“Hey, stranger,” I said to him.
He tucked his lips in and shook his head, then nodded. I guess that was his way of saying hello.
“Looking for Elodie?”
Little Mama was spending her evening at the monthly family readiness group meeting for Phillip’s brigade. She was determined to make the other wives like her before the baby came. I didn’t blame her. She needed all the support she could get.
“I’ll tell her you stopped by.”
“No, actually. I just—” Kael paused. “I went to get a massage, but you weren’t working.” He looked in the direction of the alleyway toward the shop.
“Oh.” Now, that was a surprise.
I scooted over on the porch and made room next to me. Sort of. I had been blowing the seeds off dandelions in between my slightly manic thoughts, so Kael had to move a pile of bald weeds before he could sit down. He dropped them softly into the palm of my hand.
“I could use some wishes for sure,” he said.
“There’s more if you want.” I pointed to my weed garden. I hadn’t meant to harbor all those dandelions, wild daisies, and creeping something-or-other, but there they were by the corners of my concrete porch. Surrounded.
“I’m good,” he told me.
He looked so different in regular clothes.
“I see you went shopping?” He was obviously okay sitting in silence, but I wanted some conversation. Plus, I wanted to know where he’d disappeared to.
Kael pulled at his T-shirt. “Yeah, sorry about that. It’s been kind of a crazy few days.”
I had to ask. “Crazy? How?”
He sighed, picking up a dandelion stem from the steps. “Long story.”
I leaned back on my palms. “Yeah.”
“When do you work again?” he asked, a moment later.
A plane flew overhead right as I started to answer. “Tomorrow. I’m filling in for someone.”
“Do you have any openings?”
He was looking at me, his dark eyes hooded by his long lashes.
“Maybe.”
“Maybe?” He raised his brows and I laughed. He was soft today. I liked this relaxed version of him. Kael the civilian.
“I’m going to a party tonight,” I told him. “It’s at my dad’s house.”
He made a face.
“Yes. Exactly. Only worse, because my brother is being an idiot and throwing it while Dad and Estelle are off in Atlanta at the Marriott, eating lobster tails and boozing with expensive wine.” I rolled my eyes.
My dad never took my mom anywhere like that. They never had adult time without my brother and me. One of the many reasons their marriage didn’t work out. That and the fact that they were the two least compatible people on earth.
“Your dad doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who wants a party thrown at his house,” Kael observed. “Especially when he’s not there.”
If only he knew. “Oh, he’s not. That’s why I’m going to chaperone.”
He made a noise—something between a grunt and a laugh. He was actually amused. I was really liking this, the way I was starting to read his face and guess what he was thinking.
“Aren’t you a little young to be chaperoning?”
“Ha, ha.” I stuck my tongue out at him . . . then snapped my mouth shut as soon as I realized what I’d done. I was flirting with him! I didn’t know how to stop. Who was this person, sticking her tongue out at a boy?
“How old are you, Mr. Expert-on-Ageism?”
“That’s not what ageism means.” He corrected me with a smile.
I scoffed. I was equal parts charmed and surprised.
“Okay, Mr. Know-It-All, how old are you?”
He smiled again.
So soft.
“I’m twenty.”
I shot up. “Really? I could be older than you?”
“How old are you?” he asked.
“Twenty-one next month.”
He licked his pink lips and bit on the bottom one. It was a habit of his, I’d noticed.
“I turn twenty-one tomorrow. I win,” he said with a smile.
I opened my mouth in an O. “No way. Show me your ID.”
“Really?” he questioned.
“Yes, really. Prove it.” And then, because I couldn’t help myself, I added, “I want receipts.”
He pulled his wallet out from the back pocket of his jeans and handed it to me. The first thing I saw was a picture of two women. One was older than the other by a couple of decades or so, but the resemblance was there.
I looked up at him, apologizing for the lack of privacy. The picture was obviously old and important, otherwise it wouldn’t be in his wallet. Across from the picture of the women was his military ID card. I read his birthday. Sure as sin, his birthday was tomorrow.
“So, you’re older than me by like a month.” I gave in.
“I told you.”
“Don’t brag.”
I leaned in to Kael with a playful shoulder bump. He didn’t move away from me. And I froze with hopeful anticipation. On my sunny porch, in ripped jeans and with soft eyes, he paused for a moment and pressed his shoulder back into mine.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
“I haven’t sat on my porch in so long. This is nice.”
It was just me and Kael, with the occasional passing car for company.
“I’d sit out here almost every day when I first moved in. I couldn’t believe it. My porch. My place.” I stopped and smiled. “It feels good, you know? The street in front of you, the house behind you.”
Talking to Kael was like writing in a diary, sort of.
“I’ve always loved sitting out front. Wherever I’ve lived. Did you notice that swing on my dad’s porch? We moved that swing with us when we were growing up. It came from base to base, from house to house—kind of like my dad’s recliner.”
I could feel Kael listening, encouraging me to go on.
“When we first moved to Texas, we didn’t have a big enough porch, so we kept it in the shed. It’s heavy wood . . . you can see where it’s splintered in a few places and where it’s worn down on the arms a little. It’s not like that plastic outdoor furniture you get now. What’s it called—rosin?”
“Resin,” he said, helping me out.
“That’s it—resin.” I was thinking about my mom now, how she would sit out front on the porch steps in the dark and stare up at the sky. “When we were in Texas my mom practically lived on our porch, all year round. I always wondered what she was looking at. What she was thinking about when she stared at the dark sky for hours.”
I thought about the nights when she didn’t have the swing and how she would just sit there, a little lost, but still focused on the sky.
“She always made up stories about the sky. The sun, the moon, the stars. She really lived in her own head, a lot like me, I guess.” I paused. “She was quite dramatic. She told me once that she believed God was made up of all the stars and that when one burned out, a little bit of the good in the world died with it.”
Kael’s eyes were on me, and I was aware of how the heat was spreading on my cheeks. The way I was talking . . . well, it was like I was thinking out loud. I barely realized it. I knew that it sounded cheesy. I’d read things like that in books sometimes or had seen it in movies, but it hardly seemed possible, in real life, to instantly connect and feel so comfortable with a stranger. What a cliché. Yet there I was, being opened by someone I hadn’t even known for a week.