Chapter 11 #2
“While our moms drink wine and gossip? Probably.” I walk to the living room, grabbing my laptop and the folder for tonight from the couch.
This morning, I typed up questions to go through.
I pull out the third barstool, two down from him.
“I don’t know why he sends me money. I told him to stop, but he refuses.
Dad still fills Mom’s tank up every Sunday like he did when we were growing up.
He started doing it for Meave and me when we turned sixteen.
I’ve convinced myself he still feels obligated to do that now. ”
I hate that Cooper is so comfortable in my place, but what I hate more is how I’m getting more comfortable in his presence. The walls I erected, the ones meant to push him out, are being chipped away.
“He wants to take care of you. He’s setting an example of how any guy should treat you.”
“I’ve never thought of it like that.” I purse my lips, think about all the other ways Dad has set the bar high. When I think about my parents and their relationship, it’s always as a unit, not individually.
“That’s what we’ll work on tonight. After whatever you have planned, so you have what? An hour or so to think about what you are looking for in a boyfriend and how you want them to treat you.”
“Okay.” I open my folder and sift through the documents, finding the one I need. “Wait, your dad sends you a twenty too?”
“Learned from the best, I guess.” He turns his chair and body to face me. “So, what’s this?”
I start to explain to him everything I researched. The shifted and new plan for our study—I can’t think of it as only mine anymore. We both have a lot riding on this. Cooper, maybe more.
Excited, tangents turn to word vomiting.
Minutes pass by before I need to take a sip of water.
I’m not positive that he understood a word I just spewed, but when I curiously peer over the lip of my glass at him he’s staring at me with a vintage Cooper Carmichael smile.
Eyes starry and attention engrossed as if he’s hanging on to every word I say.
I set my glass down. “What?” I ask incredulously.
“Keep going.” He smiles bigger, and flips the page to more of my notes.
Meave has her phone propped up against a plastic cup facing her. She’s on her art stool, one leg balanced on the top, tucked into her butt. The other bouncing up and down.
Her chestnut brown hair is tied up into a messy bun with two paint brushes pinning it together. Baby hairs and loose strands stick out everywhere.
The biggest show of her career is coming up. Some fancy schmancy studio in the Chicago hired her as an art studio assistant when she graduated from Savannah College of Art and Design. They’re starting a new up-and-coming series; and Meave is the first to be spotlighted.
She’s been working on these newer pieces since October. Honestly, she’s more together than I had anticipated when she answered my video call two hours ago.
“I still can’t believe you applied to be on a dating show.”
“That’s what you don’t believe? I can’t believe they are wanting to do a casting interview.
” She laughs, dipping her brush in the water.
Meave picks up a new, thinner brush. “When my friends and I all agreed to submit applications, I was the last one they thought would make it on. I didn’t take the ninety second video seriously.
I filmed it after a bottle of wine. When we get off the phone, remind me, and I’ll send it to you. ”
I change my position on my bed. Unfolding my legs and rolling over to lie on my stomach.
“If they ask you to be on it, are you going to do it?”
Meave shrugs, dropping her head one way, then the other.
“Seriously?” I exhale. “Mom and Dad—”
“Would laugh. It’s not like I’d fall in love with anyone, or that I’m ready to. Plus…” She pauses.
Besides wanting to check in on her show, I called my sister because three weeks ago she broke up with her long-term boyfriend.
They’d been doing long distance since high school, and when she moved to Chicago after college she realized they weren’t the same people they were at sixteen.
Their break up was ‘mutual’, but Meave still cried for seventy-two hours straight, held up in the second bedroom of her industrial loft apartment that she uses as a studio.
Can’t wait to see the art that came out of those days.
The tip of her tongue sneaks out the corner of her mouth. It’s always done this when she’s concentrating—homework, art, painting her nails, it never mattered. Meave leans into her easel, nose about to touch the canvas.
“If I did go on the show, it’d be for the wrong, I mean selfish, reasons. I’d gain all the followers just to yap about my art. They’d be highly disappointed to find out that I am in fact an old woman trapped in a twenty-four-year-olds body.”
“You are not an old woman.”
“Sure,” she says humorously. “The two cats, an enthusiasm for needlepoint, carrying hard candies in my thrifted purse, playing Mahjong, volunteering at the community garden, and a bedtime that is occasionally before the sun sets. Nope, not an old woman.”
“I think you’re interesting.” She does have a mature palette. I snort quietly. She gives me a placating smile. “But you are okay? You are doing better?”
“You sound like Mom.” She turns to face the camera. “Yes, Sutton, I’m okay. Leland and I had lunch the other day. We are going to be friends.”
“Friends.”
She swirls the paint brush in front of her, accidentally painting a lavender streak across the lens. “You have zero room to talk.”
“Uh. How?”
“Cooper is helping you find a boyfriend.”
Meave wipes the paint off with the sleeve of the flannel tied around her waist.
“That isn’t the same. We never dated, and we aren’t friends.”
“Dating. Being infatuated with each other from the ages of six to sixteen. Tomato, to-mah-toe.”
“Literally no, Meave.”
She blows out a very older sister breath. “Whatever. How is your tutoring going?”
“Good.” I think.
My sister picks up her phone, bringing it closer to her face as if she’s trying to examine me through the screen. “Sutton Davis, are you blushing?”
I touch my cheeks. Warm and tingling like a bag of Pop Rocks.
Yes. “No. Sunburnt from a run this morning.”
“It rained.”
“Stop stalking me.”
“Never. I’m your older sister and I have the right to do whatever I want.”
“You aren’t my sister. Kidding,” I say when she drops her blue eyes, all cat-like. “Cooper is actually picking me up tonight for our next lesson.”
My phone pings.
Cooper
I’ll be there in twenty.
Is that enough time?
Should be.
“I’ve gotta go Meave. I need to get dressed, and I have zero clue what I’m going to wear,” I groan and flash the camera down at my body—warm and wrapped in a fluffy robe.
“Wait. You’ll never guess who I saw when I was home last weekend.”
“Who?” I rummage through hangers, my I-hate-everything-in-my-closet mood not helping.
“Izzy and Dylan sharing a hot chocolate. And I mean sharing.”
“Drinking out of the same mug would be rather impressive.” The sarcasm leaks through the phone.
“He kissed whipped cream off her.”
I pull out a polka-dot sweater dress and switch my phone to the other ear. “Thank you for letting me know.”
“Seriously?”
“Meave, I’ve really gotta go. Cooper’s on his way.”
“Text me after, or I’m calling Cooper,” she says in a rush as I hang up.
I take a slow inhale. My high school best friend and my ex-boyfriend dating, or whatever they’re doing, isn’t what bugs me. Probably should, but it’s the reminder of more people who make dating and love seem easy.