“That’s too much for a kid.”
I shrugged at that.
It probably was.
But it was all I knew.
“I got breaks when we were with my grandparents in the summer.”
“Where?”
“In Shady Valley. I grew up in San Bernardino.”
“Different world from Shady Valley.”
“Yeah, definitely.”
“What’d your mom do?”
“She worked for an accountant.”
“No shit. That how you got the idea?”
“Yeah. Her boss was this badass woman who had all the finest things in life. Sometimes, when school was closed, my mom would bring us to work with her. And her boss would talk to me about accounting, colleges, and career trajectories. I was good with numbers. When I was old enough, she let me intern. Then helped me apply to colleges.”
“So, instead of going to basement parties, getting wasted, and playing spin-the-bottle with kids your own age, you spent your teens interning and planning your future.”
“To be fair, basement parties sounded as appealing to me then as they do now.”
“So, when was the last time you swung on a swing?”
“I don’t remember,” I admitted. I had some vague memories of it, but they were blurry around the edges.
“Well, tomorrow you can say ‘yesterday,’ then,” he said, pushing off the ground and pumping his legs.
Right.
That was how you did it.
Taking my cue from him, I pushed off, pumped, and then leaned back.
I wasn’t prepared for the free-fall sensation in my stomach—an intoxicating thing that made me pump my legs harder, then lean further back to feel it more intensely.
I couldn’t tell you how long we did that—swinging like little kids—but I can say that it was the most free and light I’d felt in a really long time.
Eventually, though, my growling stomach had me slowing down, then moving to stand.
“Weird being on your feet again, huh?”
“Kind of like stepping off a treadmill after a long time,” I agreed, following him on awkward legs back to the table. There we ate and talked mostly about Raff’s other adventures on the road. Which included being tattooed by a seventeen-year-old son of a tattoo shop owner, accidentally stumbling into a women’s-only wellness retreat, and joining a spicy book club when he’d been stranded in a town for a few weeks because the car needed some serious work.
After that, we cleaned up and made our way back to our rooms, where I finally decided to climb into the cold tub water, washing away the sweat and sand from all day in the high-desert.
I was still in said tub when I heard Raff in my room.
“Knock knock.”
“Out here,” I called back.
