“Why not? Are you extending yourself past Sussex County? Are you going to be the New Jersey Casanova? Or the East Coast Casanova?” She giggled as I kissed her collar bones and down to her breast plate, all the time keeping one eye on her open bedroom door and the currently empty hallway.
“No.” I ran a hand up under her shirt, all the way up to the bra that I could feel was little more than a tiny bit of lace. God, I loved her underwear. “I have no plans to expand. In fact, I’m contracting.”
“What?” she asked, her voice a little giggly and off. She bit her lip a little when I got my hand under the lace.
She felt amazing.
“I’m relocating, and downsizing,” I explained, then I saw Sullie run down the hall pulling a wagon full of toys that would serve equally well as run-of-the-mill playthings and items of torture. For my head and sack. I pulled my hand and mouth away from my very hot girlfriend, sat back to wait for Sullie to administer some pain, and finished explaining. “I’m an official Essex County resident.”
Sullie came in and pulled out a heavy toy keyboard, dropped it on my bare foot, and clapped along to “Bingo” while I screamed in agony.
“What do you mean?” Cadence asked, her focus snapped back as mine blurred out in a red cloud of pain.
“Ow, damn, Sullie, that hurts!” Sullie laughed and held his hands up. I swept him off the floor and jostled him on my shoulder. “I mean that I can’t leave Aunt Helene in her rotting hole of a house. What the hell will she do about the ice and snow? What about the heat? That fucking furnace is a hundred years old. I’m surprised you don’t have to shovel coal into it.”
“Don’t swear in front of the baby,” Cadence said absently, which was a fairly hilarious warning considering their mother’s language could melt the ears off a fucking truck driver. “So you’re going to fix Aunt Helene’s up more?”
But, like I said before, my girl’s no moron. Her eyes were shiny with the promise of what she wanted me to say.
I pulled Sullie’s shirt up and blew a loud raspberry on his belly. He screamed with happy laughter. “Yeah, I’m fixing it up more.” I paused to give one more tremendous raspberry, then let the news drop. “And I’m enrolling.”
“Here? At George Washington High?” She leaned towards me.
“Here. At Immaculate Conception,” I corrected. I was down on all fours, Sullie on my back and kicking his little heels into my sides hard. I plodded around the room and fully realized how ridiculous I must look.
“You’re going to my school?” Cadence’s mouth twitched into a smile.
“Yep,” I said, then picked up the pace in response to Sullie’s incessant kicks. When I stopped, I was right in front of her. “You cool with that?”
She pulled Sullie off my back and swung him onto her hip, mercifully allowing me to stand upright. “I’m so happy.” She threw her free arm around me tight. “I’m so glad, Saxon. I…” I felt her give a little sob. Sullie patted her head.
“What’s up, babe?” I asked, dipping my head to see her face.
There were runny mascara-tinged tears all over her cheeks. “You…I was so nervous…I thought this might be…a summer thing…” She laughed and sobbed a little, and I pulled her close, her face making my shirt wet and gray with smudgy tears.
“Shh. What are you, insane? I’m not going anywhere. Not unless you agree to come with me.” That made her cry a little harder. I laughed, and my whole chest felt loose and free when I did it. “Stop. Don’t cry. You look like a zombie.”
“Oh, shit.” She wiped under her eyes with shaky fingers.
“Don’t swear in front of the baby.” I rubbed a thumb over a sooty tear on her chin.
“Shut up!” She looked up at me, so gorgeous it squeezed the breath right out of my lungs. “Do I still look like a zombie?”
“Yeah.” I leaned towards her ear. “I’m feeling a strange surge of necrophilia.”
“I bet you say that to all the pretty zombies.” She bounced on her toes and kissed Sullie’s head. Just then Rosalie called us down to dinner.
I’d been getting fairly regular invites to Cadence’s house for dinner. At least when they had it, which wasn’t always often with everyone working so much. I always invited Aunt Helene, but she had a pretty rocking social life for an older lady, and it was fairly rare that she didn’t have something else on her busy-ass Bingo-and-reading-club-filled agenda.
I liked the big, noisy dinners with the Erikson’s. Pammy and Jimmy accepted me like I was a real sibling; which meant that they switched between loving me and giving me merciless hell.
Tony had already come over and spent some time in the driveway with me, showing me how to do basic shit like rotate tires and change oil, which I really appreciated. Google can take you so far, but after that you’re just shit out of luck if you screw up your car.
And Rosalie was as mean and unforgiving to me as she was to her own brood, which I knew was her form of love, and I ate it up.
So I was pretty glad that I was so crazy about Cadence, because she could have been a hag and I might have kept hanging around anyway just to leech off of her family.
But, much as they all liked me, I still felt weird telling them the news about my move. I had talked to Lylee about it; she was pretty fucking thrilled with the idea of having her house to herself and the ability to do whatever the hell she wanted whenever the hell she wanted. She took my word for it when I told her I wasn’t hooked on drugs anymore.
And Aunt Helene had cried and hugged me and tried to stuff more food down my throat. Damn, I loved that woman.
But those two were predictable variables in my world. The Eriksons were a whole different story. I wasn’t sure if they would be happy to see me. Every day. All year.
We sat down at dinner, and while Cadence snapped Sullie into his high chair, she announced, “Saxon’s enrolling at Immaculate.”
There was that terrible choked moment when I thought all shit would hit the fan, and Tony would tell me summer was enough and Rosalie would say that I was invading her family, and I would walk back to a cold house like a stooge.
“Catholic school, huh?” Tony scooped a huge blob of sour cream onto his plate to combat Rosalie’s fiercely spiced tortillas. “You Catholic, Saxon?”
“No, sir.” Rosalie handed me a glass of iced tea.
“It’s a pretty strict school,” Rosalie warned me, pursing her lips. “They aren’t going to put up with any crap.”
“I don’t plan on giving any, Mrs. Erikson.”
She frowned. “I don’t know if you can help yourself.” She flicked a look at Cadence. Or maybe I imagined she flicked a look at Cadence. “You’re a wild one, Saxon.”
“I think I’m done with all of that.”
Cadence’s parents looked at each other and laughed loud and long.
“You’ll probably be fine,” Tony said, choking so hard, Rosalie had to smack him on the back a few times.
And that was it. It registered with them, and they let it go. I mean, it cracked them up, but they didn’t have a shit-fit or kick me out or anything. And as I ate Rosalie’s cheesy delicious tortillas and thought about why I was so worried about it all, I couldn’t come up with anything that really made sense. I guess it was just my fucked up perception of myself and all the people who had the bad luck of having to deal with me. It made me worried that anyone in my life was just biding time until they could get rid of me.
I left after dinner, but not before Cadence whispered that she would sneak by later. Aunt Helene slept like the dead, and Cadence and I had planned to get together for a while. I felt a little nervous about the whole thing. I had never really orchestrated any kind of actual dating life.
Brenna had been the closest and it wasn’t like I was eating dinner with her family and spending hours flipping through her old yearbooks and photo albums. Which I did with Cadence, and it was, astoundingly, a pretty cool thing. I felt like I got to see her grow up a little. She was a damn cute kid, even when most people are going through their ugly, gawky stages.