21
A late-spring storm descends on the island the next morning, buffeting my bedroom window with erratic splatters of rain. I
was hoping to get an early-morning run in, but that’s okay. Nothing can dampen my spirits today.
I roll out of bed, shower, and plait my wet hair into a French braid, then I make a pot of coffee and flop down happily into
my couch. Every so often, I remember last night and a little fizzy burst of energy shoots through me.
I kissed John .
As I sip my first cup of coffee, I take out my phone and open Wordle. John isn’t working at the shop today—he’s taking a vacation
day to go to a dentist appointment in Charlottetown—so there’s no point waiting until lunch to do it.
LIKES, I type in. As in, John likes me.
Shoot. All gray.
SHOCK. As in, I’m still shocked at how great our date was.
Damn it. Nothing again.
Okay, maybe it’s time to stop using romantic words.
I go back to my usual boring, sensible method and within a few minutes, I’ve figured out the right word. TRAIN, for three
hundred and twenty-three days!
I sink back into the couch, grinning at my phone. I should text John and see if he’s done Wordle yet. Or would that seem too
eager? We just went out last night. Maybe I should wait for him to text first.
I spend about fifteen minutes waffling on it, then another fifteen trying to craft the perfect casual text. Then I catch sight of the time and realize I’m wasting my whole morning on this. I shake my head at myself and put my phone down determinedly.
Yes, my date with John was great, but I’m not going to be one of those people who makes their whole life about a relationship.
Like Martha, back in university. The first two years of school, all she ever talked about was how much she wanted to be a
self-help guru. She used to drive us all bonkers, actually, always looking down on us for eating sugar (“That’s literally
more addictive than meth”) or getting annoyed when we wouldn’t read all the books she recommended. They all had titles like
Winner, Winner: Five Foolproof Life Hacks to Become an Instant Success Story or The Happiness Game: Ten Secrets from the World’s Happiest People. I actually tried to read that one, but I didn’t make it past secret number one: “Put down your morning coffee.” Honestly,
if that’s the secret to happiness, I think I’d rather die miserable.
Anyway, then Martha met her husband, Jason, and we literally never heard about any of it again. All she ever talked about
was Jason. Fallon actually made a drinking game out of it. If Martha said Jason’s name more than twenty times in a day, we
all had to take a shot.
We eventually had to stop, because we were getting wasted, like, every night.
So, yeah. I definitely don’t want to be like that. Which means I can’t stop trying to sort my life out just because of one
tiny little (amazing) date with John.
I finish another cup of coffee (I’m officially losing at The Happiness Game ) and spend the rest of the morning making a homemade card for Divya to congratulate her on her pregnancy, and another for Martha, whose third child should be born in a few weeks. I even call the bank to get a new debit card, since the tap function on mine stopped working a few months ago. And if I daydream a little about John while the bank has me on hold, well, that’s nobody’s business but mine.
At nine, I head into the shop. There are about fifteen phone messages waiting for me—I guess the whole town woke up and realized
that it’s almost summer and they should really get their snow tires taken off—and the first three customers of the day are
kind of impatient, but today, I don’t care at all. Time flies by in bright, happy bursts, and when I’m not reminiscing about
all the best bits of my date with John, I’m planning out the next event for the museum, which I’m going to do on Canada Day.
I want to make this one even bigger than the last one. Our final tally of guests for the Barrel Into Summer event was eighty-eight.
On Canada Day, I’m determined to break a hundred.
At lunchtime, I pop down to the grocery store. Jim and Mrs. Finnamore both need a few things, and I buy myself a bunch of
discount candy and chocolate.
In the checkout line, my phone dings with a text.
[12:14] John: how’s it going?
My heart does a somersault in my chest.
[12:15]: Good!
[12:15]: Just buying my body weight’s worth of candy at the grocery store
[12:15]: Snacks for my movie marathon tonight ?
[12:17] John: Heath Ledger movies, right?
