"Me neither. Maybe we'll do better with the next one." I topped off our glasses and handed over the box of Fruit Loops I'd been munching from before he'd arrived.
"Dry cereal and wine?"
"I prefer to call it whole grains with my fruit salad."
Reluctantly, he reached into the box and pulled out a handful. I watched him out of the corner of my eye while he snacked. Unlike me who ate bunches at once and then picked the residue from my cleavage, Marc popped one loop in his mouth at a time. It was kind of weird and kind of adorable all at once. Definitely neater than my method. Deliberate.
After he'd eaten a few, his brows knit in confusion. "They're all the same flavor," he said bluntly.
"Ding, ding, ding. You might not know wine, but you can ID cereal like nobody's business."
"That's just. That's dumb. They should be different flavors. Lime. Lemon. The red one should be cherry. I was really looking forward to that being cherry."
"Sorry to disappoint you." I bit back a laugh, but my cheeks hurt from smiling. "I'll try to have more varied snacks next time."
"No. This is perfect."
My heart tripped at his remark and I had to turn away from him before I tried to read too much into it. We got caught up with the action on the television then. Or, he did. I, on the other hand, stared quietly at the screen while my brain freaked out. Was this night going where I thought it was going? My hands were sweaty just thinking about it. Maybe I should slip away and freshen up. Another round of mouthwash would really clash with the wine, though, so I decided against it.
But too soon, Daredevil ended, and the silence felt heavy so I rushed to fill it. As I do.
"How is your mom?" I asked. I really did want to know. I'd been naked in a bed with him and still barely knew anything about him. Also, how else to make things sexy than to bring up someone's mother? This was why I didn't date.
He sighed. "Fine."
I knew I shouldn't pry, but nearly two glasses of wine in, and I was ready for a good chit-chat. "So, is it … like is it terminal, or just chronic?" I took another long sip. Still no mocha, but maybe a plum? I couldn't remember the last time I'd had a plum, so maybe not.
"Is what terminal?" He clicked off the TV as it started into the next episode of Daredevil.
"Your mom's condition. I understand if you don't want to talk about it." I regretted bringing it up. He was looking more and more uncomfortable, and I'd spoken without thinking. What if his mom was dying? What if she only had a short time left? Oh, God.
Yep, I was definitely capable of more humiliation where Marc Kirby was concerned.
But then he said, "My mom doesn't have a condition," and grabbed another handful of Fruit Loops.
"I'm-" What was I? Confused, mostly. "I'm sorry. I mean, not sorry that she doesn't have a condition. That's not. Anyway. Ava told me you go take care of her every weekend. I just assumed she was sick."
Marc looked slightly ashamed. He took a deep breath, and then a deep swallow of wine, and then another deep breath.
Lo and behold, we'd finished the bottle.
I poured us some chardonnay, which tinted pink when it hit the dregs of merlot.
"Do you have siblings?" Marc asked. Not where I thought he was going.
"I have a sister twelve years older. She's more like a cousin or something, since we grew up so far apart. Why?"
"Because I have a brother. Paul. He's eighteen months younger." We clinked our glasses and sipped. "White grapes, this time."
"Absolutely," I agreed. "Maybe a touch of apricot." I did not taste any apricot. But it sounded like a good thing to say. The kind of thing that would be printed on a bottle.
"Paul has always been my mom's favorite. No matter what I did, she'd pat my head and then praise Paul. I got honor roll. He got C's. Still, guess who got to pick the fancy dinner because he'd 'tried so hard'?"
Ouch. That was never the case with my sister and I, because we'd both basically been only children. Also, both solid B students. High five.
"I just finished my PhD with a job offer in hand. Paul barely managed to get his GED. And yet my mom coos over him as though he'd gotten a Nobel. Check the bottle, I feel good about that apricot thing."
I revealed the description on the bottle. "Pineapple and vanilla?"
"No," Marc said.
"No," I agreed.
