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“Maybe when you got your first period on the carpet in my room?” he teased.

I rolled my eyes. We’d been playing video games. He’d cleaned it up and I’d been mortified.

“You know, for a teenage boy, you handled that pretty well,” I said, flipping to a picture of his parents at a BBQ a decade ago.

“That stuff just never bothered me. Plus I knew what it was because Grandma was the one who gave all of us ‘the talk’ and most of it was her explaining menstruation followed by that female anatomy pamphlet she made us read that covered the importance of the clitoris in great detail.”

“I was always grateful for that pamphlet.”

He snorted next to me.

“Remember that thing she’d always say?” he asked.

“‘Anything you can do, she can do bleeding’?”

“That’s the one,” he said.

“I can’t even tell you how many times that mantra carried me through the tougher days at law school,” I said. “I had it taped to my mirror.”

“Ha.”

I flipped to a picture of everyone on Christmas Eve, circa eleven years ago, the two of us in gloves and puffy coats with arms around each other in front of Santa’s Sleigh.

“I loved when we drove up to Little Christmas for the parade,” I said wistfully.

“Yeah. That town always smelled like chocolate.”

“They had those chocolate-dipped Rice Krispie things at the bakery,” I said. “I ate so many that one year I got sick.”

“I know, you made me give you mine.”

I laughed and flipped the page. New Year’s that same year. “I remember this,” I said, smiling. “This party was so fun.”

He leaned over to study the image, his warm shoulder pressing into mine. “I still remember my New Year’s resolution from that year.”

I looked up at him. “You do? What was it?”

“To get you to second base.”

“Ha! I think I had the same resolution.”

“We both made our goal, then.”

I could feel the rumble of his chuckle against my arm.

“The week after Christmas was always the best week,” I said thoughtfully. “No school, nothing to do and nowhere to be.”

“No hard pants, just pajama bottoms and eating leftovers and random crap that you got at Christmas,” he said. “Those weird candies Mom always put in our stockings.”

“And if you put all the flavors in your mouth at the same time it tasted the way a gas station bathroom air freshener smells?”

The smile I got creased his eyes at the corners.

“I swear every year we ate a whole tin of that caramel popcorn your aunt sent,” I said, turning the page.

“I still do that,” he said. “But mostly because I’m too busy for decent meals at the hospital.”

“Beau used to bring me food when I was studying for the bar. It’s the only reason I didn’t live off beef jerky and banana pudding for breakfast.”