Page 20 of My Favorite Lost Cause (The Favorites #2)

“Now I know you haven’t thought this through,” I reply, “because there is no way in hell you can offer me anything worth enduring that.”

And she just smiles at me in that way that says she’s already won.

Which she has.

Hot girls are a menace. Especially this one.

“Have fun with that campout,” Elijah says to me as he leaves.

Just after nine, we drag her mattress out onto the deck.

“Should we tell ghost stories?” she asks, smiling at me in the moonlight.

I’m being suffocated to death by the humidity, but I grin anyway. “Someone did die out here, by the way.”

“You mean…in this section of South Carolina?”

I laugh. “No, I mean, literally where these cottages sit.”

She swats my arm. “And you’re just waiting to tell me now?”

“I didn’t want you going full Professor Trelawney on me and start channeling the dead.”

“So who died?”

I shake my head, rolling on my back. The crickets and cicadas are making such a fucking racket tonight I can barely hear my own voice.

“I don’t know. There was a shack here. Elijah and I tore it down before we put up the cottages.

But apparently whoever owned the house at the time came out here and died in her sleep. ”

Maren’s eyes go wide. “She died in her sleep? Are they sure? I mean, sometimes there are gasses in the ground that?—”

“Which is exactly the sort of shit I knew you’d worry about. She was super old.”

“How old?”

I smile at her. “Like…your age. Natural causes.”

She hits me again. “We’re the same age, Charles.”

“Males and females age differently, like dogs. What’s thirty-two times seven? That’s your real age.” I meant it as a joke, but she isn’t laughing. “I was kidding, Maren. She was legitimately old.”

She rolls onto her back and stares at the sky. “I know.”

I’m on the cusp of reassuring her that she’s not old and her fertility is fine when she rolls toward me. “You said your mom got this place dirt cheap, but I don’t understand how it didn’t stay in the family or sell for a billion dollars.”

I’m just relieved she isn’t choking back tears about her declining fertility.

“My mom bought it from the bank,” I reply, “so I assume it was foreclosed on. It was in rough shape even then, and the area wasn’t booming. I imagine no one wanted to deal with it.”

She bites her lip. “But they had so many kids. You’d think their descendants would pitch in to save it.”

It’s sort of endearing how na?ve she is about the way the world works—she and Kit grew up with too much money. “Maren, the majority of families probably can’t pitch in to buy a mansion.”

“But this is a family who started off here ,” she argues. “They had money.”

“It was over a hundred years ago. There’ve been three major wars since then. A lot has changed. ”

“What are the odds all those boys survived World War One?” she asks quietly. “They were just about the right age.”

“All of them?” I ask. “Not good. Reason number one to not have kids, beyond the hundred ways they ruin your life.”

She elbows me. “You’d like kids, if you had them.”

“I know,” I reply. “That’s why I don’t want them. Look at what happened to my parents and tell me why any reasonable person would assume that risk.”

We lapse into silence. It’s too hot to sleep, so it looks like I’m gonna lie awake all night, thinking about how I wish things were different. Wishing she didn’t want the things she wants and that there was just a fucking way to…

“Charlie,” she whispers tentatively.

A viciously hopeful part of myself, one I have tried to beat back for years, suggests that she might say, “ There’s something going on between us, isn’t there? There’s always been something going on between us .”

“Yeah?”

“It’s so hot out here. And that mosquito thing isn’t working at all.”

I laugh, stifling a hint of disappointment. “That’s not what I thought you were going to say.”

“What did you think I was going to say?”

If my life was on the line, I wouldn’t admit the truth. “That you’d murdered someone,” I reply. “Maybe you were drunk driving as a teen and weren’t sure if you’d killed a kid. Your sober driving is sufficiently dangerous, if we’re being perfectly honest.”

She laughs. “Okay, back to the subject at hand… Are we in agreement that this is miserable, and we should go back to our beds?”

“I think it’s perfectly lovely outside,” I reply. “But if you want to quit, go right ahead.”

“There is no way that you think it is perfectly lovely outside right now,” she says. “You’re sweating anytime I try to raise the air conditioning above sixty-five.”

I laugh. “Yes, it’s fucking miserable, Maren, just like I told you it would be. And we can go in as soon as you’ve said, ‘Charlie, you were right about this the same way you were right about everything because you are wiser and more logical than me. Probably because I have a weak female brain.’”

She sits up. “You realize that I could just go in regardless of whether or not you agree?”

My hand presses to her stomach. “I could always pin you in place.”

Our eyes catch. Hers are wide, surprised. Even in the darkness I can see the flush crawling over her face. And I’m suddenly picturing her calling my bluff. Saying, “ Try it and see, Charlie. ”

I would try it. And goddamn, would she see.

“Charlie,” she says, “you were right about everything, and you were always super smart and logical, and whatever else I was supposed to say.”

“Because you have a weak female brain.”

“Fuck that,” she says, and I laugh again.

She’s finally standing up to someone. Even if it is, regrettably, me. Even if it means I don’t get to pin her to this mattress.

Which she wants me to do.

She’d never admit it, but she wants it too.