“But you could,” Will interrupts with a kind smile.
Shyly, I shake my head. “No, I still need like four hundred bucks. I still need to convince my father. I still need… well, a lot.”
Cass stares at me intensely.
“I’m so sorry,” I say, reaching out to his hand on the table. “I wasn’t keeping it from you. It just didn’t come up.”
He shakes his head. “No, that is not what I meant. It’s okay,” he explains. “It’s just that I thought you knew—but no. You just had your own New York thing.”
“What?” Will interrupts. “You thought she knew what?”
“About New York,” Cass replies, confused. “Wait, do you know about New York too? How did you hear about that?”
Will holds up a hand, and I catch Mona’s eye. She is wide-eyed and delighted by the strange, mirror image theatrics unfolding in front of her.
“How did I hear about what? That doesn’t make any sense. How did you hear about New York, Cass?”
“By email, how else?”
“Well that is how I heard about it too! That and a phone call from the head of the history department—”
“History department? What are you talking about? The National Guard doesn’t even have a history department at Fort Hood.”
“National Guard? Who said anything about the National Guard?”
By now, Mona and I are both racked with laughter. We can see it, even if they can’t.
“Okay, okay, okay, what is going on here?” Cass says, annoyed. “Will, are you talking about my job offer from the National Guard?”
“No… I’m talking about my job offer from the history department at Fort Hood.”
“Those are the same place.”
Will begins to smile. “Yeah, but they are two different job offers.”
Cass shakes his head in disbelief. “Are you shitting me? Do you know how long I’ve been sitting on this, trying to figure out how to talk to you about it?”
“I don’t know… about a month?” Will answers, shrugging.
Mona pulls a face. “Sounds like you guys got some weird twinsy hoodoo going on. What are the odds?”
Will scrubs his face with the heel of his hand, shaking his head in disbelief. “Man, I should’ve figured it was going to be something like this. We made it a lot harder than it needed to be.”
“Probably won’t be the last time,” Cass says.
All I can do is smile. That was one of the funniest things I think I ever saw. I’m so glad Mona was here to witness it, because nobody would ever believe it.
“So all you need to do, Libby, is figure out h
ow you’re going to get to your residency, right?”
I take a breath, peering into Will’s gaze, seeing myself in his green eyes. He holds me steady, plain and earnest, telling me something silently that I would never ask him out loud.
Cass reaches out and slides his fingers underneath my palm so he can grasp my hand lightly in his.
“Well?” he asks softly. “What do you think?”
My head is spinning. What do I think? It’s hard to say. I know that words get in the way, though.