Page 86 of Outside The Wire

“Seriously, Asher, don’t encourage her.”

“I’m not,” I said, pulling her into my arms. “But you have to lighten up. The more you fight this, the more she’s going to push. Maybe you should try reverse psychology on her.”

“What? You mean…make her think we’re getting married?”

I shrugged. “Maybe she would back off.”

“But that would require me totellher you proposed.”

I thought about it and that wasn’t right. If she was going to tell her mother I proposed, it was going to be real. “Okay, so that’s off the table, but maybe you could tell her we’ve talked about it or something. Discussing it isn’t the same as proposing, but it would let her know that it’s not off the table, right?”

She chewed her lip as she thought it over. “I guess, but it might make things harder on you.”

“In what way?”

“Well, she might start planning the wedding.” She winced. “I’d hate to think about all the reservations she’d make without us knowing.”

Chuckling, I shook my head. “Okay, maybe we put a pin in that for now.”

“Put a pin in that?” she asked, looking at me funny.

“You know, a grenade. You pull the pin and it explodes. You put the pin in it and it doesn’t explode.”

She rolled her eyes. “Men and their action movies. Best not to talk about your stint in the military with my dad, either. He’s not a fan.”

Right, probably best he didn’t know about my previous life.

“Come on, let’s go before they have our first child named. It’ll be something dreadful like Emmanuelle.”

I followed her into the other room. “We could always go with December.”

She shot me a lethal glare. “Don’t you even think about it.”

20

HOLLY

I grabbedmy mother and pulled her into the kitchen. “Mom, you can’t grab my boyfriend’s arm and tell him how sexy he is!” I hissed.

“I didn’t say he was sexy,” she said calmly. “But he does remind me of this man I met in my younger years,” she said, pulling at the bow at the neck of her shirt. “Oh, he was nothing like your young man, though he was quite large in all the right areas.”

I cringed at my mother’s words, hoping the story was over.

“I remember this one time, I had dropped something on the ground and when I bent over, I ended up with my face right in front of him. It was right there! And then he?—”

“Ew! Gross, Mom! I don’t want to know what happened!”

“I was just going to say that he helped me up.”

Oh, well, that wasn’t so bad. “Oh.”

“And then I sat on his lap, and did I get a surprise.”

I rolled my eyes, walking away from her. I couldn’t handle hearing these things from her.

“I’m telling you these things because I want you to understand that I was young once, too. I understand thatyou might have urges and…you might do things before the appropriate time.”

“Mother!” I spun around, horrified that she was actually going to give me a sex talk.

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