13. Everett
13
Everett
K issing.
We’d done it when we were both fourteen, of course. Or maybe I’d been fourteen and he’d been a hundred and fifty. And now he was still...okay, no, he wasn’t still fourteen. But still, something about kissing him felt odd.
I’d had the opportunity, even if I hadn’t really taken it, to kiss dozens, even hundreds of other people. College, especially with art students, was practically one long opportunity to kiss people. And drink. And do various illicit substances.
Peter? He just had me. Clearly the other kids in the woods weren’t big into kissing—and the kids in the woods were something Peter and I were going to have to discuss at some point, since, well...kids didn’t belong in the woods.
Fuck, I was a boring, responsible grownup.
And that was part of the problem, I realized, as I grabbed more pizza for both of us. We’d completely finished one of them, and were working on the second, stuffing ourselves beyond capacity and loving every moment of it.
But the children.
Until Peter understood that children being lured into the woods away from their families was a bad thing, it was going to be hard for me to see him as an adult.
I pressed a finger to my lips, considering him kissing me. It had been chaste and innocent, just like our first kiss, so many years ago.
I hoped it wasn’t me creepily grooming a teenager in an adult’s body.
We were going to have to have a discussion about it, I realized, as much as that was going to be awkward and terrible.
Peter came bouncing into the kitchen after me, DVD in hand, holding it out to me. “Can we watch this one?”
One of my grandmother’s extensive romcom collection. Was he interested in the bright colored cover, or had something else drawn him to it? Well, there was no reason to say no. It was a cute enough movie, and frankly, I was going to have a hard time saying no to anything Peter wanted for a while.
Possibly ever.
No, I hadn’t abandoned him on purpose. I never would have done that. I didn’t bear fault in the situation. If anyone did, and I wasn’t sure anyone did, it was my parents, for forcing me to leave even when I wanted to stay and my grandmother offered to let me.
But that didn’t mean I didn’t want to make it up to Peter.
So I smiled at him. “Sure. Sounds good. I also got a tub of rocky road for later.”
He cocked his head in confusion, and that was when it hit me, the enormity of what we had ahead of us. Even if Peter was an adult in age and mannerisms, which I wasn’t sure about at all, he was from the fucking eighteen hundreds. He’d lived his whole life in the woods, playing with children.
The lost kids, he’d called them, and I was sure as shit going to lose sleep about that until we had a long talk about it, and maybe did something about it too. Lost children were not something I could learn to live with. Were they all kidnapped and replaced, like Peter had been?
Nope, that wasn’t a conversation for today. Soon, definitely, but not right then.
“Rocky road is a kind of ice cream. You...remember ice cream?” Surely we’d had ice cream together sometime in our four years. That was a normal thing to do, especially in the summertime. I distinctly remembered Cider Landing’s drugstore selling ice cream.
He perked up. “Like the cold sandwiches you used to bring sometimes? With the sweet black bread and cold drippy white insides?”
Ice cream sandwiches.
This was the problem. The man didn’t even know what ice cream sandwiches were called. It was going to take time to integrate him into society because he didn’t know simple, basic things any five-year-old modern kid would know. And at the same time, he remembered a woman who had died before the turn of the twentieth century.
“Those would be ice cream sandwiches,” I agreed, then considered for a moment. “Rocky road is similar, but...different. You’ll see.”
He grinned in response, but accepted his plate of pizza and didn’t demand to know now, now, now, which struck me as a good sign. Maybe it didn’t mean he was definitely an adult, but it was the adult way to react to a promised treat—pleasure, but also patience.
It was going to take time and work and lots of patience for both of us, but...we could do this, me and Peter. We were us again, and together, we’d always been able to do anything.
I had to explain some things about the movie to him, like why the woman was embarrassed by, oh, anything, and what “black tie” meant, but in the end, he loved it. He finished the movie leaning against me as the couple kissed, and smiling sweetly.
“That was nice. I’m glad they stopped fighting and she caught him before he left.”
I squeezed him tight against me, nodding. “Me too. They deserve to be happy. Now how about that ice cream?”
He hopped up off the couch, so light on his feet it was a wonder they even touched the ground, and then held a hand out to me. “I thought you’d never offer.”
I accepted his help and leaned into him, kissing him on the cheek instead of the lips, but still, it was warm and hopeful and felt so right. I’d been away from my best friend for too damned long. Never again. “I promised you ice cream, and I always keep my promises. Especially to you.”
He grinned that sweet grin of his and nodded. “Best friends?”
“Best friends,” I agreed. “Forever.”
I wrapped an arm around his shoulders and led him into the kitchen, where I proceeded to teach him the joys of rocky road. Marshmallow, it turned out, was his new favorite thing. I couldn’t wait to make him s’mores.