[12:17]: Nope, changed my mind
[12:17]: Nostalgic movies
[12:17]: Although I’ll probably watch A Knight’s Tale
[12:17]: That’s Heath Ledger AND nostalgia
[12:17]: (And yes, I know I’m weird.)
[12:18] John: lol
[12:18] John: sounds fun
I glance up to make sure I’m not holding up the line, then shift my weight from foot to foot. Should I invite him to join
me? Or would that be too weird? Normally I would space dates out more. Although that’s because I usually find it kind of tiring
being with someone that much. Like I feel that I have to be extra peppy and entertaining or something.
I don’t feel that way with John. Things with him are somehow... different.
[12:20]: You’re welcome to join if you want
[12:20]: Though I will make you watch The Last Unicorn.
I don’t even have time to get properly nervous before John’s answer pops up.
[12:20] John: sure
[12:20] John: sounds good
I grin down at the words.
Easy, I realize. That’s how things are different.
Things with John just feel easy .
Easy or not, having John inside my house is definitely kind of weird. Not weird in a bad way, but it’s just a little bizarre, like seeing a penguin in the desert. I hang back a few steps and watch him wander the
living room, his skin bathed in red from the sunset.
He’s super interested in the house and asks me a bunch of questions I don’t know the answers to, like when it was built and
if it has a drilled well or a dug well.
“How on earth would I know that?” I say.
“You could’ve asked before you moved in.”
“They’re charging me two hundred dollars a month. The only question I asked was ‘When can I move in?’”
“Two hundred a month ?” He whistles. “That’s insane. This place is incredible.”
“I know, right?” I beam around the living room. “I guess they just wanted someone to look after the place while they were gone.”
“Is that a wood-burning stove?”
“Yep.” I don’t add that I’ve never used it before, because I’m not actually sure I know how to start a fire.
“When d’you think the owners will want it back?”
I grimace. “I don’t know. My parents say they really love it in New Mexico, so I think I’ve got a while longer.”
I give him a tour of the rest of the house, beaming every time he points out the cool things I’m secretly hoping he’ll notice,
like the clawfoot tub in the master bathroom and the huge mahogany desk in the office. I even take him out to the garage,
a standalone building set a ways back from the house that I think I’ve only set foot in once. The garage door hasn’t worked
since I moved in, so I’ve never parked my car inside it, and anyway, it’s half-full of boxes of the owner’s stuff and a bunch
of broken lawn furniture.
“Holy shit,” John says, staring at the large, cobwebby space like it’s the Shangri-La. “This is insane. You could fit a huge
workbench in here. And is that another room back there?”
I rise up on my tiptoes. It does look like there’s a door hidden behind that pile of boxes. “Maybe.”
It takes ten minutes for us to shift enough boxes to see, and another five for John to jimmy the door open. A shower of dust
and dead bugs rains down when he finally gets it open, but he doesn’t seem to notice.
“There’s a whole other space back here,” he calls.
I’ll have to take his word for it. No way I’m walking through that dead bug shower.
John walks backward on the way back to the main house, admiring the harbor view. “This place is seriously awesome. You couldn’t find something like this in a big city,” he adds.
“If you could, it would probably cost about a million dollars.”
He snorts. “More like ten or twenty. Cities are insanely overpriced. My buddy in Toronto bought the tiniest two-bedroom apartment
for one and a half million.”
“Is that the one whose wedding you’re going to this summer?” I ask, as we step into the kitchen.
“Mm.” He peers at the radiator. “Does this place have a wood furnace, or oil?”
“No idea.” I ignore his slightly affronted look and swing open the fridge. “Want a drink?”
After John takes a trip to the basement to confirm that it’s an oil furnace, we stretch out on the couch with sodas and popcorn
and I pull up our first nostalgic movie of the night— A Knight’s Tale. I’m kind of expecting John to be one of those guys who’s too cool for any movie that isn’t a dark action film or violent
thriller, but once again, he surprises me. He pays attention the whole time, even if he does have a habit of forgetting which
characters are which. “Who’s that guy?” is his constant refrain. In anyone else, it might be annoying, but with John it just
makes me laugh.
