Page 58 of Maybe You

The last few words come out on a squeak because he’s laughing again.

“It made sense in my head,” I say, and now I’m laughing, too. “I was really worried for a while because I didn’t know where my parts were from. And I never really got how all those people had these fancy, foreign parts because nobody ever said, ‘Oh, I’m part Kansas.’”

Another roar of laughter follows that statement.

I pull his hair a little harder than strictly necessary.

“You realize you’re laughing at something that made me stay up for nights on end when I was a kid?”

He wipes the tears from his eyes and aims his laughing gaze at me.

“How old were you?”

“A kid,” I say.

“Aged?” he prods.

“An appropriate kid age.”

“Five?” he guesses.

I clamp my mouth shut.

“More?” he asks with obvious glee.

He raises his hands and holds up six fingers. “Stop me when I get to the right number.”

He lifts another finger. Then another one. And another.

“Am I gonna need my toes, too?” he asks.

“Twelve,” I say in a resigned voice. “I was twelve when my sister’s boyfriend explained that particular aspect of life.”

He grins at me, and it’s sort of brilliant and intense and wonderful to be able to make somebody smile like this.

“I like this game,” he says. “Give me another one.”

“Exactly how dumb do you think I was?”

He crosses the fingers of both of his hands. “For the sake of this game, I hope very.”

“Well, I wasn’t. That was the one and only time, and I’ve been a genius ever since.”

“Uh-huh.” He sends me a sleepy grin. “Come on, just one more.”

I look at him. He looks back.

I sigh.

“I went to this birthday party once when I was a kid, and they had a pool. The party was Hawaii themed, so they had actual leis made out of those flowers they use in Hawaii.”

He nods. “Plumeria.”

“Right. Anyway, eight-year-old me really liked those. I’d never smelled anything like it before, so I spent half that day with my nose buried in the flowers instead of in the water, and there was this other kid who, for some reason, was super annoyed that I wasn’t in the pool. So then he was all, ‘You know what makes the scent even better?’ And I said no. And he said, ‘If you smell them underwater.’”

I meet Sutton’s laughing gaze.

“You didn’t,” he says.

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