And with those reinforcements, I decided to tackle the boys/consent/choice/sex talk.
She did not seem at all uncomfortable with me.
What she seemed to think was that I was crazy.
“I know that, Delly,” she’d said when I got through the consent part, and the inferred at the end of that sentence was a yeesh. “I mean, I know there are girls who really like boys and they’ll do like…anything. But boys who are stupid are just stupid. Everyone knows that.”
Did they?
I glanced at Camille and Joan.
They appeared just as surprised as I was.
I treaded cautiously.
“When you say ‘boys who are stupid,’ what do you mean?”
“I mean like, if you say no, and they don’t stop. Or if you’re like, ‘I don’t wanna drink,’ and they’re all, ‘C’mon, everyone’s drinking. Let’s play beer pong.’ Beer pong is stupid too, by the way. But anyway, it’s like, you know, beer doesn’t taste good, and people act dumb when they drink too much of it. Some people think it’s funny. But me and my friends just think it’s, well…” Big shrug and, “Stupid.”
She proved she got my drift when she went on, a might huffily.
“Will’s not like that, you know. He might drink a beer, but he thinks all that being loud and crazy and obnoxious is stupid too. I never saw him do that before, but he might have done it. Still. I think it has to do with Alice. It’s like, a really crappy silver lining. You know, he’s learned life is too short to act like a moron. Life is serious. You don’t have to act serious all the time. But there’s no time to be a moron. Am I making sense?”
She was.
And this made me feel even better about Will, who was still over a lot, and I’d come to like him.
He was broody (understandable).
He was intense with Celeste (she was very into him, and he needed someone who cared, so maybe he was just soaking it up).
But mostly he was quiet and polite, serious like she said. He studied with Celeste. He went to hockey practice. He played in his games. He took Celeste out to the Double D or the Lodge. He went home to his grandmother. He avoided his parents like the plague.
And that was that.
So obviously, onward to the more difficult part: sex came in a wide variety of ways, and people should feel free to enjoy the ones that felt good to them.
She glanced at Camille and Joan that time, before she replied, “I know gay sex isn’t bad.”
“That wasn’t gay sex,” I told her.
“I wasn’t finished, Delly.”
“Okay,” I mumbled.
“Gay sex or you know,” her voice dropped, “anal. Or like, dress up or um…that stuff they do in those famous books.”
“BDSM,” I choked out and caught Joan elbowing Camille and definitely heard Camille fight snorting.
Celeste heard it too. “Yeah. Whatever. You can be gay and bi and a lot of things. A friend of mine, she, uh…finds stuff and reads it and watches it, and she thinks she’s pan.”
I had nothing to say to that. Though I was glad her friend was exploring so she could know herself, I still worried that “watching things” at sixteen might be a bit early.
“It’s just like, you know, whatever you want, whoever you are, right?” she asked.
“Right,” I answered.
“Right,” Camille and Joan chimed in with me.
Then she shared she’d figured me out.
“I know I called it gross, but I didn’t mean what the Pulaskis were doing was gross. Okay, it was. Because they’re parents. And I’m sorry, Delly. That’s gross.”
I waved my hand in front of me because I had to give that to her.
It wasn’t gross, but I’d get why a kid would think that.
“It’s gross they let it out so Will could see it,” she concluded. “It’s gross they let their stuff mess him up. That was gross.”
That was definitely gross.
Thus endeth our discussions, and I was pleased to be able to call Bohannan and report his daughter was enlightened as well as beautiful and intelligent and sweet.
And although it wasn’t that he had nothing to worry about, at least she had herself together.
His reply?
“That’s great, baby.”
I went through all that for him (and Celeste), and that was it.
I’d take it.
I would because it wasn’t the words, it was the tone.
Now I was back. It was a couple of weeks before Christmas. We had decorations up in my house and Bohannan’s. My master bath was done, and a spruce up of the downstairs powder room was in full swing. My book was half written, and I might make my deadline by the skin of my teeth. I had most of my Christmas shopping complete.
And no one had been killed.
So things weren’t great.
But they were all right.
And now Megan was filling me in on everything else that was breaking loose in Misted Pines.
“Apparently, even the governor can’t snap his fingers and remove a sheriff. But he did whatever he had to do, and while you were gone, Dern was removed. I’ve heard he huffed, and he puffed, but he’d already blown the house down. Harry is acting sheriff until the election. So far, it looks like he’s running unopposed.”
Another quick update: I’d been right. It was a big thing that much ado had been made over, the fact that I’d landed such a badass hot guy, but attention on me and Bohannan had been thankfully brief.
And apparently, Leland’s Hail Mary play hadn’t worked.
“I’m sure that’s a relief,” I replied to Megan.
She gave me a You Know It look and shared, “Harry cleaned house and he’s gotta recruit a bunch of deputies, but he brought back Polly, so at least he’ll know where everything is.”
I shot her a smile.
She leaned into me. “Now for the juicy stuff.”
I was intrigued.
“That wasn’t juicy?”
It was.
But I’d find what was next was juicier.
“Audrey filed against Dale. Dale is gone. Bobby’s gone. Jay and Dwayne haven’t been seen in public since ‘the incident,’ and word is, Jay’s interviewing for jobs up in Alaska. But Dale and Audrey’s house is up for sale. Bobby and Lana’s too. I know because I’m listing them. But I’ve seen hide nor hair of the men. Lana and Audrey are handling everything. Audrey told me she’s moving to Spokane. Where Dale went, I do not know. Poof,” she said. “Vanished.”
Megan and her husband, Dan, owned a real estate agency in Misted Pines.
This was why Megan could stop for Aromacobana and have coffee with me whenever the mood struck us.
She was very good at what she did, so that was why she had nice handbags like me.
Probably needless to say, when media interest turned to Misted Pines because of me and Bohannan and dead girls, as I noted, I’d been right, of a sort. They were interested in us for a second.
But then something else caught their attention.
And that something else was that it took no time for them to sniff out the sex scandal. As the video clips weren’t exactly kept under wraps, and they were all kinds of salacious, and the woman scorned angle was too good to pass up, those went from MP viral to globally viral.