Page 15 of Lovesick
“Let’s just walk around for a while,” Maggie suggested. “Leave the beer here for now.”
“Sure,” I agreed. We weren’t really supposed to have alcohol in the park at all, but from experience, I had learned that as long as you didn’t open a cooler where most of the families were, the rangers looked the other way. The police weren’t so forgiving, but they didn’t patrol all the lots - just the front ones. Right now, the place was so busy that it would be better to wait for a beer.
We crossed over the wooden footbridge that spanned the bayou. Elbows on the railing, we watched the minnows swimming around near the sandy bottom. The exercise area on the other side, situated amongst some widely-spaced cypress trees, was definitely new. And we couldn’t resist the urge to thoroughly and incorrectly explore the pull-up bars, inclined boards, and other wooden contraptions that neither of us could figure out.
I dropped down from doing a single carefree pull-up on a metal bar secured to two wooden posts. “Too easy.” Maggie shook her head, applauding nonetheless. “You need a handicap.”
Amused, I repeated, “A handicap? Like…”
“Like…” She hopped off her seat on a wooden post. “This.” Maggie wrapped her arms around my neck and legs around my waist and jumped on my back. My T-shirt stretched as she started to slip, and I instinctively caught her-
By the thighs just below her shorts, way too close to her ass for comfort. I tried to fix my mistake by sliding my hands down her thighs toward her knees. That just made it sensual…and reminded me that a certain part of her was pressed against my back.
Sensual. Wasn’t that how I had been feeling all day? Wasn’t that what I wanted?
When we had dated, neither of us made that daring move that would lead to more than just innocent make-out sessions. In my view, that had been a mistake… One I intended not to repeat.
“Okay,” I said readily. “Hang on.” I felt her legs tighten around me, and I let go…slowly, finger by finger, letting my hands slip just a few smooth inches up her thighs first. Her shiver did a lot of things to me that I couldn’t admit to in the middle of a park filled with children.
I wrapped my fingers around the pull-up bar and got a tight grip. I had to put quite a bit more effort into it, but I still managed a smooth pull-up…and I did a second one for good measure too.
“Not too bad.” In my imagination, her hands lingered on me, but in reality, she just let go and took a step back. “I could do that too, but I don’t feel like it right now.”
I went with the joke. “I bet. Maybe later?”
“Sure, later.” She giggled and ran ahead when I found a little brown leaf stuck to my hand and flicked it at her.
Aside from the exercise area, the park was mostly the same. Along one of the paths, they had added a side lane for bikes with tiny white merge lines and stop signs so kids could play like they were drivers on a real road. It certainly seemed popular with the kids, and more than once we had to step out of the way as a sparkly-pink princess bike came flying past.
The place where this particular trail led was the same - a large, circular path splitting around a tree surrounded by grass and wildflowers meeting up with its lost half on the other side. “Come here,” I said, holding out a hand to help Maggie step over the large rocks separating the trail from the circle of nature.
“What - oh, yeah,” Maggie said, suddenly catching on and excitedly searching the trunk of the tree. “They should be…here!”
Together, we crouched and brushed away dirt from the two initials carved into the trunk. “This was when you realized our initials spelled M&M like the candy, and you couldn’t stop laughing for an hour,” I remembered fondly. The hardy bark of the massive oak had reclaimed bits of the Ms, but our initials were still visible.
“Yeah,” she agreed, brushing a hand over the letters. “It’s still funny.” But she wasn’t laughing; her eyes bored into the tree, lost in thought. “Isn’t it weird how things turned out? Not weird, exactly. More like… Did you ever think we’d be where we are today?”
“I don’t know. For a while, I thought I might go to college for two years, but then we opened the second one and Momma needed the extra hands.” I shrugged. “I guess this is more or less where I thought I would be in life.”
“What if you had gone to college?” she asked, leading the way back to the path. “Would you have gone to Tulane?”
“You tell me. Would I have gotten accepted there?”
“Um…no,” Maggie admitted, backtracking when I faked a hurt look. “You didn’t really try very hard in school!”
“I figured all I needed to do was pass,” I pointed out. “Didn’t see a point in working my...butt off for nothing.”
I didn’t think Maggie could quite understand how someone could not work hard at academics, but she just shrugged, and said, “Makes sense.” Then, she stepped onto the rocks and played a balancing game around the inside of the circular path.
“What about you? What would you be doing if you weren’t a nurse?”
She paused, wobbling slightly with one foot in the air. “Maybe…I would be involved with oil somehow. Like Daddy. He works offshore on an oil rig,” she reminded me.
That was right, her family had a history in the oil industry, and I could understand why Maggie would want to move away from that and pursue something else. Squinting at her, I shaded my eyes and craned my neck. “Nope,” I announced. “I can’t really see you in a hard hat.”
She giggled, and the conversation lightened. We stuck to the what-ifs, bringing up different scenarios and imagining what life could have been like if things had been different.
I laughed at something Maggie said and almost tripped, a root that had grown underneath the path and pushed up the concrete into ridges caught my toe. Surprised, I realized that at some point the sun had set and plunged the world into dusk. So much for watching the sunset. We had been too busy talking to notice it was almost dark.
