The afternoon passes quickly, and I spend most of it with Kimber, drinking and bullshitting around, all the while, watching Mark and Candace from across the backyard. They’ve been talking and laughing non-stop.
“Help me clean up?” I ask Kimber, and she rolls her eyes at me. “You are such a spoiled brat. Get off your lazy ass, and help me out.”
Sighing in exasperation, she says, “Fine.”
Candace and Mark join us in the kitchen after a while and we decide to call it a night.
Walking us to the door, she says, “It was so good to meet you, Mark.”
“Same here,” he responds.
She pulls him in for a hug and tells him, “You’re welcome anytime, and you don’t need Jase with you to stop by.”
I laugh and shake my head at her when she says this.
“Thanks,” he says.
Kimber yells her “goodbye” from the kitchen and we yell it right back. I grab Candace and give her a tight hug. She whispers softly in my ear, “He’s perfect.”
“I know,” I mumble quietly. I give her a chaste kiss and then head out. Walking to my car with Mark, he takes ahold of my hand and gives my neck a few pecks. We stop at the car and I kiss him. Seeing him so comfortable with my best friend, my only family, makes me happy, and I smile against his lips as we continue to share our slow kiss.
Mark whispers over my lips, “What’s so funny?”
I move back and look at him. “Nothing’s funny. I’m just happy.”
He wraps his arms around my waist and says, “Me too. I see why you love her so much. She’s great.”
“Yeah, she is. So are you.”
The smile that grows on his face is beautiful, so I take one last kiss before we get in the car and start driving back to my place. Since neither one of us has an early class tomorrow, Mark decides to stay the night.
After changing clothes and sliding into bed, Mark wraps his arm around me as I ask into the darkness, “Did you have fun today?”
“Yeah, I did,” he responds softly. “Thanks for introducing me to your friends. Did you know them before coming to Seattle?”
“No. I met Candace the first quarter I was here. We had a Gen. Ed. class together. I also had a Communications class with Kimber, but I never spoke to her until I found out she was Candace’s dorm mate.
“So what’s her story?” he questions. “She seems so different from you and Candace.”
Letting out a laugh, I tell him, “I don’t know where to begin with that chick. I’ve always found it odd that Candace is such good friends with her because they are so opposite.” I start laughing harder when I think back to our Communications class we had together freshman year. “Oh my God. You wouldn’t believe this speech she gave in that class we shared.”
“What?” Mark chuckles as I try to control my own laughter.
“We were assigned an informational presentation. We were free to choose our own topic, but we had to perform a demonstration. So she walks to the front of the class with a blow-up sex doll. No. Shit. Mark. Mouth open for a blowjob, big tits, sex doll!”
He’s now laughing just as hard as I am. “Are you serious?”
“No joke. She tried going for a sense of modesty by throwing one of her t-shirts over it. I swear, I was about to piss my pants when she laid that thing face down on the demonstration table and began giving that doll, with its ass all exposed, a thorough body massage. Everyone was cracking up, but she kept a straight face and proceeded as if she was giving some political speech.”
“What did your professor say?”
“Nothing. He just let her do her thing as if what she was doing was completely normal.”
“Oh my God,” he says as we both lie there in my dark room and laugh together.
“But that’s Kimber. She doesn’t care what people think about her, and she is totally unpredictable, whereas Candace is reserved, quiet for the most part, and extremely focused. The two of them are an odd combo.”
“So how do you fit in to that?”
Laughter aside, I roll over and lay my head on his chest. “I hang out with Kimber a lot, only because Candace rarely goes out, but we don’t have a deep friendship at all; more like buddies. It’s nothing close to what I have with Candace.”
“I don’t think many people have that. You’re lucky.”
“Yeah,” I whisper. “It’s a lot like what I had with my sister, well, except the physical stuff,” I joke. “But she gives me what Jace used to when I had her.”
I pull my head back and look Mark in the eyes when he says, “Tell me something about her.”
It’s always hard for me to talk about my sister, but I want to share her with him, so I take a hard swallow before I open up. “We were best friends. It was always like that with us. We did everything together. There was this one time, we were young, maybe ten or eleven,” I say and then pause when I feel the sadness well up in me along with the happiness. It’s a strange conflict of emotions that causes my throat to slightly constrict.
Shifting and tucking my bent arm under the side of my head, I continue, “We had dug up a pail of mud down at the creek that ran through the back of our neighborhood. Jace thought it would be funny to make mud pies and blow them up with firecrackers on one of our neighbor’s front porch. The lady that lived there was always crabby, so needless to say, we didn’t like her that much. Jace found one of the leftover boxes of Black Cats from the Fourth of July, and we set those suckers off.” I start laughing at the memory. “That shit was so loud, and there was mud flying everywhere. That crotchety, old woman opened her front door and Jace and I ran as fast as we could, laughing our asses off.”