Page 8 of Into the Mountains (Blue Grove Mountain #3)

“More like shoved,” I mutter as I stuff more soup soaked bread into my mouth, savoring the taste before Mom starts swiping in whatever direction it is that gets me to go on a date with some random person.

“Which isn’t like you, I might add. However,” I emphasize, “I won’t bug you about it.

” I raise my eyebrows, waiting for her to give in and tell me whatever the secret is I know her and Dad are keeping from me.

She doesn’t. Her hand just comes to rest on my thigh and she gives me a soft squeeze before she gives her full attention to my new enemy.

I finish off my soup and bread as she busies herself with what I’m sure is my profile that she already set up earlier today or even yesterday.

Dad comes back to the table, placing a mug of coffee in front of me, one I gave Mom for her birthday a few years ago.

There’s a picture of a bright red beet on the side, eyes closed and the biggest smile you’d ever see on a beet with the words, “ You can’t be beet!

” stacked neatly next to it. I don’t know why, but I have always loved a good pun.

Put a cute graphic next to it and it makes it ten times better and the perfect gift for just about anything.

And it never fails to put a smile on a person’s face.

Whether it’s out of genuine laughter because they think the pun is actually funny or it’s a wry smile because they think it’s stupid. I get a smile every single time.

“Alright, here.” Mom turns her laptop screen toward me. It’s open to a page with questions with Compatibility Quiz in bold letters at the top.

“Seriously, Mom? I have to take a quiz for this?”

She answers in giggles as I skim through question after question about why I’m single, my ideal date, and made up scenarios.

It’s way more detailed than I expected it to be.

Once I’m finished, the new profile page Mom set up for me shows up.

There’s a picture of myself smiling back at me.

I’m in the mountains on our last family trip before I left for college, looking over my shoulder at my parents behind me.

I remember thinking how big the world was, but also about how small mine had been.

I remember being terrified to leave while excited to see a new place at the same time.

I remember thinking how lucky I was to be raised by two exceptional people.

Dad comes around my other side, reading over my shoulder. “That’s my favorite picture of you. And one of my favorite trips.”

“Mine too.”

“The about section might need work, Annie.”

“I didn’t know what to put, Paul. I wasn’t sure if I should put more or less.”

“Well, you got the less part down,” he laughs.

I hadn’t gotten that far. My eyes dart down under the profile picture to where my mom has two sentences.

Charlotte, 19

Looking for someone fun. Show me the ropes of dating, while also being a gentleman.

“Mom, really? This looks like it was written by someone in their forties!” She just shrugs her shoulders and laughs it off.

“News flash, honey, I am in my forties. And like I said, I wasn’t sure what to put.”

“You could have put literally anything else besides, “show me the ropes of dating.””

“Well, you’ve never dated!”

“I know, but the whole world doesn’t need to also know that.” I laugh as I select the short section of text and delete it. I type out one sentence in its place.

There is nothing like looking, if you want to find something.

I leave the rest of the quote off and face the screen toward my mom, knowing she will understand.

Sure enough, a smile slowly spreads across her face.

It’s a story we both know well. One we’ve read more than I can remember and in all the formats.

Physical copy, audiobook, ebook; any version we could get our hands on, it’s been read and listened to.

The copy I have in my bag is worn from years of turning the pages over and over.

I have another one I used for annotations, colored tabs sticking out at various places marking different passages.

“One of the greatest stories.”

“One of the classics,” I agree.

“Exactly how many times have you two read The Hobbit combined?” Dad chimes in.

We laugh instead of answering his question, because we know neither of us can answer that accurately.

“At this point, I’ve read it at least three times with your mom listening to the audiobook on speaker when she’s cleaning.

But only when she has it at a slower speed.

I can’t understand what he’s saying when she has it going fast.”

She shrugs. “Headphones hurt my ears so I just use a speaker. It’s easier and I can still hear it just fine and understand it at my “fast” speed.” She puts fast in air quotes.

“When you listen to anything more than 1.5x speed, it sounds like gibberish to me. My brain just can’t keep up with whatever he’s saying.”

“You get used to it.” Hell, I’ve gotten used to mine being at speeds higher than two and when I really focus, I can almost get to three.

Recently, my headphones disconnected and the audiobook kept going.

