All Your Perfects(32)
Every time he opens his mouth or smiles or touches me, all I can think is, “What would possess Sasha to cheat on this man with Ethan?”
Her trash, my treasure.
His childhood home is everything I imagined it would be. Full of laughter and stories and parents who look at him like he was sent straight from heaven. He’s the youngest of four kids and the only boy. I didn’t get to meet any of his sisters today because two of them live out of state and one of them had to cancel dinner.
Graham gets his looks from his father. His father is a solid man with sad eyes and a happy soul. His mother is petite. Shorter than me, but carries herself with a confidence even bigger than Graham’s.
She’s cautious of me. I can tell she wants to like me, but I can also tell she doesn’t want to see her son get his heart broken again. She must have liked Sasha at one point. She tries to pry about our “relationship” but Graham feeds her nothing but fiction.
“How long have you two been seeing each other?”
He puts his arm around my shoulders and says, “A while.”
A day.
“Has Graham met your parents yet, Quinn?”
Graham says, “A few times. They’re great.”
Never. And they’re terrible.
His mother smiles. “That’s nice. Where did you meet?”
“In my office building,” he says.
I don’t even know where he works.
Graham is having fun with this. Every time he makes up a story about us, I squeeze his leg or nudge him as I try to stifle my laughter. At one point, he tells his mother we met at a vending machine. He says, “Her Twizzlers were stuck in the machine, so I put a dollar in and bought Twizzlers so that hers would get unstuck. But you wouldn’t believe what happened.” He looks at me and urges me to finish the lie. “Tell them what happened next, Quinn.”
I squeeze his leg so hard he winces. “His Twizzlers got stuck in the machine, too.”
Graham laughs. “Can you believe it? Neither one of us got Twizzlers. So I took her to lunch in the food court and the rest is history.”
I have to bite my cheek to keep from laughing. Luckily, he was right about his mother’s food, so I spend most of the meal with my mouth full. His mother is an amazing cook.
When she goes to the kitchen to finish the pie, Graham says, “You want a tour of the house?”
I grab his hand as he leads me out of the dining room. As soon as we’re in private, I shove him in the chest. “You lied to your parents like twenty times in under an hour!”
He grabs my hands, pulling me to him. “But it was fun, wasn’t it?”
I can’t deny the smile that’s breaking through. “Yeah. It really was.”
Graham lowers his mouth to mine and kisses me. “You want a typical tour of a typical house or do you want to go to the basement and see my childhood bedroom?”
“That’s not even a question.”
He leads me to the basement and flips on the light. There’s a faded poster of the table of elements hanging on the wall of the stairwell. He flips on another light when we reach the bottom of the stairs, revealing a teenage boy’s bedroom that looks like it hasn’t been touched since he moved out. It’s like a secret portal straight into the mind of Graham Wells. I finally learned his last name over dinner.
“She refuses to redecorate it,” he says, walking backward into the room. “I still have to sleep in here when I visit.” He kicks at a basketball lying on the floor. It’s flat, so it barely rolls away from him. “I hate it. It reminds me of high school.”
“You didn’t like high school?”
He makes a quick gesture around the room. “I liked science and math more than I liked girls. Imagine what high school was like for me.”
His dresser is covered in science trophies and picture frames. Not a single sports award in sight. I pick up one of his family photos and bring it in closer for inspection. It’s a picture of Graham and his three older sisters. They all favor their mother heavily. And then there’s the lanky preteen with braces in the middle. “Wow.”
He’s standing right behind me now, looking over my shoulder. “I was the poster child for awkward phases.”
I place the picture back on the dresser. “You’d never know it now.”
Graham walks to his bed and takes a seat on the Star Wars comforter. He leans back on his hands and admires me as I continue to look around the room. “Did I already tell you how much I like that dress?”
I look down at my dress. I wasn’t prepared to meet the parents of a man I’m not even dating, so I didn’t have a whole lot of clean laundry. I chose a simple navy blue cotton dress and paired it with a white sweater. When I walked out of my bedroom before we left my apartment, Graham saluted me like I was in the navy. I immediately turned around to go change, but he grabbed me and told me I looked really beautiful.
“You did tell me that,” I say, leaning back on my heels.
His eyes drag up my legs, slowly. “I’m not gonna lie, though. I really wish you would have worn your scuba gear.”
“I’m never telling you my dreams again.”
Graham laughs and says, “You have to. Every day for as long as I know you.”
I smile and then spin around to read some of the awards on his wall. There are so many awards. “Are you smart?” I glance over at him. “Like really smart?”