“What’s wrong?” I whispered. He dropped his blanket to the floor.
“The chair’s uncomfortable,” he responded. I could tell from the way he stood there awkwardly that he was waiting for permission to lie down.
“Okay,” I told him.
That seemed to be enough, because a second later Alex was stretching out next to me, and not long after that he was out. In their sleep, both boys kept moving closer to me, and when I finally drifted off, there was one arm wrapped around my stomach and one hand intertwined with mine.
***
Sunday passed quickly. The boys called Will in the morning and he came over to fix the power. Once it was back on, Cole spent what little time he could watching ESPN before his parents got home. Alex tried to tempt me into playing GoG, but I wasn’t willing to break Katherine and George’s rules. I stayed in my room reading until my phone rang.
“Sammy?” I asked, picking up immediately when I saw her name on the caller ID.
“Hey, girly,” she said. “What you up to?”
“Not much,” I said, pushing away from my desk and moving to the bed. I collapsed on the comforter and switched the phone to my other ear. “Just doing some anatomy homework for next week.”
“Ugh, typical Jackie,” Sammy criticized. I could practically see her sitting on the fuzzy pink rug in our dorm room, painting her toenails. “You’re living with a bunch of hot guys, and instead of finding Cole and experiencing some real-life anatomy, you’re shacking up with a textbook like a pariah.”
“It’s not like I never see him,” I told her. “I mean we did sleep together last night.”
“You what?”
“Okay, wait,” I said, backtracking. “That came out all wrong.”
But Sammy was already in full-on rant mode. “My best friend went and got herself de-virgin-fied and you didn’t think to call me, like…this morning? Seriously, you moved away and poof! I don’t hear from you until five years later and—”
“Oh my God, no!” I said, shouting into the phone.
“‘No’ to what? The five years part, because it’s honestly starting to feel like that. The next thing you know, I’ll be stalking your Facebook just to see if you’re still alive.”
“Would you stop being such a drama queen?”
“Are you kidding me?” she said, clearly upset. “This situation is totally eligible for full-on drama status!”
“Sammy,” I said, lowering my voice so nobody could hear me. “Can you just chill out? I didn’t de-virgin myself or whatever.”
“Sex, Jackie. We’re talking about sex!”
“Yeah,” I said. “I know what we’re talking about, and I didn’t do that.”
“Oh,” she said after a long pause. “Then what are you talking about?”
“When I said ‘slept,’ I meant we fell asleep in the same vicinity.”
“Well, that is totally less newsworthy. Mr. Elvis sleeps with me when he can’t get comfy on his doggy bed, and then he makes these little farts that stink up the whole room, but you don’t hear me blabbing on about it.”
“I’m not the one blabbering,” I said. “And I don’t know, it just—it feels kind of big to me. I don’t know what to do about him, Sammy.”
“It’s not what you do about him. It’s what you do with him. Grab him by those big, manly arms that I’m assuming he has, and show him what New York has to offer.”
“Okay, can you please be serious for a moment? I’m really confused here,” I told her. “I try to ignore him, but then he does something cute like, I don’t know, taking me on a tour of the ranch to cheer me up, and I just—argh!” I grabbed my pillow and flung it across the room.
Sammy sighed. “All right, I’m sorry. I got a little excited to finally hear from you.”
“A little excited?”
“Do you want to talk about your Cole issues or not?”
“That’s the thing. I don’t want to have Cole issues. I just want to get through these next few years and come home.”
“So for the next two years of high school, you’re never going to have a boyfriend?”
“I don’t know.”
“Jackie, just because you’re leaving eventually doesn’t mean you can’t get to know people.”
“I’m not afraid of forming relationships, Sammy—it’s just him.”
“Why?”
“Because he’s a complete chauvinist. When we go to school, it’s like he has a different girl to make out with every period.” In reality that was just an excuse. The real reason why I was frightened by whatever was going on between Cole and me was too hard to admit.
“Okay,” she said, thinking out loud, “so he’s a bit of a man-whore. But, honey, trust me when I say that can be fixed. You should focus on the positive things. It sounds like he can be sweet when he wants to be.”
“It’s not just that. It’s…” I trailed off, still struggling to say what I was thinking.
“It’s what?”