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“First of all,” she says. “I’m over it. I don’t have the same crush that I had in high school. Second of all, because it’s complicated.” She looks away. “You already know,” she says.

I nod slowly. “Yeah. Well. I do.”

“It’s weird. Right?”

I shake my head. “No. It’s not weird. I’m also a very bad judge of that, because I’m extremely dysfunctional. ”

She laughs. “Well, that actually works for me. You want to be my friend who enables me?”

“I really do. I really do want to be your friend. You can trust me with that information. I’m not going to tell anybody. Not even Dallas.” I love the idea that I have a secret with a friend. “I’m bad at figuring out romantic relationships, honestly, but I’m just as bad with friendship.”

“You’re pretty good at it, actually,” says Allison.

I spend the rest of the shift feeling like I’m floating. It’s amazing how intense the formation of a friendship feels. Similarly fraught to this whole thing with Dallas, if I’m honest. Okay, maybe not quite so intense, but it’s definitely not nothing.

When Kaylee comes to pick me up, I feel like I’m on the verge of peaking in my happiness.

Everything feels like it’s working together.

Like it’s normal and functional and great.

And yes, that underlying sense of the possibility of everything being torn away from me also exists.

I can’t escape that. But I’m choosing to embrace the good.

“How was your day?” Kaylee asks as I settle into her car.

There are car seats in the back with Cheerios ground into them, and I smile.

“Where are the girls?”

“Oh, they’re with Bennett. He went to help deliver some puppies, and they went with him. If they don’t come home committed to at least two of the puppies in the litter I’ll be surprised. Bennett is such a pushover when it comes to his kids and animals.”

“Dallas really likes animals too,” I say.

Kaylee looks at me, and I can see that she’s debating whether or not to push the topic of Dallas now that he’s been brought up. I also see when she gives in. “So things are going well with Dallas?”

“Yeah,” I say. “Great.”

“I think it’s really wonderful that… That you found each other,” she says.

I feel a little bit panicky, because I don’t want her to attribute something to it that isn’t there. Commitment or vows that we haven’t made.

“I would really like to figure out how to make him dinner,” I say.

This is the thing I wanted to talk to her about.. Though it feels a little bit more high stakes now. Especially because she knows everything. Though I’ve been spending time with their family a lot over the last few weeks and I feel comfortable enough with her.

Maybe less comfortable now that I’m sleeping with her stepson, but still.

“You would?”

“Yeah, I… He’s been taking care of me, and I want to take care of him.”

“That’s really sweet.”

“I just want him to have everything he needs. I want to be able to give it to him. He’s my best friend.” Though that doesn’t feel quite right. “He’s my…”

“I know that you care a lot about him. He cares about you too.”

I nod and look out the window.

“I’m not a great cook,” she says. “Bennett and I split kitchen chores. I’m competent, I can definitely show you how to make some things that Dallas likes.”

“I’d like that,” I say.

“We don’t have very long until dinnertime, but I can help you make something quick to take back to the cabin for dinner. He really likes stroganoff made out of condensed cream of mushroom soup. It’s easy. Takes about twenty minutes, and we only need four ingredients.”

“That’s something I can do.”

“All right. I’m going to take you to the grocery store.”

She takes me to the tiny little store right near the jewelry shop, and guides me in choosing what I’m going to need.

Then she drives me back to the main ranch house and gets me set up with the very basic directions for the meal.

She’s not wrong. It’s very easy. Just browning hamburger and putting salt on it while I boil noodles.

“I know there are more elaborate recipes,” she says. “But Bennett isn’t the most adventurous eater, and so I have a lot of really basic recipes that are tailored to him, and as a result, Dallas loves it.”

“He told me that you and Bennett got together really quickly after he came to live with him.”

She nods. “Yeah. It was kind of the catalyst for Bennett and me finally getting together.”

“Finally?”

She sighs. “We were friends for years. My family was really dysfunctional. I mentioned that, didn’t I?”

“No,” I say. But between her and Sammy, I’m starting to feel more normal with my own dysfunction.

“He was the best. We bonded together as kids over how much we loved animals. Got ourselves through veterinary school. I was so jealous when he started dating Marnie. God.” She sighs.

“He told me when he lost his virginity to her.” She looks a little murderous even now and I love her for it.

