“No problem.”
For a while, we drank in silence. Up high the tips of the old pine trees swayed in the breeze like they were waving at the stars. Someone somewhere played Simon and Garfunkel a little louder than necessary. Otherwise the night was peaceful, nice.
“Good thing about the fences,” I said eventually.
“Hmm?”
“Otherwise the neighbors would have had a wonderful time watching you trim the hedges in your boxer briefs.”
He snorted. “True. Those fences aren’t tall enough to keep out runaway brides, though.”
I breathed in through my teeth, making a hissing noise. “A nasty invasive breed. I’d be surprised if anything could stop them.”
He motioned to the neat line of hedges with his half-empty bottle. “This is how Dad used to keep it, all neat and tidy. Then Mom would plant flowers everywhere she could fit them. They’d be spilling out all over the place. Total chaos.”
“Yeah?”
“I’m pretty sure she did it just to drive him nuts.” A ghost of a smile crossed his face. “Every year she’d do a different color. All white flowers one summer, all yellow the next, and so on. Want to hear another of my embarrassing stories?”
“Hells yes.”
“One year, I accidentally broke a lamp. I was throwing a ball around inside the house, completely against the rules,” he said. “Anyway, I blamed it on the dog. This yappy ball of fluff Nell had begged them to buy her for Christmas. She even called the stupid thing Snowball.”
“What happened?” I asked.
“Well, Mom knew I was lying about the lamp, but she couldn’t prove it.”
“What about your dad?”
A laugh. “He hated the dog too. Gave me the benefit of the doubt.”
“Poor Snowball.”
“Mm. He had to spend more time outside after that,” he said. “Nell wouldn’t talk to me for weeks and Mom was definitely not impressed.”
“I bet. You sound like a terrible child,” I joked.
“Hold on, I’m not finished.” He turned my way, his smile definite this time. “So I was having a water fight in the backyard for my eighth birthday party. Had been planning it for months. I’d stockpiled all these water balloons and me and Eric spent weeks building these giant forts out of cardboard boxes. It was going to be excellent. Absolutely no girls allowed.”
“And?”
“Mom planted pink that year. And not just light pink, oh no. Big bright pink flowers everywhere. They were hanging in baskets and filling pots. She went berserk with them, far worse than normal.” He paused, drank. “You couldn’t come out here without being struck blind by it all. It looked like a flock of flamingos had exploded.”
“Oh, no,” I cried out dramatically. My senior year drama classes were finally proving useful, thank god. “Your poor burgeoning masculinity and street cred. Gone!”
“Right? I was completely humiliated.” He stretched out his legs, semi-reclining back on his elbows. “Eric wanted to dig them all up right before the party and try blaming it on Snowball. But I really didn’t see how that could work twice.”
“Probably a wise call.”
A nod.
“You mom sounds awesome,” I said with no small amount of wonder.
“Yeah. She was.”
With no ace parenting tales of my own to share, conversation lapsed again. This time, however, it didn’t feel awkward. We were just two people hanging out, star gazing on a summer night. It was all good.
“I do know you,” he said quietly. “You’re wrong about that.”
My gaze jumped from the stars to him. Both equally stunning. His eyes shone in the moonlight, which was singularly useless. I couldn’t read him at all. I needed more light to see his expression, so I could figure out where this was going.
“You’ve done nothing but show me who you are since I met you,” he said.
And that right there was the problem. “I’m not sure it’s fair to judge me on recent events. The last few days have quite possibly been among the most bizarre and traumatic of my life.”
“Lydia, you’ve broken into my house, punched a lying asshole in the nose, stayed with me when I didn’t want to be alone, stepped in to help my sister’s business, forgiven me when I behaved like a dickhead, cleaned me and my house up after a brawl, and pushed me into having rough sex with you.”
“… yeah.”
“Yeah,” he repeated. “I like you. But more than that, I trust you.”
“Wow. That’s what you get from all that?”
“That’s what I get.”
I raised my brows, looking away. It was a lot to take in. More than I needed or less than I wanted, I couldn’t quite decide. Confusion of the heart is a bitch. Assuming like, the same as love, came from the vascular muscle, of course. Crazy obviously came from the head and the loins.