I’d pumped my legs harder, trying to go higher and faster than she was. She always seemed to get her swing a little higher and a little faster than mine, no matter how hard I worked. “I dunno. I guess.”
“My mom wants to get married again.”
“How . . . do you . . . know?” I was out of breath from the pumping.
“I heard her talking to my auntie on the phone.” She didn’t say anything else for a minute.
“Who are you going to marry?” I ask.
“You, silly,” she answered.
I slowed down at that, letting the swing go forward and backward but without pumping. By the time my swing stood still, Stevie had been stopped for a while. She stood next to her swing, hanging on to one chain, her wavy golden hair in a long tangle down her back.
Reaching down, she pulled up a blade of grass and stepped in front of me. “Hold out your hand.”
I did, and she wrapped the grass around my pointer finger. Hey, we were six.
“Will you marry me, Logan Stephens?”
I looked into her gray blue eyes, or at least I liked to think I did, and said, “Yep.”
And she’d kissed me. Her lips tasted like chocolate.
And that was it. We’d talked about the vow, as I like to think of it, a few times over the years, usually when drunk and a little bummed that we were both still single, but we’d never kissed again, and we hadn’t really had a serious discussion about the possibility.
As I blow away one of the aliens, narrowly missing Noah’s avatar, which makes him yell in my ear, I wonder, why is that? Why haven’t we talked about getting together? Or freaking gotten together already? We live in the same house, after all, it wouldn’t be hard. It would be a matter of a nice bottle of wine, some mood music, and some talking, hopefully followed by a lot of kissing.
I haven’t ever brought it up, because I’ve always gotten the sense it needed to be her decision. I’d been her choice at age six; was I still at age thirty? I’ve never admitted this to anyone, but if she’d come to me at any time over the last few years and said she was ready to get romantically involved, I’d have said yes in a flash.
But she hadn’t.
So . . . now what? Do I let her work her list and hope she gets to number eleven? Do I playfully remind her of our agreement again? Or do I do the mature thing and tell her how I feel about her?
The thought of that makes my muscles tense up and my stomach sour. Telling her that could change everything between us. It could make our relationship incredibly . . . awkward.
Stevie and I have something special, after all. We’ve been friends since childhood and housemates since college. We’ve always had each other’s backs and never had a serious fight.
But the last year or so she’d grown a little more distant, like she felt the big 3-0 deadline bearing down on us as much as I did.
And now it’s almost here.
I have to do something to persuade her that what we have is not only worth preserving but worth deepening into something new.
I have to show her I love her like more than a friend. Like a man loves a woman.
But how?
Chapter Five
Stevie
The morning after the disc dogs club, I wake up late and dress in a hurry. Luckily, it doesn’t take me very long.
I own five pairs of skinny jeans for fall, five pairs of shorts for summer, a collection of T-shirts and hoodies, and a smattering of bead bracelets and some hoop and dangly earrings. Plus, two dresses and a couple of fancier tops for occasions that call for them. What can I say? I work from home. And I have enough decisions in my life. What I wear is not one I’m interested in making every day.
I’ve read that the contents of my closet could be called a capsule wardrobe. I call it easy. And I’m all for easy.
Because of my nocturnal work habits, Logan feeds and lets Bean out early before he heads to work downtown. Now, she waits for me by the front door, tail wagging, as I jam my feet into shoes and grab her leash. She knows where we’re going as well as I do. It’s Thursday morning, after all.
I duck and Bean leaps into my mother’s black Lexus SUV and we both kiss her cheek. She greets my dog with a scratch on the chest and a gentle shove into the backseat and me with a smile and a soft palm against my cheek.
“Morning, Stevie Sunshine.”
She’s always greeted me this way, no matter what was going on in our lives: divorce (her), uncontrolled moodiness (me, mainly in middle and high school), almost dropping out of high school (me, only didn’t because Logan did most of my math homework for me), being laid off (her), actually dropping out of college (me), and remarrying a great guy, Lamar (her).
She eyes me as she backs out of my driveway. “Did you get enough sleep last night? You look tired.”
I flip down the visor and check out my face in the mirror. She’s right. “Not really. I got to working on a project. But I’ll survive.”
She sighs. “You really should get more sleep, love. Before you know it, you’ll get married, have babies, and then you’ll go through menopause. And most of those things lead to a lack of sleep.”
“To do two out of three of those things, I have to meet someone first,” I counter.
Mom eyes me but doesn’t say anything. She always gets cagey when I talk about never meeting the right guy. I have no idea why.
She’s fashionably dressed as usual in black slacks, heels, a baby pink silk shell, and a matching summer cardigan. Her dark blonde, shoulder-length, wavy hair is styled, and her makeup is on point, but she couldn’t quite cover up the smudges of fatigue under her eyes. “Bad night?”
She groans. “I had hot flashes half the time and spent the rest having to pee.”
I frown. And now she’s taking time out of her busy day to drive me to my stepsister Tamara’s house thanks to my pathological hatred of driving.
“But I love getting to see you,” Mom adds sweetly. I swear the woman can read my mind.
I touch her arm. “You, too. Thanks for the ride.”
After being laid off from a receptionist job at a commercial real estate office, Mom got her real estate license. Now, she’s really busy with tons of referrals, and yet, her schedule is fairly flexible. Driving me places once in a while, like to Tamara’s house on Thursday mornings to babysit, is one way we carve out some time to see each other in her crazy week.
Tamara, her husband Dean, and their daughter Jasmine live in Montclair, a neighborhood about ten minutes south of Park Hill, where Logan, Mom, Lamar, and I live. Mom helped Tamara and Dean buy their home during a rare downturn in the Denver housing market. They’re both public school teachers, so money is pretty tight. Logan and I rent our house.
A whine from Bean draws my attention. She’s staring out the side window at a couple of squirrels chasing each other around in someone’s front yard.
Bean is the gentlest creature on earth, I swear, but she absolutely cannot resist the urge to chase and herd. Whenever there are more than two creatures of the same species, including small humans, she wants to push them together, keep them together, and make sure they’re safe. If only the creatures knew that was her intent.
“Did you finish that logo you were working on?” Mom asks.