“Oh absolutely. Charlotte is an unapologetic fan of the Byronic hero. Case in point, her boyfriend, Mason, is a moody, controlling piece of shit. Naturally, she adores him.” Which is why she won’t be here for the holidays, I almost said out loud.
The Professor laughed so hard he choked. He reached for his beer and sputtered through a sip. “So poor Ms. Frank, in my class, she never had a chance. You’ve been arguing for team Austen since childhood.”
“You bet I have. I’ll take Mr. Darcy over that pyscho Mr. Rochester any day,” I said. The oven timer chimed, signaling that the frozen pizza I’d popped inside twenty minutes earlier was now ready for consumption.
“I am comforted to hear that. If your taste in literature has affected your tastes in men, then I like knowing you assume I have more in common with Darcy than Rochester.”
“Me too,” I agreed. “By the way, this is the kitchen,” I said, panning my phone quickly around the room before setting it on the counter top.
“What a spectacular ceiling—a truly exemplary use of the color white.”
“Oh shut up,” I said, slipping on oven mitts. “You’re just there for a minute while I get my pizza.”
“This must be what it feels like to be a turtle, on its back at the mercy of the elements.”
“Quit moaning and eat your food. How’s the lo mein?” I asked, setting the pizza on the counter and picking up the phone just in time to catch him shoveling a slippery tangle of noodles into his mouth.
“Dellishuss,” he said. “Brudy, famtasic.”
“Hey, say it don’t spray it, mister,” I said, pretending to wipe off my face.
He swallowed and laughed, then lifted a napkin to his screen and mimed dabbing at my face.
“Better?”
“Yes, thank you.” I smiled back at him, admiring how sexy this man could look even in casual attire. He wore a blue T-shirt under a bulky, black cardigan with a high rolled collar. His hair looked like he’d combed it in a wind tunnel and his jawline bore a healthy sprinkle of scruff. Dellishuss indeed.
“What kind of house is this? Where does it fit in the standards of American architecture?” he asked.
“That is a topic of some lively debate in this family, actually. Really I’d say it’s a beach bungalow that swallowed a cape cod and then developed delusions of Victorian grandeur. Lots of built-ins and wainscoting, and plenty of nooks and crannies for epic games of hide and seek when we were kids.”
“So you spent your summers in this house, then? As a child?”
“We did, until my parents divorced, then we moved here full time.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“Don’t be,” I said. “It was a long time ago and my dad is an ass-hat; we are all better off without him.”
“Sadly, I can relate.”
“That is sad,” I said, genuinely sorry to hear he had a crap dad too. But the last thing I wanted to do right now was derail our fun by swapping sob stories, so I fast forwarded to the next part of the tour.
“So now you’ve seen the kitchen,” I said, waving behind me. “Time to show you the garden and the beach.”
“Aren’t you going to eat?” he asked.
“I am,” I said, opening a cabinet and snagging my mom’s oversized picnic basket from a shelf. I stacked several slices of pizza on a paper plate, and then set it, a bottle of wine, corkscrew, glass and a pile of napkins into the basket. “I love eating outside this time of year.”
“Isn’t it too cold and dreary for that?”
“Nope,” I said. “I’m a Mainer. My people invented cold and dreary.”
“No you didn’t. You inherited your hearty dispositions from your forebears, who, I might add, come from the same genetic stock as my own. So you’re welcome.”
“Don’t get smug with me, buddy. My forebears ditched your rainy rock collection centuries ago in search of brighter shores and they found them. That’s why they call it New England. New, as in better. New, as in awesome.” I grabbed the phone and the picnic basket, and walked from the kitchen to the double set of French doors that banked the back wall of the living room.
“Well, listen, if my forebears hadn’t had the good sense to…persecute and oppress yours, then this brave new world would have…would have…,”
“Keep pedaling,” I said as I stepped through the French doors to the all-season porch.
“Well, it would have belonged to the French, wouldn’t it? And no one would’ve wanted that, except the French of course, so really you should be thanking us.”
I laughed as I set down the basket and pulled on the pair of galoshes that sat next to the door leading to the garden.
“Thank you, Professor, and please thank your countrymen for me. We Americans are so grateful to you. Without your noble efforts the world might have never known the joys of baseball, mega malls or reality television,” I said, retrieving one of my mother’s down-filled winter jackets from where it hung on a peg.
“Again, you’re welcome. Although I can’t tell if those examples were meant as an endorsement or an indictment.”