She also knew exactly how to get to me, Evie did.Fuck off,I wrote back.Your turn.
I put the phone back down while I waited. This was the new game Evie and I had been playing for weeks. When the other person asked where you were right now, you took a picture and sent it. Then the other person reciprocated. It wasn’t much of a game, maybe, just a back and forth between us. I didn’t even know why we kept doing it. All I knew was that I liked it when her texts came in. And I always wanted to know the answer to the questionWhere are you right now?
It would take her a second—it always took Evie a second to get up the nerve to take the picture and send it—so I picked up my book again.Principles of Creative Writing.Here was the fucked-up thing: I’d actually signed myself up for a creative writing course. One of those continuing education things, because come on—I needed to aim low. But so far it wasn’t so bad. And I wasn’t doing so bad at it. And it was the first thing I’d learned since dropping out of college five years ago. I was learning about three-act structure and character development and point of view, and fuck if it wasn’t pretty interesting. The tests were about mechanics, but for the assignments I’d have to submit original work. I was thinking of a Lightning Man story already.
“Hey,” Andrew said. “You think the banner should be fixed width or full width?”
“Full width,” I said, flipping to the next chapter of the book.
“You don’t even know what I’m talking about, do you?”
“No.”
“Ugh. I’m working with amateurs here.” Andrew clicked around. Outside, one of the neighbors fired up his lawn mower. It was June in the Millwood suburbs, except inside this tiny living room. In here, we had no seasons. It was fine with me.
“Despite the fact that you know nothing, I’m going with full width anyway,” Andrew said. He was programming the Lightning Man website, which we were planning to launch in a few weeks. The whole thing still made me nervous, but I’d agreed to it.If you love him, you have to do it,Evie had told me, and she was right. So we were doing it. He was talking about apps and paid downloads and print on demand. I had no idea about any of that, though I tried to follow along.
It wasn’t about the money for either of us, but the challenge and the creativity. And Andrew… Andrew was juiced. He worked on nothing except Lightning Man right now, and he had a spark that I’d never seen in him before. He fucking loved every part of this project, and he wanted me to write stories, like I always had. So maybe it would be okay to change things, like Evie said. Maybe it would work out.
I still didn’t take my leather bracelet off, though. And I spent a lot of time at Andrew’s when I read and studied for my course. So much time that I’d started bringing Scout with me instead of leaving her home alone. Scout was somewhere on the sofa next to me right now, where she’d burrowed beneath a pile of Andrew’s laundry to sleep.
It was a pretty nice scene, all told. Except Evie wasn’t here.
My phone buzzed with a text.
She’d taken the picture. The point of this game, the game where we texted the pictures, was complete honesty. You had to take the picture when the other person asked. So Evie had taken a picture of herself standing in the alleyway behind the bakery where she worked. No, the bakery where she wasmanager.She was wearing cargo pants and a V-neck T-shirt, an apron tied over her clothes, her red hair tied up loosely on the top of her head. She was holding two trash bags, and there was a dumpster behind her.The glamorous life of a baker,she wrote.
Even in everyday clothes, standing in front of a dumpster after going to work at four in the morning, Evie was hot. And awesome.
Take off your clothes,I texted her.
Ha,she wrote back.You first.
Me:Andrew would be mad.
Her:So would the homeless guy sleeping in the alley right now.
“Earth to Mason,” Andrew said, pulling me out of my conversation. “You’re not studying, you’re staring at your redhead.”
“None of your business,” I told him.
He rolled his eyes. “Please. I’m ordering my own tux for the wedding. I look good in dove gray.”
“Can it,” I said. “We’re not getting married. We’re barely even dating right now.”
“Which is stupid,” he pointed out, “because you are.”
We were dating, sort of. Evie had walked into a bakery in downtown Millwood that had advertised for a manager job, and she’d given them such a hell of an interview that they’d hired her on the spot. She supervised the bakery, managed the staff, oversaw the daily receipts, and helped with hiring and marketing. It was great, but it was also a huge learning curve, and the hours were long, at least at first. She worked a lot, and she didn’t need distractions.
I was a distraction. This wasn’t the kind of job she could walk into late, wearing my T-shirt after a night of nonstop sex. So I stayed away from her on work days, doing my course work and hanging with Andrew. On work days, we texted each other, but not enough to get her in trouble. On work days, I didn’t even take her out to dinner, because if I did we’d end up fucking. On work days, I behaved.
On her days off, I did whatever I wanted.
Which was a lot.
On her days off, she’d come over and I’d fuck her however I wanted, as long as I wanted, as fast or slow as I wanted, until she’d come as many times as I wanted. Then we’d eat something and relax and talk about our week. Then we’d try to watch TV for about fifteen minutes, until we pulled each other’s clothes off. Then we’d fuck some more. Repeat until she had to go back to work again.
Was that dating? I had no idea. It was pretty fucking great, though. So great I wanted more. But I had to be patient. Evie wasn’t fucking around with her career anymore. She had her eye on owning the bakery one day, when the owner retired, and she wasn’t prepared to risk that. So we didn’t.