Cody was true to his word. He came to my house and spoke to my father with no visible nerves. Then again, it wasn’t my mild mannered, quiet and kind father he had to worry about. It was my constantly disapproving, not at all quiet, judgmental mother.
Somehow, he handled both with ease. My father looked to me when they started speaking, as if searching for my silent happiness. Which there was a lot of, it was just buried underneath the pile of nerves that I had been living with the entire afternoon.
After seeing whatever he saw on my face, my father nodded, shook Cody’s hand, and that was that.
Things with my mother were not as simple. She drilled him about his parents—the only part of the interaction where he seemed even the slightest bit uncomfortable. Everyone knew that he was raised by a single mother who worked as a nurse at the hospital in the next town over. I’d seen her in the grocery store a couple of times, and she had a kind smile, sad eyes and always looked tired. She was pretty, though, kind of ageless. I hadn’t heard of her having a boyfriend since she’d moved here with Cody. And if there was one, my mother would’ve pounced on gossip like that. In our small town, , a woman moving with her son without a father was gossip worthy. At least to my mom it was.
She already knew everything there was to know about his mother, and there was nothing to know about his father. As far I as I knew, Cody never talked about him, and he wasn’t in the picture.
Cody handled it well, though, with manners that my mother—in my opinion—didn’t deserve.
“It’s just me and my mom, ma’am. She works hard and is the only parent I need.” He said this with such firmness that it moved even my mother off the subject, which earned a look of approval from my father who had been trying to master that art their entire marriage.
Of course, it didn’t mean he was completely off the hook. Mom continued to drill him about his grades—good but nothing special—about his college prospects—none as of yet—his part time job working at the Sons of Templar MC garage—yeah, my mom got a real kick out of that—and her demand that he get me home by curfew.
Pretty mild for my mom.
Cody made all the promises, and he kept them all.
He took me for a picnic on the beach for our first date. Yeah, he organized a picnic on the beach. The eighteen-year-old, mini badass organized something so romantic I cried inside.
He kissed me at sunset.
It wasn’t my first kiss, but it felt like it was. Everything with Cody felt like a first.
I think I fell in love with him during that kiss. Or maybe it was when he complimented my boots in the hallway. Or when he handled my mother so well. Or when he brushed my hair from my face and whispered to me how beautiful I was.
Yeah, it was probably all of those.
And he was acting like he felt the same way. Like this was something natural, like he’d been feeling this way for as long as I had, but Willow warned me not to be fooled.
“If there’s one thing men are good at, it’s pretending they feel the same way about you until they get into your pants. That shit should be an Olympic sport for them.”
She was too young to be such a cynic about men and love in general, but then again, she had divorced parents and a rotating door of stepfathers, the latest of whom had tried to sneak into her room while she was sleeping. Willow had woken up and, of course, punched him in the face. Her mother had immediately kicked him out. She might’ve had bad taste in men, but she loved her daughter.
I, on the other hand, had two parents who at least pretended to love each other and a stable home life where I didn’t have to wake up with my right fist ready in case some creep is trying to touch me in my sleep.
I read romance novels and had a quiet, caring father, a brash, casserole making mother, and no real traumas in my life. So I found it hard to believe that Cody was just putting this on in order to get into my pants. If he wanted to get into a girl’s pants, there would be a line around the block of girls volunteering for that.
Nonetheless, I heeded Willow’s words. Or tried to. It was hard to be a cynic when the guy I’d crushed on my entire high school life was carrying my books for me, holding my hand and making out with me in my bedroom with the music turned all the way up.