“You first,” Amy said.
I climbed the stairs and waited until our parents were out of earshot. “Chill. It’s not like I was trying to look at your ass or anything,” I joked. Besides, I already had, and it was a very cute little ass. I’d stared at it when she was talking to her mom.
“Hmph,”she replied indignantly.
We climbed the third flight of stairs to her room. Her mother and I had painted it a light purple, which was apparently her favorite color. I opened the door and let her in. She looked back at me and smiled.
“Wow! It’s beautiful!” she gasped.
“Thanks. I helped paint it.” I stuck my chest out proudly.
“Well, you did a great job. Where is your room?”
“This way, through the bathroom,” I said.
Her face turned ashen. “Wait. We share a bathroom?!”
“I’m not that dirty. Chill,” I teased. “Besides, it’s only temporary. My dad is having someone put in my own bathroom. They figured, for now, that we were old enough to be chill about it.”
“I don’t know if this is appropriate. Sometimes my mom forgets I’m not twelve anymore.”
“I’ve gotten into too much trouble for my dad not to know I’m a man,” I said, moving closer to her. She looked nervously up at me again with her big brown eyes.
“Let’s go downstairs. I’m hungry,” she said quickly, leaving me alone in her room. I laughed to myself and left her bags there, following her downstairs.
Brunch was waiting for us. Mounds of french toast, bacon, and fresh fruit were spread out on the table. I began buttering my toast, watching Amy from the corner of my eye. She looked around with her curiously innocent gaze and sat as far away from me as she could. This one was going to play hard-to-get. I could almost sense the chase before it even started.
“How was your trip, sweetie?” Emma asked her daughter.
Amy cleared her throat and took a sip of her orange juice before speaking. “It was really smooth. Best flight I’ve ever been on, by far.”
“Do you like your room?” my dad asked.
“It’s beautiful, thank you,” she replied, smiling sheepishly. She decided to leave out the part about how she hated sharing a bathroom with me.
“You two will have to communicate or set a schedule for using the bathroom,” Emma commented. “We are having someone put in a new bathroom for Ashton, but Gary is a bit picky about who does the work.”
“I told you I could do it, Dad,” I said.
“You do a great job, but we both know you’re not the most consistent individual,” my dad joked.
I sighed. “Well, if you want to pay someone to do it, so be it. I could have done it for nearly free—besides the parts, of course,” I challenged.
“Since when has money ever been an issue for us, son?” my dad joked, his head up proudly. He puffed his chest out. Emma took his arm and grazed it seductively.
I didn’t want to see that, so I turned my head and so did Amy because her eyes met mine. We shared a small, mutual smile—our first moment of genuinely chill interaction. She must have hated parental PDA as much as I did.
I cut into my french toast before jamming most of it into my mouth. The taste of the cinnamon, syrup, and butter was incredible.
“Someone’s hungry,” Emma said, giggling.
“I’m a growing boy. I gotta get my first five meals in before I hit the bar later.”
“He’s been so excited to go to the bar since he turned twenty-one a month ago,” my dad said to Amy.
I felt embarrassed and cleared my throat. “I drank long before that, though. Most of the bartenders around here don’t give a damn,” I informed Amy.
Amy giggled and took a bite of bacon. “Oh yeah? I guess people in New York aren’t so uptight after all.”
I got up, pushing my chair in. “I’m going to go work on my other car.”
“Always working on something,” said Dad. “His favorite thing to do.”
I left the room, a bit annoyed. My dad always had to try to bring me down a level, but in front of Amy, it was unacceptable. I wanted to look like the cool badass I was, and someone being too young to go into a bar wasn’t the type of image I wanted to paint.
“Why do I care, anyway?” I mumbled to myself.
I opened the door to the garage. My old blue car sat, shining and comforting, in the dark. It was my first car—the last piece I had of my old life with my mother. I thought back, imagining her standing in front of it.
“Do you like it, Scoots?” she’d asked. ‘Scoots’ was my nickname, short for Scooter. I’d had a scooter when I was a kid I had been obsessed with.
“Hell yeah, I do,” sixteen-year-old me said, my spiky hair and UFO pants contrasting with each other.