“No. Well, yeah, but that’s not what I was talking about. I trained him to sit, by the way.”
He looks skeptical. “How? He’s stubborn as hell.”
“He’ll do anything for a piece of cheese.”
I go to the kitchen and grab a package of cheese. Bruno smells it and comes running. I do the hand signal from the video. The puppy lowers his bottom to the floor and stares at me expectantly. I give him the piece of cheese. He eats it, then runs to the other side of the room to join the kittens.
I can tell by the look on Luca’s face that he’s impressed and maybe a little bit jealous.
“I didn’t know you grew up with dogs,” he says.
“I never had a dog.”
“Seriously? So, you’re just a dog whisperer by accident?”
“I watched a lot of videos this afternoon,” I say. “Plus, I had a ferret when I was a kid. I loved teaching him new tricks.”
Luca smiles. He leans against the armrest of my couch. “I guess your fifth-grade dream came true, then. Didn’t you mention that you wanted a ferret in the first letter you ever wrote to me?”
“I also wanted a cat. Now I have two.”
He snorts out a laugh. “What did I say about cats back then?”
“You said that cats were boring, and that’s why they’d be a perfect fit for me. Something like that.”
We both look at Roland and Phoebe, who are in the living room ganging up on Bruno.
“I might have been wrong about that.” He steps away from the couch and toward me, but then passes me, making me have to turn around as he makes his way to the kitchen island.
“You were wrong about a lot of things,” I remind him. “For one, my parents aren’t brother and sister.”
I follow him to the island and pull out a stool to sit down. When I cross my legs, one of my feet bumps his knee. He looks down at my foot, but he doesn’t move out of the way. I don’t move either. My foot feels warm where it touches his leg. It’s all I can focus on. The heat spreads up through my leg to the rest of my body.
I watch as his Adam’s apple bobs up and down before he meets my eyes again. “I was a little shithead back then, wasn’t I?”
“Back then? You mean you’re not anymore?”
His smile fades just a little. For a moment I wonder if I went too far. I move my foot away from his knee, bringing his attention back down to my legs.
“You’ve been reading the letters again,” he says without looking up, “haven’t you?”
“Yeah. So have you.”
“I figured you might have seen my box.”
“I was surprised that you kept all those letters. I’ve always wondered if I was the only one saving them.”
“I threw away the first one,” he says. “Then I regretted it and I took it out of the trash. I couldn’t bring myself to get rid of them.”
“I really thought that you hated me that first year,” I say. “It wasn’t until I realized nobody else was still writing to their pen pals that I thought maybe you didn’t hate me as much as you wanted me to think.”
He looks back up at me, and it feels like it’s the first time I’ve seen those ice-blue eyes in ages. “Why did you keep the letters if you thought that I hated you?”
I shrug. “Hard to say. I’d like to think that I was too sentimental, but I was probably just a hoarder. I used to keep all of my birthday cards for years until my mom forced me to throw them away.”
“I have two more letters upstairs if you want them,” he says. “They were the letters that I tried to send to you after you had already moved. I tried to give them to you the other day, but I think you were still pretty mad at me.”
He says this tentatively, like he’s wondering if I still am.