“That’s Heath Ledger,” I say, for the fourth time. “He’s the main guy.”
“Ah.” John nods. “He looks different now.”
He definitely doesn’t, but I just roll my eyes and hold my hand out for the popcorn bowl. He hands it to me without taking
his eyes off the screen, frowning at Heath Ledger like he still secretly suspects it’s a different character. I hide a smile.
My eyes linger on him a few moments more, watching the lights of the TV move over his skin. It’s still a bit weird seeing him out of his work clothes. In a T-shirt and jeans, you can really notice things like the swell of his biceps and strong lines of his neck.
He notices me watching him, and something shifts in the air as our eyes meet. There’s a pleasant warmth stirring inside me,
but I just smile and turn back to the movie. It’s more fun this way, letting the tension build naturally.
The last guy I slept with was someone I met online and had a few dates with over the winter. He was nice enough, don’t get
me wrong, but it all felt so dreadfully formulaic. Plus, I think he must’ve read somewhere that girls really get turned on
by kissing. I like a good make-out session as much as the next girl, but this was, like, forty-five minutes of kissing. I kept trying to move things along, but he kept pulling my hands away and murmuring cringey things like, “There’s
no rush” and “We’ve got all night.” I wanted to say, yeah, dude, I know we’ve got all night, so let’s move along to the fun
stuff, please.
I probably shouldn’t be so harsh. I could tell he had good intentions, but I was so bored by the first ten minutes that he
wound up doing the opposite of what I’m sure he intended.
I can already tell it won’t be like that with John. Over the next hour, we slowly drift closer together. I shift on the couch
to lean against his shoulder. He puts his hand on my leg. I trace my fingertips over his arm. His thumb moves over my knee.
By the end of the movie, we both totally know where this is going, but I like that he asks me anyway.
“Do you want me to head out?”
I look up at him with a grin. “What’s a five-letter word for ‘hell no’?”
Laughing, he pulls me closer and captures my lips in his. I throw a leg over his knees, straddling him on the couch. Our kisses are bright and breathless, his hands warm as they slide down my back. They move lower, strong fingers digging into my flesh, and then he pulls me against him, a rhythmic, dizzying friction. He scrapes his lips over the shell of my ear, and a breath of startled laughter slips from my lips. He laughs too; I think he knows just how I’m feeling. For a year we worked side by side, barely polite acquaintances. Now his warm, bare skin is sliding against mine, and my breathing is ragged in his ear, and it’s all the more intimate after being strangers for so long.
His mouth moves down my neck, over my collarbone; a noise slips from my throat as it moves lower still, his tongue moving
over raised flesh. My bra is on the floor—I vaguely remember discarding it—and the rest of our clothes follow shortly after.
We break apart so I can hunt down a condom, and I laugh again as I sprint naked through the house, giggling harder as I duck
under the windows.
“You’re so weird,” John says, laughing with me as I hop back on the couch.
“Yeah, yeah,” I say with a grin. A moment later, he pulls me back into his lap, and my laughter gives way to soft, shallow
panting. His hands are on my hips again, recapturing that steady rhythm, but now there’s nothing between us. Everything gets
hot and blurry, my world narrowing down to John’s skin, his fingers, his lips. He’s very quiet—not surprising—but I can feel
his breathing changing as our movements become quicker. Then my head is on his shoulder, and I’m crying out and clutching
him, and his groan is a rumble I feel inside my bones.
I come back to myself in stages, finally shifting my weight to collapse beside him on the couch. We’re not touching anymore, but we’re both breathless and grinning.
“That was fun,” he says, and I laugh, because what a very John way to put it.
“Very fun,” I agree. “Want to stay over tonight? Have some more fun later?”
He grins and echoes my words from earlier. “What’s a five-letter word for ‘hell yes’?”