“Sounds great,” he said. He rolled onto his back and tugged me toward him. “What made you want to add them to the list?”
“I was walking around during lunch, and it was so hot. I was disgusting and sweaty and I bought one of those frozen lemonade things.”
“Mmm,” Rhys mumbled. He was constantly hungry and got hungrier at any mention of food.
“I sat in the shade and searched for pictures of cold places on my phone.” Rhys laughed and I shoved at him. “Shut up, it totally works. Anyway, I was looking at pictures of glaciers and snowcapped mountains and these pictures tagged with the Faroe Islands kept coming up.” I turned my face into his neck. “I’d never heard of them.” Rhys’s hand was soft in my hair. “But they look beautiful.”
“Then we should go,” Rhys said, rubbing my scalp with his fingertips.
“You’re gonna put me to sleep if you keep doing that,” I murmured.
“That’s okay.”
But I made myself sit up. I hated falling asleep and waking up at strange times. It always left me feeling disoriented and confused. I picked at a loose thread in the pillow case. Rhys twined his fingers through mine and brought my hand up. He kissed my knuckles, and I squeezed his hand.
“Hey, look,” he said. He hauled himself out of bed and grabbed his phone from the top of the dresser. “I talked to Morgan this morning.”
Morgan was Rhys’s sister, who lived in Raleigh with her husband and two kids. Their parents moved down there five years ago when the first grandchild was born.
“Tommy’s obsessed with that little cartoon that you drew of yourself on his birthday card and Morgan took a picture of it and printed out a bunch and he colors them in like a coloring book. So now their house is littered with all these yous.”
Rhys held up the phone and there, on Morgan and Doug’s refrigerator, were four variously colored versions of the cartoon of me.
“Kids are so weird,” I said, zooming in on one of them where my face was purple but my hands were green.
“Yeah, I guess Tommy likes you more than me now,” Rhys said with a pout.
That would never happen. According to Morgan, Tommy worshipped Rhys, who flew him around over his head like a rocket and flipped him upside down until he puked. Instant hero. Two-year-old Sarah wasn’t quite sturdy enough yet to appreciate the rocket, and she’d only met Rhys when she was a baby so she could take him or leave him.
“They just like scribbling out my face better than yours.”
“I told you, babe, the cartoon version of me that you did looks like Thor.”
I raised my eyebrows and looked him up and down deliberately. “If the hammer fits . . .”
Rhys caught me by the hand and pulled me off the bed and into his arms. He squeezed me so hard it lifted me off my feet, and I didn’t even think he was doing a Thor bit. Sometimes Rhys didn’t know his own strength. He put me down with a kiss and a nip at my neck.
“I’m starving,” he said. “Want to grill?” Grilling was pretty much the only culinary skill that either of us bothered with. Fortunately, nearly anything could go on the grill, as we’d proven this summer. I nodded and put on cutoff sweats and an undershirt.
“They want to meet you,” Rhys said from the doorway.
I froze.
“Who?” I’d shot for casual and only achieved squeaky.
“You know who, baby. My family.” Rhys’s voice was soft, calm. He was the most confident person I’d ever met. Not egotistical, just confident, like a tree that had stood for a hundred years and was happy being exactly what and where it was. But this was a point of insecurity for him. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to meet his family because I wasn’t committed to him—I’d told him that a dozen times. It was just . . . something always seemed to get in the way.
“I—yeah, okay. I know . . . Sure.”
“Okay,” he said simply. “Good.”
I fired up the grill while Rhys took care of the food, appearing after a few minutes with a disturbingly large piece of meat and some foil-wrapped packages. He put the meat onto the grill with a sizzle.
“What is it?”
“It’s lamb.”
“Lots of lambs on the Faroe Islands.” The pictures had shown them grazing in the mountains, woolly white bodies nestled in the grass. I squinted at the meat. “That’s what lamb looks like?”
“You’d eat roadkill if it came in a Chef Boyardee can,” Rhys scoffed, dropping a kiss on my head.
I shrugged. “I probably have. That beef ravioli.”
“Try not to starve to death while I’m on tour, okay?”
I’d been hungry before, but at the reminder he was leaving, my stomach just felt hollow.
“I did fine before I met you.”