Chapter Fifteen
Walker
The text hits my phone just as the pumpkin pie hits the table. I glance down at it.
Ugh, I hate it when people use those stupid text shortcuts.
It takes less than sixty seconds—or the time required to cover my pie in Jameson’s homemade whipped cream—for his response to come.
He didn’t. Did he? A quick inventory tells me that, yes, Mason McGeekypants did, indeed, squeeze each and every letter of the alphabet into that one message. Before I can stop myself, I’m smiling.
“What?” Bailey asks.
I look up to find the entire table looking at me. Jameson and her husband, Scott; Scott’s father, Big Win; Henny, Bryan, and all four of the small human beings have gathered at the house we grew up in, the house I still live in, for Thanksgiving dinner.
“What what?” I counter defensively.
“You’re…smiling,” Scott informs me, sounding more than a little surprised.
I quickly replace the rogue expression with my standard scowl.
“No I’m not.”
“You were, too, Auntie Walker,” Jackson says from across the table.
I can deny, deny, deny the fact to his mother, but I can’t do it to him.
“Yeah, well, I’m not smiling anymore.”
“You were thinking about him, weren’t you?” Henny accuses with her own knowing smirk.
“No,” I reply a little too quickly.
Wait, what?
“Who would that be?” I ask, pretending to be perplexed when really I’m terrified. A fact that I, apparently, am not able to disguise.
“Oh, puh-leeze,” Bailey says with a roll of her china blue eyes. “Duh! Mason, of course!”
Jameson reaches over Maggie’s booster seat to lay a hand on my forearm.
“It’s okay, Walker. We know you’ve been seeing him.”
“Y-you do?” I stammer, stunned that they’ve uncovered so easily what I thought was a superb stealth operation.
She nods. “Suddenly you’re taking nights off. You’re out all the time…”
“You’re happy,” Hennessy adds from the other side of the decimated turkey carcass. “That’s the biggest giveaway. Smiling, humming when you don’t think anyone can hear you…”
“And then there are the doodles,” Bailey adds.
“The what?”
“The doodles! You’ve been using up all the scratch paper by the phone doodling little hearts.”
“Oh, please,” I scoff. “Now you’re just making stuff up, hoping I’ll confess to something that I didn’t do.”
But Jameson counters my counter, leaning over to grab an item from her purse. It’s an un-crumbled piece of paper that had been wadded up and tossed in the trash behind the bar. I recognize my handwriting immediately.
Mother. Trucker.
I’d give anything to be able to unleash a torrent of genuine curse words right now, right here at this Thanksgiving dinner table.
“Look,” Henny adds, “no one here is judging you.”
I open my mouth to spit back a smarty-pants reply but stop because I realize she’s right. As I look around the table filled with the people I care for most in this world, I don’t see anything but kindness. They’re not mocking me, as I often assume they’re going to.
“Why don’t you tell us a little about him, Walker?” Scott suggests in an easy tone that I appreciate immensely. “We know he’s a grad student at the U. He studies mineralogy. What’s he like? His personality, I mean? Is he the kind of guy you usually like?”
I don’t know why I start talking. But I just do.
“No,” I begin, unable to stop the words from spilling out of my mouth. “That’s the weird thing. He’s all…clean-cut, sunny, sweet guy. I shouldn’t like him. But…I just… he’s…I can’t…” I fumble to string together the sentence that will explain my confusion over all of this.
“He’s gotten under your skin,” Henny supplies for me.
“Yes!” I agree, nodding my head adamantly. “Exactly! How…how do I get him out?”
Henny laughs, but it’s not at my expense. It’s the chuckle of someone who’s been there before and wrestled with the same questions.
“Walker, do you think I’d be married to this guy if there was a way to get someone out from under your skin?” she asks, elbowing her husband sitting to her left. “You don’t get to choose who you fall for. It just…happens. No matter how much you want to undo it. No matter how hard you try to fight it, that kind of attraction runs so deep that there is no way out—except to let it run its course. So, my suggestion? Just roll with it for now. Have some fun and enjoy hanging with someone who you’re not related to.”
“I agree,” Jameson chimes in. “We all know that falling for my ex-husband’s brother wasn’t the easiest route I could’ve chosen. But it turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to me.”
With that, Scott leans over and grabs his wife’s face for a spontaneous smooch that has the kids hooting and hollering.
“Okay, okay, I get it,” I say, feeling my face grow warm.
“Was that him texting you?” Bailey asks.
I nod. “Yeah. He wants to get together.”
“Do you want to see him?” she follows up.
Do I?
I do. Yes. Definitely.
“Yeah…kinda,” I admit reluctantly.
“So do it!” Henny adds.
I look around at all of them.
“Look, guys, I appreciate all of this…but there isn’t any place open on Thanksgiving night. And, seeing as how you’re all sitting in the dining room of the house I live in, I can’t exactly invite him over here. Not yet, anyway…”
“The pub,” James says. “Have him meet you at the pub. You can hang upstairs and have all the privacy you like.”
“No…I couldn’t…” I start to say, but stop. Because, I could, actually. “That’s…that’s a really good idea, James…” I concede and she’s on her feet before I can finish the sentence.
“Wait, what are you doing?” I call after her.
“I’m packing up a picnic for you to take with you. The fridge upstairs is empty,” she replies from the kitchen.
“But I just ate! I’m stuffed!” I object.
“Walker, who knows how late you’ll be there,” Bailey says. “Trust me, the nearest convenience store is like ten miles away, and you don’t want to stop your date to make a Coke and Pringles run at eleven o’clock tonight.”
