The Happy Ever After Playlist - Abby Jimenez Page 0,19
cut, actually. He’s almost out of food too.”
“Save your receipts so I can reimburse you.”
“Yeah, yeah,” she said. “So bone marrow, tell me.”
“Right. I grew up in a really small town in northern Minnesota. Population three thousand. So everyone knows everybody else. There was a little girl in the town who got leukemia, so a lot of the townsfolk—”
“‘Townsfolk’?” She sounded amused.
“Yes, ‘townsfolk,’ we actually talk like that there.”
She laughed at this. I liked her laugh. It was musical.
“A lot of the townsfolk registered on Be The Match because she needed a bone marrow transplant. She ended up getting one. Nobody she knew. But I was in the registry after that, and I ended up being the match for a guy with lymphoma. So I donated.”
“Did they live?” she asked.
I nodded. “They did. I’m friends with the guy on Facebook. He’s been in remission for four years now. And Emily too. She just graduated high school.”
“Wow. That’s…that’s really generous.”
I shrugged. “I just couldn’t imagine being that sick and not having any options, you know? And maybe one day someone will do it for me. Or someone I love.”
There was a little pause, and she was smiling when she started talking again. “So in this tiny town of three thousand, what kind of things did you do for fun?”
I ticked off on my fingers. “Ice fishing, dogsledding in the winter. Canoeing. I worked as a guide for trips into the Boundary Waters for ten years. My dad owns an outfitting company.”
“And your mom? What does she do?”
“She stayed home. Worked at the outfitters in the summer when it was busy.”
She laughed a little. “You really are a northerner, aren’t you? Have you seen any moose?”
“I’ve seen moose, wolves, the northern lights—”
“Oh, I would love to see the northern lights. It’s on my bucket list.”
“Yeah? What else is on your list?”
She made a humming noise. “I want to eat soft-shell crabs. Oh, and I want to visit Ireland. That’s my biggest one. What’s on your list?”
If anyone had asked me the same thing yesterday, I’d have answered, “Play the Hollywood Bowl.” But today? “I want to take you on a date.”
Chapter 8
Sloan
♪ This Charming Man | The Smiths
Tucker loved PetSmart. He started crying to be let out as soon as we got to the parking lot. He jumped from the car and pulled me into the store, choking himself in the process. His enthusiasm made me laugh, but that wasn’t the only thing making me smile today. Jason had me in a good mood.
We’d talked all day yesterday. All day. When Fight Club came on the TV in his hotel room, I found it on Netflix and we watched it together, talking through it. I drained my cell phone battery three times and finally ended up lying in bed hooked up to my charger until we hung up a little after midnight.
It was official. I had a major crush on him.
He’d grown up stomping around in the woods, and I’d gone to a high school that had a student body the size of his town. He’d worked summers taking tourists on canoeing trips into the wilderness while I did beauty pageants until I was eighteen and worked at the mall. But somehow we clicked. We got along so well, it was crazy.
And it was scary.
Now I hated that he didn’t know what I looked like. What if he didn’t think I was pretty? What if he was like, “Oh” when he finally saw me for the first time? I wanted to just bite the bullet and send him a picture, but now I was too freaked out about it. And all through yesterday’s phone call he’d kept asking me for a date.
It was 1:00 and I hadn’t heard from him yet today, but it was still early in Melbourne. I’d spent the morning stressing about my appearance. I had a newfound urgency to undo two years of neglect.
Jason would be back in California in a week. That gave me seven short days to prepare. I hadn’t cared about my appearance in so long I wasn’t sure where to even begin. I always threw my hair into a bun, my toes went without polish, my skin got nothing except a splash of soap and water twice a day. And now this man was practically extorting me for a picture of myself, and I was in no way prepared to be examined.
“You’re being dramatic,” Kristen had said this morning when I called her in