“What I didn’t know is that she got pregnant. ”

“Oh,” I say. I would’ve died. I realize that now. If Dallas got another woman pregnant? I think it would actually kill me .

“Yeah. Then she lost it, so she said, and… Fifteen years later, that baby came back as Dallas.”

“And in all that time you never…”

“Never. He dated a woman named Olivia for a really long time, I hated her.” She laughs. “That doesn’t sound very mature, I realize. But I just… That was tough.”

“So Dallas brought you two together.”

“Yeah. God, he was a pain in the ass. And I loved him. Immediately. It’s been the best gift for him to be my stepson, honestly. He’s mine. Just like Bennett is. Just like the girls are.”

I hear a note of steel in her voice, and I can tell that she’s warning me in a way. Not to hurt him.

I don’t want to.

I also don’t have a gauge of how to do much of anything else.

We strain the noodles, mix in the meat, the soup, and some sour cream. Then, I have a big pot of creamy-looking noodles that I’m personally quite uncertain about, but I’m confident Dallas will enjoy, so it’s good enough for me.

“Thank you,” I say. She smiles at me, and I have the strangest longing at the center of my chest. I wish she could be my mom.

Like I wish I had any maternal figure in my life.

Anyone who cared about me the way she does, Dallas.

It’s another reminder of how high the stakes are.

Because any good person I have on my periphery is because of him.

She gives me a ride back to the cabin with the food, and I thank her again profusely for the lesson.

“We’ll do it again,” she says. “I’ll give you a whole list of meals that you can make for him pretty easily.

She’s quiet for a moment, then looks at me.

“I know how scary it is. Loving someone who means so much to you, and having the relationship shift and change. I didn’t feel like I could make a move with Bennett, because I thought that I would break it if we kissed.

If we had sex. I was so afraid of what would happen, and I knew that I wouldn’t be able to stand life if he wasn’t in it.

I have a lot more experience with life now.

I realize that it doesn’t have to be that way.

If you and Dallas can take this and find a way to be together forever, that’s amazing.

But I also know you’re young. If it isn’t right now, it doesn’t mean it never will be.

If you do this for a while, and then you don’t, it doesn’t mean it was a mistake.

And it doesn’t mean you can’t still love him in all the most important ways. ”

It’s beautiful advice. And it does something to soothe the fears inside of me, and yet I feel like it’s not quite… True. Of us. There’s an intensity between me and Dallas that just feels like it has the potential to be something toxic if we’re not careful. We need to be careful.

I say goodbye to Kaylee, and take the pot of stroganoff into the house with me.

I waffle on what to put on before he gets home.

And then I choose a new dress, one he hasn’t seen me in today, I feel like I’m cosplaying some kind of traditional 1950s housewife, like I’ve never aspired to be, and never will be. What am I doing?

I don’t have an answer to that question.

But when Dallas pulls into the driveway, it takes actual restraint for me to not run out the front door and fling myself straight into his arms. If I could crawl under his skin to be closer to him, I would, and that is an extremely concerning sentiment. I recognize that.

My breath catches as he opens the front door.

He looks first at me, then at the pot of food on the table. “You made dinner?”

“I did,” I say, and I want to jump up and down like those excitable dogs at the main house. Because he’s home. He’s here.

I feel like I’m outside of myself again, terrified at how overjoyed I am to be with him. Terrified at how intense all this is, and also completely unwilling to stop it.

Like we’re driving in a speeding car not paying attention to the speed limit, and I guess if we hit the wall, we’re going to do it together.

“Well that was… That was really…” He crosses the room, eyes intent on mine, and wraps his arm around my waist, pulling me in for a kiss. “You changed your dress,” he says.

“I did,” I say. “For you.”

“It’s pretty,” he says, grabbing hold of the flowy purple fabric. I could’ve gone with a short dress, I know he would’ve liked it, but I went with a maxi dress because I thought pretending to be demure might drive him even crazier.

I want to drive him crazy. “I’m informed that this is one of your childhood favorites,” I say, going and taking a couple of bowls down from the cupboards and bringing them to the table.

“You colluded with Kaylee,” he says.

“I did,” I say. “I colluded with her completely. I mean, since your family saw us making out on camera anyway.”

He laughed. “Yeah. Apparently.”

“I hope you didn’t get crap for that today.”