Thinking quickly, I grab her foot and stop her, inches from taking hold of it.
“Let go,” she says, kicking her leg around.
“Jesus, you’re strong.”
“This is not boss-like behavior. I will take you to human resources,” she pants, twisting and kicking her legs.
“And I will tell them how you pounced on me first.”
“HR likes me better than you—they’ll take my side.” She scrambles, and she’s gaining centimeters on me.
“I sign their paychecks—they’ll always side with me.”
“Ugh, not everyone is about money.”
“Most people are.” I yank on her foot, bringing her back a few inches.
“Let . . . me . . . go!” She kicks out, hitting me in the chest and sending me backward. Stunned, I drop her foot, releasing her just enough to scramble the rest of the way to the box. She scoops it up and, like a ninja, hops up on her feet, leaps over the bed, and opens the box—to my intense horror. “Oh, a notebook . . . oooh, what could be in here?”
“Don’t open—”
Too late. She flips the cover open, and all the life in my body drains at what I know she’s seeing right now.
Fuck . . .
“Oh . . . my . . . God!” Just as quickly as she opened the notebook, she shuts it, her face red, her smile impossibly big. “Ford Chance.”
Groaning, I slide back on the floor and cover my eyes with my hands.
“You dirty, dirty boy.” From the sound of pages crinkling, she obviously opened the notebook again, turning this embarrassing moment into a full-blown nightmare. “You have a notebook of just boobs. Cutout boobs. Boobs in lingerie, boobs in tight shirts, naked boobs. What on earth?”
Yup, this is my life now. My assistant knows I have a boob book.
“And I will never be able to look at you again,” I say, wishing the floor would swallow me whole right about now.
She takes a seat on my bed, the squeak of it alerting me. “I mean, where did you get all of these pictures? Some of them are printed out, I can see, but some of them are magazines . . . wait, are these from catalogues? Oh my God, this one is totally from the Watchful Wanderers magazine. She’s wearing a shirt I recognize. Ford, you clipped out boobies from your family’s store magazine.”
“Can you not call them ‘boobies’? Jesus.” Humiliated, I stand and reach for the book, but she snatches it out of the way just in time. “Larkin, hand it over.”
“Why? You going to take it back to the inn?” She wiggles her eyebrows. “Maybe set up a fire, pour some wine, have an evening to yourself with your . . . friends?”
“If you’re trying to make me shrivel up and die from embarrassment, I’m seconds away.”
She chuckles and continues to flip through the pages. “You know, I have noticed one commonality among all the breasts: you like them small.”
“Good to know. Now can we get to work?”
“This is work.” She flips through more. “This is so telling. Really getting down to the nitty-gritty of what makes Ford Chance tick.” She snaps the book shut and meets my gaze, clutching the notebook to her chest. “Tell me, Ford, what makes you lean toward a smaller set of breasts?”
I drag my hand over my jaw. “You know, this was a bad idea. I think I can do this on my own. I will report back with my findings. You can go back to the inn.”
“Oh no.” She shakes her head. “I need to know what else is in those boxes.” She gasps, hand to heart. “Dear Jesus, am I going to find another notebook, but this one is cut-up butts? And then cut-up—”
“There is one notebook,” I say before she can go any further. “That’s it.”
“Uh-huh, well, we’re just going to have to find that out for sure, aren’t we?” She nods toward the closet. “Go on, pull down more. We have some things to pick through.”
“I have never been more confused and fascinated at the same time,” Larkin says, sitting in the middle of my room, my belongings surrounding her. She looks up at me with those bright, intriguing eyes. “Who knew you were so complex?”
I’m sitting on my bed, my back against the headboard, letting her paw through my childhood possessions. I gave up helping after she found the Nano Kitty I called Ralph stuffed away in a box. “Complex? I think I’m pretty simple.”
She shakes her head. “No way. Look at all of this.” She motions to the open boxes. “This does not read ‘simple man.’” She lifts up an old diary. “Through this fantastic literature, we learned that you appreciate the smell of grape soda. And this”—she holds up a binder full of loose-leaf paper—“this let us know that you are positively irrational because you kept every piece of geometry homework you ever had after you decided it would be a ‘nifty’ goal for the year.”
“Everyone has to have goals, no matter how big or small.”
“And this.” She lifts an old piece of fabric out of a box. “You kept this piece of plaid fabric because the colors reminded you of the summer day you had your first kiss.”
“It was during a sunset—very romantic for a thirteen-year-old.”
She laughs out loud and then leans back on her hands. “I wasn’t aware you were so sentimental.”
“It was a first kiss; weren’t you sentimental about yours?”
She considers it. “Not really.”
“Must not have been good, then.”
“Was yours?”
Wistfully, I look up at the ceiling. “It was a beautiful day—”
“Okay, okay, I don’t need to hear the story. Who was the poor girl who took your kissing flower?”
“Raina Mastiff. I believe she lives in Texas now and is married to a pro football player.”
“Seriously?” Larkin asks.
“Yeah. She might have the life of luxury now, but nothing will ever beat that first kiss.”
Larkin chuckles. “You know, I like it when you joke around. You should do it more often.”
“I joke around with you.”
“Not nearly enough.” She picks up a notebook, which we established I kept but never wrote in because I liked the mountain on the cover too much. “How about we use this for your bucket list?”
“The untouched mountain notebook? I’m not sure I’m ready to make that kind of commitment.”
“We have to start somewhere, and what better than with this cherished notebook you never wrote in but kept for years.” She picks up a pen, flips the front page over, and then places the pen on the paper.
I jokingly gasp, which makes her laugh as she scrawls something across the top.
“What are you writing?”
“‘Ford Chance’s bucket list.’”
“You realize a bucket list is representative of things you want to do before you die.”
She glances up at me. “Well aware, but we’re still calling it that.” Pen still poised, she says, “Okay, from what we’ve conjured up while looking through these boxes . . . you were incredibly anal retentive and never had any fun . . . besides cutting out boobs.”
I point a finger at her. “What did we say? No more referencing the boob book.”