesn’t react to me being a forum geek.
Instead, she stares at me with horror. “No one?No one?”
“Maybe five other people. Most of the forums want him to hook back up with the princess ghost.”
Margot makes a face like she tasted spoiled cottage cheese. “I don’t like to say negative things about women in general, but theprincess ghost is getting on my last nerve. She’s been dead for three hundred years. I think she can learn how to be nicer to the ghosts who smell like toast.”
I’m sweating.
I’m getting harder by the minute, and I’m sweating, and Margot has a dusting of cinnamon sugar in the corner of her mouth, and I want to lick it off her, and then haul her into the bedroom and make her scream my name.
All because she’s all in on seeing my favorite show the same way I do. “How fucking much did you investigate me?”
One side of her lips curves up in a half grin. “If my team investigated your TV preferences, I didn’t get a dossier on it, if that’s what you’re asking.”
I want to kiss her.
I want to kiss her while she’s smiling, and I want to feel every inch of her body, and I want to?—
I want to protect myself from making the same stupid fucking mistake twice, so I turn back to face forward and hit play on the show.
She’s watching me.
I can feel it and half see it out of the corner of my eye.
The show keeps playing, not that I can process a single word that’s being said.
She laughs at something that I completely miss.
I reach into the popcorn bowl to distract myself, and inadvertently grab her hand instead.
