“Nobody’s related to the Westons except the Westons,” I said. “How do you know about them?”
“I have my ways. Do you know about their hot spring?”
“That’s a rural legend. Um… the small-town equivalent of an urban legend. The hot spring isn’t real.”
He looked down at his cleaned-off plate, his smile smug. “Interesting you believe that.”
“Doesn’t matter. Even if the hot spring is real, nobody’s allowed on the estate who isn’t family, which rules out all of town.”
“I hear the spring has magical restorative powers.”
“Oh yeah?” I said. “I hear Old Man Weston has quite the shotgun collection, and doesn’t take kindly to people trespassing on his land.”
“Are you sure you’re not related? He sounds a lot like you, when reporters show up on your front porch.”
“Oh, f**k. You had to bring that up. Now I’m getting mad all over again. I should send them a bill for my plant pot. Do you think I could sue the crew for something?”
He laughed. “Let’s go skinny dipping in the Weston hot spring. I think it’s the perfect thing for us to do today.”
I jumped up with a start. “Poor Vern! Has he been waiting in the car this whole time?”
Dalton pulled a set of keys from his pocket. “I told him to take the day off. Someone recommended the tennis courts, so I believe he’s starting there, taking a tennis lesson.”
“Careful about that,” I said, grinning. “He’s going to get too comfortable here in the Beav and you’ll find yourself without a butler.”
“We’ll see about that.” He nodded for me to follow along as he walked toward the front door. “Just me and you. Let’s have an adventure. Put on your adventure boots.”
“Sure, but they don’t go with this dress.” I ran up the stairs to my room and got changed into my Disco Duck T-shirt, plus sweatshirt layers in drab colors, plus a pair of dark, lightweight cords with some stretch. I didn’t own a pair of hiking boots, but I had some year-old, unused tennis shoes that could use some breaking in.
I popped my head into Shayla’s room and told her we were heading out.
She looked up from her computer and gave me a worried look. “Be careful.”
“How do you know what we’re doing?” I looked down at my outfit. “Is it that obvious I’m dressed for trespassing on the Weston estate?”
“Oh.” She scrunched her lips from side to side thoughtfully. “I just meant be careful in general. He’s so charming, just like his vampire character. But you wouldn’t trust Drake Cheshire with your heart.”
“He’s not Drake. That’s just a character, and Dalton’s not a character.”
More lip scrunching, plus wincing.
“Funny you should mention that,” Shayla said. “You say Dalton’s not a character, but what if he is? This whole super-playful personality thing he has going on… insisting on going to the wedding of a complete stranger, with a stranger. It’s f**ked up.”
“Maybe that’s just how he is. Some people are impulsive. Fun. I hope he rubs off on me.”
“He’s going to fill your head with promises and leave you broken hearted.”
Now, I love Shayla like a sister. Or, based on the siblings I know, better than a sister. I knew she meant well with the warning, but her condescending tone was not helping her message get through.
I stepped into her room, pulled the door shut behind me, and whisper-yelled, “He’s going to fill my vagina with c**k and leave me satisfied. You’re not the exciting one now. Get over it.”
Before she could retort, I quickly exited the room, shutting her door firmly behind me.
With a deep breath, I put a smile on my face to lift the weight in my chest, and I ran down to join Dalton on an adventure.
~
We drove toward the Weston Estate, which is on the opposite side of town as Dragonfly Lake.
With Dalton at the wheel of the sleek black car, and me beside him on the passenger side, we drove past the Burger Barn and Chloe’s Pie Shack, both of which seemed busy with the Saturday afternoon crowd. Through the large windows, I spotted a table full of boys in baseball uniforms, trying to get the attention of a table full of girls with their hair up in buns from the afternoon’s ballet classes.
Dalton had slowed down to a crawl to catch a good look as well, and said, “It’s like a Norman Rockwell painting in there.”
“You should buy a house in town if you like it here so much.”
He didn’t respond, just smiled and tapped the steering wheel, staring straight ahead at the road.
Now it was my turn to feel awkward about touching on that forbidden topic of The Future. When you’re dating someone, you need to have intercourse at least ten times before you start talking about The Future.
(That’s not one of Dottie’s rules, just one of my own. I probably got it from my mother’s trashy magazines that she hides under a stack of decorating and craft magazines in her impeccable, non-trashy living room.)
To date, I’d never talked about The Future with a man.
I’d made The Beast with Two Backs more than ten times, but never ten times consecutively with the same person. I made the mistake of trying to talk about Two Weeks From Now with a guy I’d had intercourse with three and a half times, and he’d claimed I was suffocating him. Ironically enough, he liked being suffocated, and had asked me to smother his face with my br**sts. Because I am a lady, I refused.
Just kidding. I totally smothered him as requested, but the whole thing was weird and I think I did it wrong, because we didn’t work out a safe word or signal, and he kept begging me to stop, so I stopped, but then he got annoyed and said the begging was part of it. We tried again, but by this point I was about as excited as a school janitor after a cafeteria food fight. We finished the smothering, and I was on the bottom as he wiggled his wormy dick around, and the whole thing just felt so wormy that I awkwardly began to make small talk to cover up his weird grunting. I mentioned a family barbecue planned for the upcoming holiday weekend.
“You’re smothering me!” he cried as he spurted out his hand lotion in or near my leg crease.
I’d held out hope he would change his mind, and even bought a big package of tofu hot dogs just for him. The wieners had been more expensive than regular meat wieners, which seemed all kinds of wrong to me, so I’d thrown them in the freezer so as not to waste the money. A year later, I’d found no takers for the tofu hot dogs, and as I sat in the car next to sexy Dalton Deangelo, I thought about those hot dogs. I wasn’t going to repeat the mistake of buying fake meat products or trying to talk about The Future before it was time.