Page 43 of Skating and Fake Dating
“Mom, there’s no room with Odette and Damian, Aunt Doris and?—”
“We have an extra air mattress. He can stay in your room.” She arches an eyebrow and wags a finger. “In separate beds. You know the rules.”
Bailey somehow goes paler. “You never even let me have boys in my room when I was a teenager and now you’re okay with it?”
“Sweetie pie, you never invited boys over. That was our Odette. Boy crazy that one and little Bailey here just stayed up there and read.”
They go back and forth for another minute until it’s settled by motherly ordination with her insistence that I stay in Bailey’s room.
Covering her face with her hands, she mutters, “I’m sorry about this. This is a disaster.”
“It’s just one night. We’re adults. It’ll be fine.”
She peers up at me. “You’re being very easygoing about this.”
I lift my shoulder with a shrug. “What’s the other option?”
“Running.”
I chuckle. “Can’t say that occurred to me.”
She yawns. “Okay, but you have to keep your eyes closed.”
“While I’m sleeping, but you can’t very well blindfold me before that.”
“Fine, but no laughing.”
My lips quirk. “Why would I do that?”
“Because this is my childhood bedroom, a relic from age zero on.”
I rub my hands together. “Oh, this should be good.”
She leads me upstairs and it does indeed look like a time capsule. Care Bears line the shelves, a collection of jelly shoes in every color fills a basket, and teen heartthrob posters cover the walls.
“So this is where teenage Bailey plotted world domination?”
“More like where I hid from family gatherings,” she says with a small smile, sitting on the edge of the bed. Since returning to her house, she has changed into leggings and an oversized sweatshirt, her face scrubbed clean of makeup. She looks younger, softer.
“I like it,” I say, flipping through a sticker collection book. “It suits you.”
She raises an eyebrow. “Childish and disorganized?”
“Colorful. Cute. Unapologetically unique.”
Bailey looks away, but not before I catch her smile. “You can stop the boyfriend act now. No one’s watching.”
I sit beside her on the bed, careful to maintain some distance in case we get any surprise visitors. “Who says it’s an act?”
She gives me a look and once more says, “Carson ...”
“I’m just saying,” I continue like a freight train that’s lost its brakes, “maybe we should talk about what you said earlier. About not entirely acting.”
“You’re the one who said that.”
It’s true.
Her jaw lowers as if calculating what this means.