"Anyway, then Paul got busted for small time dealing, and now my mother doesn't have anyone to manage the business on the weekends. She could hire someone else, but I'd thought that if I spent more time working with her, we might finally have a chance to get closer."
"And?"
"Hasn't happened so far." He took another swallow of his wine. "Pineapple? Really?"
"Really. Maybe it was mislabeled."
"Could be. This one was homemade."
"No way. Are you serious?"
"Sort of. My mother's neighbor is an amateur vintner and has been bottling everything from reds to meads to dandelion wine for as long as I can remember. He's even won a couple of awards, but he says if he ever does this for business, he'll stop finding the pleasure. So we just enjoy everything he makes while it lasts. He's getting older. Not too old to stop threatening me with a bare-butt-whipping every time I drive the moles off Mom's lawn and into his, but … "
"Your mom lives next door to a home-winery? Is this in Kansas City, Missouri?"
"No, a little further out. My mother runs an organic farm outside Lawrence, in Kansas."
"That's kind of cool."
"Don't look so surprised."
"You're just, you know. All professorial and bookish. It's hard to imagine you digging around in the dirt." Though it did explain how extremely well built the man was. Also, I liked the thought of Marc and Dirty in the same sentence. Hulk-growl. "What exactly do you do for her?"
"I help with a variety of things. In the spring, I supervise the planting. In the summer, I help get everything to the farmer's markets where we make most of our money for the year. In the fall, I help with the books and the budget."
"And in the winter?"
He smiled like he was about to tell a secret. "That's when we're selling her organic body care products."
"Wait. Wait. That cucumber-rose bodywash of yours is actually yours?" In the back of my head, I'd assumed it was left over from some date or another, and he'd just kept it as a guilty pleasure. Now there was truly no excuse why he hadn't been sharing, and I was not going to feel guilty over stealing it. Not that I had been feeling guilty, but I wasn't going to start.
"It's my mother's. But, I do help with the distribution. And the occasional flavor. Cucumber rose was my idea." His face lit up. Of course it was. "Not for much longer, though. This year I've been training my replacement, and as soon as summer is over, I'm done." He raised his glass in celebration.
I mirrored him. "Congratulations. I bet you're looking forward to it."
"I am." But the twinkle disappeared from his eyes.
"You're also going to miss it."
He seemed to ponder that for a moment.
Then he abruptly changed the subject. "So what about your job? I figure you sell a lot of your work online or around town. But where do you go every night? A print shop, right? You make t-shirts or something." Apparently I wasn't the only one Ava had been dishing roommate secrets to. But shoddily, since neither of us new much.
In my hopeful, imaginary version of events, he'd asked her about me. If it had been her volunteering the info, I didn't want to know. Ava had been present for too much of my awkward to be trusted to volunteer good info. Also, Ava enjoyed being an agent of chaos. If I didn't know better, I'd think she threw us together just for her own amusement,
"Do you like that?" he asked. One brow raised over his chocolate-brown eyes. Yes, I did. Oh, he meant the print shop.
"I actually love it. I make t-shirts and canvas bags and aprons and pillows. Sometimes clients even let me do the graphic design. Everything I do is interesting. It's different every day."
"That sounds so … unstructured," he said, with an air of disgust. Academics, man. I thrived on the freedom.
"Not your style. I get it. But I think that's what I love the most about it. It never gets boring. It takes skill, but you can also totally zone out while you're working. I come up with my best ideas halfway through a print run. Plus, it's super convenient. I stay late a few times a week and print my own stuff that I sell online. So it's a twofer."
"Your boss knows you do that?" He sounded incredulous.
"That I use the machines for my own stuff? Yeah." Marc clearly thought I was capable of more subtlety than I really am. No way could I have pulled something like that over on JD for my entire six years of employment. Not with my tendency to run off at the mouth when I'm nervous.
Marc studied me. "And he's cool with that?"
"Well, I give him blowjobs," I said as casually as I could.