“Jesus,” I say when I finally size her up. “You okay?”
“It’s nothing serious,” she says. “Just…you were right. The sandals weren’t great for walking, and these”—she gestures at the slip-on tennis shoes—“are kinda…so-so. My feet are sore.”
“Blisters?”
“No. Just very tired and muscle-sore.”
“You want another piggy?—”
“No,” she says quickly, and even though I feel a stab of disappointment, I definitely think that was the smart answer. Eden’s inner thighs are strong and soft as fuck, and having them wrapped around my waist made me want to pull her around my body to face me. To line up my hardening cock against the seam of her sweatpants, to see if she’d be hotter there. It made me want to know what it would feel like to have those thighs wrapped around my face.
All things I don’t need to be thinking about, if I want to do right by her, which is all I’ve ever wanted.
So we keep walking, now side by side. And it feels good. Nice. Her arm brushes mine occasionally, and I try not to notice the new surge of electricity each time, the way it goes straight to my cock.
There’s nothing to do except walk and talk, so we do. I ask her about how she got started with quilting (she learned it from her grandmother; sewing was the only time her grandmother sat still).
I want to know more about her grandmother, so she tells me: That she was small-minded and bitter, not very likable. That Eden knew she was safe but notcherishedoradored. She longed, a lot of the time, for someone who would hug her and curl up with her and stroke her hair.
Dead father.
Absent mom.
Withholding grandmother.
Jesus.
My hands fist at my sides.
“Teller was very demonstrative,” she says. “So it was hard to resist that. That’s part of how I ended up in that marriage.”
She doesn’t say anything about Paul, and I don’t ask. I realize I don’t want to know. I don’t want to know if Paul gave her everything she didn’t get in her childhood, if she misses it now, if thoughts of him are creeping into the cracks in our conversation.
I hope not, and I hate myself for hoping.
She tells me about when she opened the quilt store, not long after she married Teller. His money made it possible for her to go from running an online store to a bricks-and-mortar one, which she still feels weird about, but also, “Thank God something good came out of that marriage.”
When she asks what it was like when my aunt got divorced, I tell her about how much time Aunt Meryl spent at our house crying and how I wasn’t old enough to understand, but I knew I wanted to stick it to the guy who’d done it.
“You were a sensitive kid,” she says.
“I guess,” I say, shrugging. “Or a vicious one.”
She’s shaking her head. “I can’t believe I thought you were cynical.”
“I am cynical.”
Eden gives me a sidelong, extremely dubious look. “You’re a giant softie,” she says. “Wearing some serious chain mail.”
She’s wrong. Maybe I was soft at one point, but life definitely kiln-fired it out of me.
“Whatever you want to believe,” I say, secretly pleased by her characterization, wrong or right.
“Ditto. We can agree to disagree.”
I cross my arms. “You know what I could use right now? Doritos.”
She snickers. “You’re in luck. I crammed the bag into my purse.”