“Eleven o’clock! What do you think we’re going to be doing up there all night?” As soon as the words are out of my mouth I reconsider them. “No, wait,” I say, holding up a palm. “Do not answer that.”
“Well, I can tell you one thing,” Bryan adds, “you won’t be doing anything if you don’t text him back.”
“Oh! Right!” I pick up my phone to do as he’s suggested but stop when I feel all those pairs of eyes on me. “Yeah, I think I’ll just step out for a few minutes…”
…
The little apartment above O’Halloran’s is where Henny, James, and I lived for the first several years of our lives. I don’t have any memories of that time because we moved to the house on Orange Avenue when Bailey was born and I was just a toddler. Now, Bailey and I share that house, and the apartment has become a crash pad for out-of-town guests…and, apparently, a place where I can bring would-be suitors.
Mason is standing in the doorway, leaning against the arch, arms folded across his chest and head tilted to one side, just watching me as I rummage through the bags of food packed by Jameson. I pull out a block of cheese, a box of crackers, some olives, and a bottle of wine to start us with. My sister was right. It’s been only an hour and a half since I finished off my pumpkin pie, and I’m already hungry again.
“So it was a nice Thanksgiving then?” he asks after I relayed the events of the afternoon—minus the discussion about him.
“Yeah, you know, it wasn’t bad, as far as family holiday dinners go. My nephews and niece were all relatively civilized. At no time was any part of the turkey airborne. No one stomped out early, slamming the door behind them. So, yeah. I’d call it a success.”
He laughs that easy, deep belly laugh of his. I just happen to glance up and see the smile go all the way up to his blue, blue eyes. The eyes that make me want to stare at him even when I know I need to turn my head away. Even when I’m aware of the fact that staring into them can bring me nothing but complications. Maybe even heartache.
“Wow, look at this,” I continue before he can comment with something sappy, “my sister packed the good crackers for us. The ones made by elves. In a tree!”
“Outstanding!” he responds, dropping into one of the kitchen table chairs.
Once I’ve finished setting out the snacks, along with a bottle of Chardonnay and some glasses, I join him, taking a seat across from him.
“So,” he says.
“So.”
“I want to date you.”
“Isn’t that sort of what we’re doing already?”
“I want to date you publicly,” he specifies. “I want you to be my girlfriend.”
“You don’t mince words,” I say, trying not to look surprised by this declaration.
“No reason to. I know how I feel about you and I think I know how you feel about me.”
I stop slicing cheese and give him a hard stare. “You’re serious,” I say.
He nods. “I am. What do you say?”
I know what my heart wants me to say. But that’s tempered by what my head wants me to say.
“I have a crazy family,” I blurt out. “I mean certifiably nutter-butter. I love them—but they’re definitely not everyone’s cup of tea. And…anyone who gets involved with me, gets involved with them. Kinda the way it is with you and Emmet.”
“I get that. In fact, we really haven’t talked much about my family…”
“Well, you know I’m a fan of Emmet’s,” I point out and he smiles.
“I do! And he’s a fan of yours. So much so that he told my parents about you before I had a chance to do it myself.”
“Oh,” I say, not really knowing how to feel about this. Aside from meeting his brother, I’ve discouraged Mason from any serious family talk. I didn’t want to unpack all of my baggage. And if he does it first, I’ll feel obligated. But now it would appear that family chat is on the menu. “And how’d that go?”
“Pretty good,” he says. “I’d really like you to come up and meet them with me sometime. Especially if we’re officially, you know, a couple.”
“I haven’t agreed to that yet,” I remind him.
“No, but you will.”
His hubris makes me laugh.
“Really? And what makes you so sure?”
Mason stands up, comes around to my side of the table, and pulls me into his arms.
“This,” he says just before he slants his mouth across mine.
I inhale his clean, masculine scent and wrap my arms around him, standing on tiptoes so I can reach him a little better. When he stops I pull back a couple of inches and meet his intense, icy-blue gaze with my own.
“Yeah,” I mutter at last. “Yeah, okay.”
He smiles, and it’s beautiful. It’s wide and open and happy. That’s when he picks me up around the waist and twirls me around the kitchen. I just throw my head back and laugh. It isn’t until he sets me down again that I realize there’s something I need to clarify. I guess he has a similar realization, because we both start to talk at the same time.
“So, my mom—” he begins.
“I have to ask you something—” I start.
We giggle at our simultaneous outbursts.
“Okay, go ahead,” he says. “You first.”
“It’s just that I need a little time before we…you know…”
He looks perplexed for a second.
“You know,” I repeat, raising my eyebrows up this time.
He chuckles. “Walker, are you telling me that you’re not ready to sleep with me?”
I feel my face begin to warm. Not because of the words, but because they’re coming out of his mouth.
“Um…yeah…”
He puts a big, warm hand to my face.
“Walker, you’re the one calling the shots here. I really like you, and I don’t want to screw this up. So you let me know when you’re ready—if you’re ready—and we’ll go from there, okay? Meanwhile, no rush.”
Jeez, who is this guy? Does he really exist, or am I dreaming him?
“Yeah…okay…” I murmur. “That sounds like a good plan.”
I start to lean in to him again for another round of tonsil hockey when I remember and stop short.
“Hey, what did you want to tell me about your mom?”
He’s only inches from me and he’s staring at me like he wants to devour me. It feels different. It feels…good. He shakes his head.
“Never mind. I’ll tell you later. Right now, I just want to do this,” he says in a voice that’s barely a whisper just before he puts his mouth to mine.
As it turns out, so do I.
And all of a sudden, I’m thinking I’m ready.