“Of course you have,” Gloria says, squeezing my knee. “She’s sweet as pie!”
“You just think that because of the curly hair,” Wyn says. “She’s actually extremely feisty.” My face goes beet red, but everyone is laughing, talking over one another, and Wyn is kissing the side of my head again, squeezing me against him on the couch, and I feel like I’m finally there, that place I’ve always wanted to be, the other side of the lit kitchen windows I could see from my childhood street, where rooms are filled with love and noise and squabbling.
“He needs a stern hand,” Michael says.
“He’s not a workhorse,” Lou says with an eye roll.
“No, of course not,” Michael says. “Much more of a mule.”
Wyn pulls me across his lap, looping his arms around my waist. “How do you know Harriet isn’t even more stubborn than I am?”
“He’s right,” I tell them. “Between the two of us, I’m the mule.”
“Well, if you’re the mule,” Michael says, “then Wyn’s the ass.”
“If I’m going to be an ass,” he says, “I’m glad to be yours.”
When Hank comes back to the cramped little den with its raging fire, he says, “Put you in Wyn’s room, Har,” and I think, Har. I’ve been here ten minutes and I’m already “Har,” and there’s a sensation like an inflating balloon in my chest, a pleasant pain, like stretching a stiff muscle.
Wyn had warned me that his parents wouldn’t let us share a room, even though we live together back in the city. In some ways, they’re eccentric and freethinking, and in others, they’re surprisingly traditional.
Later, while his parents finish washing the dishes, Wyn takes me to his room to settle in. For hours he lets me go through his stuff, picking things up, asking questions, while he acts as the docent for this museum dedicated to my favorite subject.
I hold things up; he tells me about them. I’m gluttonous for all these bits of him.
Plastic MVP trophies from his soccer days; washed-out disposable-camera shots of him as a teenager, surrounded by girls with the sperm-shaped eyebrows and bleached-to-death hair of our youth. Pictures of him with friends at football games, their faces painted, and walking in summer parades, and even, in a couple of cases, at the rodeo.
Every time I point to someone, he tells me her name (most of his friends, it seems, were girls), how they met, where she is now. “You keep in touch with all these people?”
“It’s a small town,” he says. “We were all friends, and so were our parents. I hear stuff through the grapevine. Some of them try to sell me multi-level marketing smoothies on occasion.”
At my request, he shows me all the girls he’s kissed, and the ones who came for the summer and broke his heart before heading home.
I stop on a framed professional photo of him on his dresser and snort in delight. “You were prom king? And you never mentioned it?”
Wyn peers over my shoulder. In the photograph, he wears a black suit and crooked plastic crown, his arms wrapped around the waist of a pretty brunette in a silver minidress and matching tiara. The backdrop behind them reads BRIGHT LIGHTS, BIG CITY over a sparkling skyline that somehow contains both the Empire State Building and Seattle’s Space Needle.
Wyn groans. “I swear to you that’s not even normally in here. Pretty sure my mom put it out for the occasion.”
“Oh? She wanted to make me jealous of your teenage flame?” I tease.
He rubs his forehead. His cheeks go adorably pink. “She thinks she’s showing me off.”
“I can’t believe I’ve known you for like three and a half years and you never mentioned you were prom king.”
“Yes, my finest accomplishment.” He shakes his head. “So embarrassing.”
“What are you talking about?” I face him. “How is this embarrassing? When I was this age, I still had braces and a pixie cut that made me look like I’d been electrocuted. Meanwhile, you were crowned prom king while on a date with a teen model.”
I lift the picture, offering him cold, hard evidence.
He returns the frame to the dresser. “I wouldn’t expect you to know this as a former teen brainiac and current brilliant medical student, but prom king is the consolation prize they give guys they think have already peaked and probably will be staying in town to be a spokesman for the local car dealerships.”
“Hold on, let me write this down.” I start to turn. He pulls me back, winding his arms around my ribs.
“See, you don’t know this because everyone in your town expected big things of you,” he says, grinning.
“I didn’t know this,” I reply, “because I went to a four-thousand-student school where no one knew my name and because I’ve never followed car-dealership culture very closely.”
“Ah,” he says. “Your first mistake.”
“Wyndham Connor,” I say. “Don’t you think this whole theory of yours is a teensy bit . . . narcissistic?”
His smile splits open, and my heart follows suit. “Because I think car dealerships would use me as a spokesperson? They’ve done it with like eighty percent of the town’s prom kings.”
“Not that,” I say. “The idea that all your classmates voted you prom king . . . because they felt sorry for you.”
He shrugs.
I wrap my arms around his neck. “Yeah, that was probably it.” I kiss him and he pulls me closer, lifting me up and into him as if to absorb me. “Surely it had nothing to do with how hot and kind and funny you are. It was sheer pity.” I kiss him again, deeper.
“And that?” he asks.
“Extreme pity.” I grab his ass. “This too.”
“Wow. Being a washed-up former golden boy isn’t so bad after all.”
Someone knocks on the doorframe. I pull back, but Wyn’s arms stay around me as he angles his head toward the hall.
His parents stand at the door, smiling, Gloria’s head resting on Hank’s shoulder.
“We’re headed to bed, you two,” Hank says.
“You need anything?” Gloria asks.
Wyn shakes his head. “Just saying good night.”
Gloria’s eyes shrink when she smiles, like Wyn’s. “Sleep tight.”
When they’re gone, Wyn walks me back against the dresser and we make out for a handful of minutes before he kisses the top of my head and leaves my room.
For the next four days in Montana, we barely do anything. We go cross-country skiing once, eat twice at an all-day pancake house that Wyn’s parents describe as “a haunt for old silver tails like us,” and take nightly walks with the whole family through the snow. We bundle up like astronauts, and Hank insists we wear headband lamps so we don’t “get hit by cars or attacked by wild animals” in the solid black of a Montana night.
Mostly, though, we lounge around the fireplace, an endless supply of food and drink cycling through the room. In the mornings, Hank makes each of us individual pour-over coffees, a process that takes so long that by the time he finishes the last one, we’re all ready for our second cups, and he lunges to his feet, without anyone asking, to start all over again.