My roommate looked at me like I had grown an extra head or told her I was from outer space or something.

“Speaking of which, are you up for the movie or starting the book tonight?” We have a tradition of reading and listening to The Hobbit and watching The Lord of the Rings when I come to visit and before I left, it was whenever we could. Neither of us could get enough of the whole franchise.

“Did Gandalf trick Bilbo into hosting a party for the dwarves?” She giggles at her own reference.

“You two are the biggest nerds.”

“Hey, don’t even get us started on your secret Star Wars obsession.

” Dad has always denied how much he absolutely loves Star Wars , but we’ve both always known he’s actually just as obsessed with it as we are with The Hobbit .

I don’t know why he pretends otherwise. I think he grew up in a home that didn’t really encourage that side of his personality, which is why he does encourage it as much as he has with me.

He holds up his hands in silent surrender. “You two have fun.”

“You don’t want to watch with us?” I ask.

“Nah, I’ll let you have your girl time. We can catch up tomorrow.”

With a quick kiss on the top of my head and a swift one on the lips for my mom, he leaves the room.

We get up from the breakfast nook and start cleaning up. “I’ll do that,” Mom says, taking the dishes I grabbed out of my hands. “You go get the movie going.”

“Okay.” I let her take the dishes from me even though I really want to make her sit down and relax. But I’ve learned over the years, that’s hard for moms to do. They’re always busy doing something and if they’re not busy, they look for something to get them busy. There’s always something.

The computer pings with a notification and Mom jumps. “Why are you so jumpy?” I have a sudden sinking feeling in my stomach. “What is it?”

“That’s the website sound.” She practically squeals, coming back to the nook and shimmying herself into it faster than I’ve ever seen her move.

“The website sound?”

“The notification!”

I can’t help but laugh. “Mom, that’s probably just a welcome email or something.

There’s no way it’s someone responding to my profile for a date.

” However, she turns the laptop screen to me and sure enough, there’s a notification from the godforsaken website lit up on the screen.

I squeak and try to contort my body to fit underneath the table like I did as a child, hiding from the tickle monster.

“It’s not going to bite you, hon.” Her face ducks under the table. “C’mon, sweets. Be brave.”

Be brave. Sometimes being brave is harder than it sounds. I don’t want to be brave. I want to crawl into my childhood bedroom and hide under the covers until the sun comes up and the monsters under my bed disappear.

Looking at the hope on my mom’s face though reminds me why I agreed to do this in the first place.

I groan. “Fine.” I situate the laptop in front of me and take a deep breath before I make myself look. Navigating the website is easy. The hard part is figuring out how the hell this happened.

A notification sits there, covering part of the screen.

You have a new notification

What does that even mean? Mom must notice the confused look on my face because she answers my unspoken question.

“That means someone wants to go on a date with you.”

I put my hand on top of the screen, considering snapping the laptop closed and fully ignoring the date notification. “Question, how do you know all about this dating site all of the sudden?”

“Well, you know Betty has been alone for a while and she recently started talking about getting back out there and this is what she did.”

Betty is their next door neighbor and has been kind of like an aunt to me throughout my life.

She doesn’t have any kids of her own, but always loved having me over.

I helped her in her garden after school a lot, especially when her husband passed away two years ago.

She had a really hard time with it, because the accident was sudden.

“Good for her.” She deserves someone in her life.

And maybe…so do I. Taking a deep breath, I push the laptop screen back open fully, the notification staring me in the face.

“It says a guy named Eli matched with me. So what do I do?”

She grabs for her forest green glasses on the other counter next to the fridge and puts them on before leaning over. “I think you just click here and it’ll take you to his profile and then you decide if you want to match with him.”

“And if I do, then what happens?”

“You talk, and then go on a date.” She says it in a tone like it should have been the most obvious thing in the world, which in hindsight, it probably should have been. But I have no clue what I’m doing. For all I know, this Eli person could be messing around.

“Wait, isn’t that—” I lean into her, blocking her view and before she can say anything else, there on my screen is the boy I was practically in love with through most of my high school years.

The boy who was both a jock and an academic nerd.

The boy who challenged me every single day to be better and smarter than I was, to work harder just so I could beat him.

The boy who annoyed me to no end. Elias fucking Hayes.