"Don't do this to me." He groans and I laugh.
"You sure?" I ask, flicking the stem around in my mouth. "It's a good one."
"I don't need to see you tie it into a knot with your tongue, Hayden." He's smiling but the tips of his ears are red.
"Fine." I laugh, then turn my head to face him and blow the long stem out of my mouth at him. It smacks him right in the face and he throws his head back laughing at the stop light. "Made you think." I giggle and he scoops out one of his cherries and plucks the stem, looking at me.
He puts the stem between his teeth and smiles at me before he sucks it into his mouth. In second he pulls it back out, the middle of the stem tied into a perfect little knot.
He flicks it at me and it gets stuck in my hair while I laugh, shaking my head around trying to get it out.
"Made you think." He grins to himself as we make the turn back down the road to his place.
Dammit.
He won that one.
I can't even actually do that. And I've tried. I usually just cheat and already have a tied stem in my mouth before I put another one in and then pull out the tied one to show people.
He actually did it, and my mind slips to places it shouldn't be.
"My mom will be here soon." He says, which thankfully brings my head right out of the gutter and back to the present situation at hand. "She's bringing my Granny."
"Oh, ok." I say, replacing my lid to drink some more. "I'll get my stuff and call a cab."
Ben pulls the truck into a spot near his townhouse and puts it into park, looking over at me. "I wasn't saying you've got to leave right now." He says, tapping his fingers on my knee. "Mom will probably want to meet you." He tells me. The idea of meeting his mother makes me uneasy, but I suppose I should if this is a person who is going to be in Elizabeth's life. "There's one thing though."
"Uh oh." I say, looking away. That's never a good line.
He laughs a bit. "It's nothing bad, it's just my Granny." He explains. "She's got dementia. She lives with my mom since Grandad passed last year. She can be a little off some days. I never really know what state of mind she might be in, so I just wanted to warn you."
"Oh." I say, looking back at him. "I totally get that. I've worked with a lot of people with dementia before."
"You have?" He tilts his head. "What do you do exactly? And actually, now that I think of it, where are you from?"
I suck my lips into my mouth. "So I kinda work at a funeral home." I give him a weird smile, too toothy and nervous. People don't always take the news well. In fact, most people are immediately creeped out by it. "And I'm from Tennessee. Chattanooga."
"A funeral home." Ben repeats. "How'd you get into that?"
I've actually never been asked that before.
Usually people just brush right over it or assume I'm creepy and start asking about what it's like to see dead bodies and what the craziest ones I've ever seen were.
I shrug a little.
Slowly I recount to him how I'd been introduced to it when my parents died and how much Shelia helped me. I explain to him how much I love it and I'm surprised to see him smiling as I talk. It makes me keep going. I want to keep seeing that look of interest on his face.
"It sounds like you found your calling." He says when I finally stop. "We could have used you when Grandad died. That whole experience was terrible for us. The place we used made us feel rushed and like they were trying to get him in the ground as fast as possible so they could get to the next group of people already waiting outside of the chapel. We didn't even get all the way out of the room before they wheeled out his casket and were already sliding someone else into place. It was awful."
