Page 3 of Never Alone
She set the plates down on the table next to the napkins, slid her phone out from under her arm and into her back pocket, and reached for the silverware caddy.
Aunt Jenna squeezed my arm once. "I'll be back. I forgot the rolls."
She crossed the porch and went back inside.
"So," I said. "Where's your boyfriend?"
Quinn set the caddy down, slow, and gave me the look she gave me whenever I did this. "Hiding from you."
"Where actually?"
"At the hospital. He's a resident. He's pulling a thirty."
"How do you know he's telling the truth?"
"Cole."
"Just saying."
Quinn had been dating Will for almost a year. I'd met him twice. He was fine. That was as far as I was willing to go.
"So. Where's yours?" Quinn picked up a fork from the caddy and pointed it at me.
"Where's my what?"
"Your girlfriend."
I gave her a look.
"What? You don't get to do this to me without me getting to do it to you."
The people who knew made a whole thing out of the fact that I hadn't dated. Quinn had asked me once, straight-faced, if I was waiting for a sign from God. I'd told her I was waiting to meet someone who wasn't going to waste my time. She'd laughed and told me that was worse.
Maybe it was.
My mother had run off with one man after another, none of them good for her and none of them a good father for me. I'd learned by watching what kind of man I didn't want to be. The kind who treated love like a thing he could pick up and put down.
I looked at love the way some people looked at a house. You didn't buy a house you were going to sell in a year. You didn't sign a thirty-year mortgage on a place you didn't want to live in. Love was what you built on top of the choice to show up every day and keep showing up. That was what it was.
I wasn't opposed to it. I just wasn't going to fake it.
If I ever met someone, really met someone, I'd want what Sam and Jamie had. Until then, I wasn't going to pretend.
The afternoon moved the way these afternoons always moved. The kids ate on the grass with Biscuit working her way through them, taking what they handed her until Megan crossed the yard with the look of a woman who had raised two boys and was not about to let an eleven-year-old golden retriever eat anything she wasn't supposed to.
Then Sam called for a toast.
He stood at the head of the table with Jamie at his side, his arm around her waist. The yard quieted.
"I want to talk about Cole," he said.
He walked the room through the long version of how he knew me. The sixteen-year-old who showed up for a ride-along with his backpack still on one shoulder. The firefighter who took the harder shifts without being asked. The engineer who knew the rig better than the men who'd worked on it. The man, now, on his way to fire captain, even if he wouldn't say so himself.
He raised his beer.
"To Lieutenant Weston."
The crew raised their drinks and said it back.
