"Do you get along with your family?" she asked.
"Sure. My parents are good people, and they've always supported me in whatever I wanted to do." I winced, realizing how that might sound to Mara. "Not that I'm bragging or something. I'm sorry your family isn't like that."
"It's okay. You don't need to apologize for having good parents." She smiled shyly. "They certainly raised an amazing son."
Her compliment made me feel a little weird, or maybe I was embarrassed. Hard to say for sure. But I knew without any doubts that I liked the way she made me feel.
"My family isn't as bad as you think," she said. "My mom is always there for me when I need her. When I was growing up, anytime I got sick she would make me soup or get ice cream for me, and she'd sit by my bed reading stories to me. She and my dad would take turns doing that."
"Then what's up with the 'you have to be proper' garbage?"
She shrugged. "My mom and grandma worry about stuff like that. We have to fit into the level of society we're in, where people care about appearances more than anything else."
"No offense, but that's dumb."
"Yeah, I know. But I'm stuck in that world, so I have to try to be what people expect. A proper lady."
I couldn't imagine how stressful that must've been. Constantly worrying about how other people viewed me and whether I'd lived up to their expectations sounded like the definition of hell.
No wonder Mara had been so uptight.
"Do you have any brothers or sisters?" she asked. "I don't. Only child here. But I always wished I had a brother or sister."
"I've got one sister, Bailey. She's fourteen and likes to call me Liver."
Mara laughed. "Liver?"
"Yeah, it's short for Oliver." I shook my head but felt my mouth tightening into a closed-mouth smile. "She's a brat, but I love her anyway. You have to cut teenagers some slack, because their brains haven't grown any common sense yet."
"When I was a teenager, I never did anything I wasn't supposed to do. I was the shy girl nobody wanted to be friends with."
"I would've been your friend. As the nerd with glasses who loved computers, I didn't fit in either."
"But now you do." She glanced around, her lips curving into a soft smile. "You found where you belong, didn't you? I can tell how much you love this place."
"I do love it. But it's more than the trees and the hot spring. I love the people too."
She aimed her smile at me. "I can see why. They're really nice people."
After our visit to the lake, we headed back to the main resort area. Nobody was using the lawn where the miniten net had been set up earlier, but I knew why. It was time for the weekly bingo competition. Everyone would be in the dining hall for that.
Mara and I joined the game. She won twice, earning two snack-size bags of candy. Afterward, we relaxed on the lawn watching one of the guests lead an impromptu tai chi session---nude tai chi, of course. Mara seemed fascinated by the slow, precise movements.
She tore open one of her candy packets and dropped one of the chocolate-covered peanuts onto her tongue. Sealing her lips, she smiled faintly while she let the chocolate melt in her mouth and hummed with satisfaction. Then she chewed the peanut, slowly, almost sensually.
I wanted to drag her down onto the grass, strip her naked, and give her a different reason to hum like that.
"Want one?" she asked, holding a peanut to my lips. "They're so yummy."
She said that like a chocolate-covered peanut was the most succulent, delicious thing on earth, like she wanted to devour the entire bag while writhing on the ground in ecstasy.
Okay, maybe that was my fantasy, not what she actually wanted to do. Licking melted chocolate off her body... Yeah, I wanted that.
"Are you allergic?" she asked. "To peanuts, I mean."
"No, not allergic." I closed my mouth around the candy and her fingers, lapping up every molecule of chocolate before I chewed and swallowed the peanut. "Mm, you're right. That's really good."
But it didn't taste as good as Mara.