Page 22 of Jackson's Redemption
“Knock, knock.”
He rolled his eyes. “Who’s there?”
“Amish.”
“Amish who?”
“You’re not a shoe, you’re man!”
He shook his head and went about putting hot dogs on the sticks he’d brought with him. I laughed for him.
“So what’s yours?” I asked him.
“What’s my what?”
“Your guilty pleasure. Your vice.”
“I don’t feel guilty about my pleasure, Kate.”
This time it was my turn to roll my eyes. “I’m not talking about sex,Jackson.I’m talking about a guilty pleasure. That thing you do, you know you’re not supposed to, but you do it anyway.”
He turned his face away in his thinking pose. I thought it was weird I had only known him for a day and half and already I felt like there was so much I knew about him. Like he was one of those pictures if you glanced at it, it looked like a jumble of nothing, but if you stared at it long enough, it turned into an image.
Finally, he shook his head. “I don’t have one.”
“I’m not buying that. Everyone has one, but I’ll it drop, because I want my hot dog!”
He’d been holding the stick over the fire for what felt like hours, but what was only a minute or two.
“Squeeze some mustard into the rolls for us,” he said, as he gently rotated the dogs over the flames, not giving in to my impatience.
After a few more minutes, and a coordinated effort to place the dogs onto the mustard-covered rolls, I was biting down into the salty deliciousness that made me groan out loud.
“Kate, cut the moans. Unless you want me to really make you moan.”
“Spoilsport,” I said, but I stopped provoking him.
I ended up eating two dogs and a healthy serving of beans. After a little more silence together where we just enjoyed the end of the day, he put out the fire and we headed into the cabin to sleep.
“Are we going to need to make a fire?”
“No, I checked your sleeping bag. It’s decent. That plus body heat and we should be warm enough.”
“Okay. Can I say something?” I asked him, even as he was dimming the gas lantern.
He raised his eyebrows like it was a dumb question to ask.
“I had fun today. I don’t want it to mean anything to you. I just…haven’t had fun in a long time. Wasn’t sure if I ever would have it again.”
He nodded. Then he shucked off his clothes down to his boxer briefs, and I pretended I didn’t notice. Instead, I got on the single bed, slipped into my sleeping bag and undressed within it.
A quick peek, and I saw he had his thumbs inside the waist band of his briefs like those were going to, but he seemed to think better about the idea. Then he turned the lantern all the way down and the cabin was mostly dark. Only little bits of light crept in from the seams in the wood.
“Night, Jackson.”
“Night, Kate. I…had fun, too.”
“Hey, Jackson, did you hear the joke about the vacuum cleaner?”
