She laughed. “Well, maybe I’m both! You’re okay, though?”
I nodded. “I’m good.” I thought about that for a moment. “I might be great.”
“Well, something’s changed with you,” she said. “You’re coming out of your shell, aren’t you? That was four complete sentences in a row.”
I flushed.
Jane pinched me on the cheek. She didn’t really do grandmotherly stuff like that usually. Like, if you found her baking cookies, you’d think aliens had body-snatched her. Unless they were hash cookies. So when she did something a TV or a storybook grandmother would do, it felt a little weird. Mostly, though, it felt special.
I didn’t tell Grandma Jane about Mason. Well, she knew about Dog and the kittens, and she knew that I was spending a lot of time at Mason’s place, but I hadn’t told her we’d kissed or anything like that. I wasn’t going crazy with the talking thing yet.
I’d told Mr. Conrad because he’d helped me get there, with figuring out stuff about communication and attraction generally, and about those things and Mason specifically. Sometimes after work we didn’t even touch the Lego anymore. I just showed him lots of photos of Dog and the kittens, and he asked questions about them that I answered.
“I like the orange one,” he said that afternoon, looking at a photograph of the kitten hanging by his claws from the top corner of the cage in the kennel room. “He’s a scrappy little rascal, isn’t he?”
“He’s my favorite too.”
“I thought Mason was your favorite,” he said, nudging me gently with his elbow so I’d know he was joking.
My face grew hot despite it, and I ducked my head. “I wasn’t counting him.”
“I know that, son,” Mr. Conrad said. “There’s cookies in the yellow tub if you want to grab some. Not the blue tub. Those are Jane’s, and, well, you have to ride your bike home.”
I huffed out a silent laugh and fetched the cookies. “Why is Grandma Jane making you cookies?” I asked.
Mr. Conrad wrinkled his nose. “Well, we share a common interest, as it happens.”
“Hash cookies?”
Mr. Conrad snorted. “No comment. Anyway, Jane saw you’d been spending time with me and came to make sure I’m not an asshole. Her words. I showed her some of my photo albums. The ones from the road trips I took with Aubrey, remember?”
I nodded. Mr. Conrad and his wife had traveled the country in an RV for six months.
“Well, Jane has a vintage Meopta Flexaret, can you believe that?”
I didn’t even know what that was.
“It’s a camera,” Mr. Conrad said. “We’re thinking of starting a photography club.”
Something about the way he said it caught my attention, and I raised an eyebrow and said, “Is that what they’re calling it now?”
It was Mr. Conrad’s turn to blush.
Oh.
I grinned at him. It was kind of funny when someone else was speechless for once.
He cleared his throat and said, “Show me that orange kitten again, son.”
Trying not to laugh, I did.
I stoppedoff at home before I went to Mason’s that afternoon because I needed to pick up some fresh clothes. Well, I didn’t really need to since I’d been doing laundry at Mason’s place, but I missed the guys. I missed Chase mostly. I’d seen him every morning this week when I’d walked down to get coffee from Gobble de Goose, and we texted a bunch of times every day, but it wasn’t the same.
And Chase was missing me too, because I sent a text to let him know I was coming by the house. And when I got there he was sitting on the old couch on the front porch, staring at the road like a kid waiting for his lost dog to come home. By the time I reached him, he’d set his face into a scowl because he never wanted anyone to know he had actual feelings.
“Missed you,” I told him when we hugged.
He squeezed me tight. “Dick.”
