Free The Lucky Kind by Alyssa B. Sheinmel Page B

think she feels the same way I do; she doesn’t want to get into anything, but she’s also upset about something.
    “You can tell me.” I wonder if my parents did something wrong.
    “Umm. Listen.” She sits on the edge of my bed. “Your mother didn’t know who I was.”
    I’m still standing up. “Well, she’d never met you before.”
    “Yeah, I realize that. I’m not an idiot, Nick. But she’d never heard my name before.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “She said, ‘Eden, that’s an unusual name’—like she’d never heard it before.”
    I open and close my mouth three times before saying, “Yeah, I know,” and sinking down on the bed next to her. “I know.”
    “Well, we’ve been dating for two months now, and my parents certainly know you.”
    “Well, we never come here,” I say, regretting it the minute I say it, since it just underlines her point.
    “I know,” she says, and she stands up.
    “You’re angry,” I say.
    “No, I’m not,” she says, running her fingers through her hair, which fell completely out of its ponytail when we were messing around, and walking toward my window. “Not exactly.”
    “I’m sorry.”
    “What for?”
    “For not telling them about you. For not inviting you here before. I really am. I just, I wasn’t, it had nothing to do with you. I honestly didn’t think about how that might make you feel.”
    “What were you thinking about?”
    “Come on, you’ve got to be impressed with the maturity and insight of that apology,” I say, trying to bring back our normal banter.
    “What were you thinking about?” she repeats, insistent now.
    “I wasn’t thinking.”
    “Sure you were,” she says, and now I stand up, too.
    “Sure I was. But”—I take a step toward her, an effort that seems particularly futile—“look, I don’t know.”
    “Sure you do.”
    “I didn’t tell them about you.”
    “Why not?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “Sure you do.”
    “Jesus Christ, Eden, stop telling me I know. Maybe I really don’t know.”
    She looks at me, surprised. I realize how mean I sounded.
    “I’m sorry.”
    “Again?” She sounds irritated. Impatient.
    I look at her blankly.
    “That’s your second apology in two minutes after two months without any.”
    “Sorry,” I say again.
    “Okay, but I can’t really know how I feel about it until you tell me why.”
    “You mean you can’t forgive me until I tell you why.”
    “Right.”
    “Right,” I echo.
    I run my fingers through my hair and look at the ceiling. “Look, I just, I haven’t been … I haven’t been spending all that much time with them lately.” It’s the first time I’ve thought about it like that.
    “With your parents?” Eden says.
    “Right.”
    “On purpose?”
    “Well, I spend so many nights at your place.”
    “I know. But you still spend plenty here.”
    “I know, I just, I don’t spend time here with them.”
    “Well, I wouldn’t say I ‘spend time’ with my parents,” she says, “but they’re there, at my house. I mean, they see what I do and where I’m going, and whatever. Unless I don’t want them to.”
    She looks back at me now, and she sounds genuinely concerned, not angry. “Are you guys fighting? You’re not talking to them?”
    “No. I mean no, I’m not not talking to them.”
    “They’re really nice, you know?”
    “I know.”
    “So?”
    “It has nothing to do with whether they’re nice or not. Sure they’re nice. They’re the nicest people most people will ever meet.” I take another step, but not toward her; I’m beginning to pace.
    “I don’t know. I didn’t want to tell them about you.”
    “Why?” she says, and she sits back down on the bed, which makes me feel better.
    “Because … I can’t quite explain it,” I say, and I sit down next to her, genuinely relieved to be close to her again. “Because this is mine—it’s ours.”
    “Well, sure.”
    “But it’s not theirs.”
    “You kept me a secret because this is