Page 139 of Never Forever

“This is a joke, right?” I asked, looking down at her air mattress bed we’d carried down to put in front of the fire.

“We just need to pump it up,” she said.

Lightning struck so close to the house I felt the electricity in the air. “Babe, that bed needs life support.”

“Come on,” she said, crawling in. “We’ve slept worse places.”

“Name one.”

“The bed of the truck was always way worse,” she said, pulling the blanket up around her ears. After the cut Star gave her, her hair was pretty cute now. Shorter, but intentional, it was wavy and bouncy around her chin. She looked younger. “That gross motel in Portland when we went down to visit Boston. Every single time we went camping.”

“I guess you’re right,” I said.

The truth was, I would sleep with her on a bed of nails if it meant we were sleeping together again. I was going to spend the next, however long it took, to make it real. Concrete.

Make us a family.

I crawled in beside her and she immediately rolled up against my side, not necessarily by choice, but because of physics. We were in an air mattress sandwich.

“Sorry,” she laughed, like she was uncomfortable, which was ridiculous considering the way she’d used my face last night.

“I’m not,” I said and wrapped my arm around her, keeping her from rolling out.

“Hey,” she said, after a moment. The wind roared around the house and lightning flashed in the window. She smelled sweet in my arms. Like sweat and sex and Carrie. “Can I ask you an awkward question?”

“Yeah,” I laughed. “I think we can do some awkward questions at this point.”

“Who have you been dating? Star made a comment about sleeping on what a fox you are, but I can’t imagine all the local women are that oblivious.”

I glanced down to see her bright eyes looking up at me. She had gotten some color after the end of filming and even in dim firelight, I could see the freckles on her cheeks.

Ah. Tell her the truth and make this weird?

Or hedge the truth.

“I haven’t dated much. Wendy at the The Gull,” I said.

“Really?”

I understood her surprise. Wendy was the opposite of Carrie in every way. Wendy had a brief life as an MMA fighter and now she ran her dad’s bar in Calico Cove. Her brother was NHL super star, Dillon Le Coeur. They were a physically intimidating family and Wendy didn’t take shit from anybody.

“It was obvious we were just friends pretty quickly,” I said.

“Who else?”

“There was a middle school teacher who moved to Calico Cove for one year.”

“What happened to her?”

“She moved away.”

“Did you love her?”

“No,” I laughed. “No. I didn’t love her.”

I had, over the course of our few dates, struggled to find something to talk about.

“Why not?”

---