Page 39 of Corkscrew You
“You know – gleaming teeth and hair and jewellery. Like the Martinburg ladies back when they were their first husbands’ mistress.”
Nate shouts with laughter. I realize I haven’t seen him do that much. His humour’s been more of the dry kind.
I like making him laugh. I likehim, very much. And not just because of the orgasms. But I’m not entirely sure why he should be attracted to me. My very few exes were all decent guys but not … Nate-level. What I’m trying to say is that men like Nate Durant don’t come into my orbit. I get homegrown, not Harvard. Board shorts not business suits. Guys my mom would describe as “pleasant looking.”
“You areextraordinarilyhandsome,” I tell him.
He frowns, like it’s a weird thing for me to say.
“You must get that all the time?” I may be digging a hole here.
“Not really,” is his response.
Perhaps feeling he owes me more, he adds, “I was brought up not to put any store by looks. My father thought it was lazy to trade on them.”
We’ve reached the pigs. Nate hangs back, I notice. A lot of people do, surprised at how large they are. Both our Vietnamese pot-bellied pigs top the scales at around one-seventy. I doubt fit, lean Nate weighs much more. And he’s outnumbered two to one.
I dole out their pellet portion. Haven’t had time to sort the food scraps, so they’ll get those in the morning.
“Do they have names?” Nate hasn’t come any closer.
“Ham Solo and Luke Skyporker. Don’t blame me. It was my brothers.”
I sense his hesitation, and though I’m not usually good at decoding signals, I think I know its source.
“We should sit down and fill in our background details,” I suggest. “Over dinner, maybe? I could rustle something up.”
“Rustle?What? Pork and beans?”
“Hush your mouth!” I nod toward the pen.
Nate peers at the pigs rootling around for the last pellets.
“Pretty sure they’re not that fussy,” he says. “They’d eatyouif you dropped dead in there.”
He picks up the pellet sack, and we stroll back to the house. I’d walk closer but Nate keeps looking around, including behind him.
“That goose hates me,” he says, when he catches my expression.
“Dylan won’t attack. He lost his mate a few years back, and geese only get aggressive when they’re protecting their young.”
“What if he’s found anewmate?”
“Nope. Geese mate for life. There’ll be no more Mrs Dylans.”
“I want to feel sorry for him,” says Nate. “And yet…”
Back in the kitchen, clean and scrubbed, and yes, all right, after more kissing and a bit of sexy fondling, I check out the fridge, freezer and cupboards. There’s a selection of separate ingredients, but none I can see that combine into anything that could be described as dinner unless you’d just crawled out of a desert.
“Might have to go to town for pizza,” I say.
“Let me look,” he offers.
“Don’t tell me you can cook?”
“OK.”
He’s already placed a collection of packets, jars and miscellaneous produce on the counter.
