I called Stacy the next Saturday, and the next. Sometimes, during the week, I'd get a text from her. It started with a "Thinking of You", or perhaps just a smiley face, and after a while it was even simpler, sometimes just a single period. It was enough to know that she was thinking of me. I started calling her an Imp, and when I did, she sent me a little mouse pic, and the simple period became a mouse, my symbol of her.
"I was thinking, do you think you can come get me Labor Day weekend?" She said the second week of August.
"I thought you said that school didn't start again until almost the end of September," I answered, puzzled at the discrepancy.
"It doesn't."
"But why do you..." I stopped, realization dawning on me, "Oh. You want to come see me?"
"I just don't want to be away from you any longer. If we've got to live in isolation, I want to be living it in isolation with you."
~
The three weeks until Labor Day seemed to go by at a snail's pace but, even with a three-day holiday, when I headed home the traffic was practically nonexistent. Getting out of town the traffic wasn't as bad as a pre-virus weekday commute would have been, and by the time I was on the road for an hour, there weren't even any slowdowns. Just as when I'd dropped her off in the spring, it was almost an hour faster than what I'd expected. I so badly wanted to go see her immediately, but instead I called her while I was still on the road.
"Are you going to come see me tonight?" She asked with a giggle as soon as I called.
"Do you think that's a good idea?" She'd also thought of the practical, as to whether we wanted to tell our parents about "us", whatever "us" was, in a yet unconfirmed relationship, and admitted that if we were "just" cousins, I wouldn't really be coming over to see her when it was only my second visit to "home" this year. She grudgingly admitted it was best if we played it cool, but when she suggested that we should leave on Sunday, "to beat the holiday traffic," I teased her that there was no reason - there hadn't been any outbound traffic so what made her think there was going to be inbound traffic on Monday?
"I just might have to sleep on the couch the first night," she threw back at me as a barb to my tease.
"I guess I really should make you stay on the couch for 14 days, shouldn't I? Self-quarantining and the like?"
"Me? Your mom was the one that said you're supposed to be giving up your bed to your guest and you should be on the couch."
"Guest?" I repeated with indignation. "You think you're a guest? What kind of freeloading leech are you, anyway? I buy you food, I buy you new and bigger bath towels so you can walk around half naked without the towel falling off, I share my bed with you so you don't get a crick in your neck, and you want to be a
guest
?"
"Please sir," she dropped into a voice reminiscent of Oliver Twist asking for more gruel, "I can always make it worth your while, sir."
"Hmmph," I harrumphed back at her. "The next thing you know you'll probably be wanting me to buy you new clothes or something."
"Oh no, Sir," she continued in the Dickinsonian accent, "I'll gladly go naked for you if you want."
"I'll bet you would, my little Imp!" We both laughed.
~
It was sundown by the time we got away on Sunday, dark by the time we got onto the freeway. "You kids are going to be careful?" Aunt Nora, Stacy's mom, had said as we'd finished putting Stacy's things in the back of my pickup. I couldn't help but notice that Stace was bringing a lot more back with us than what I'd delivered in the Spring. I wondered if Aunt Nora had noticed. Probably not, but for the moment my heart leapt into my throat at her words, interpreting that she was telling us to be careful -
sexually
, but she immediately clarified with her continuance, "It's gotten so bad. Will you kids stay safe? Who would have believed even just a couple of months ago that deaths would have reached a thousand a day in the US alone, and over 200,000 people have died?"
Luckily, I hadn't been looking at her when she'd asked if we were being careful, so she didn't see my guilty face. "Yeah, hard to believe," I acknowledged. "But that's why Stacy is staying with me, so she's not in that dorm room or seeing other people every day. We're staying quarantined as much as we can."
"I'm so glad you're taking care of my baby," she said with a smile, although from behind her mask I could only sense it rather than see it. "I know she's in good hands with you."
"She is, Aunt Nora, don't you worry."
"He's definitely got good hands, Mom. He'll treat me well." I almost choked when Stacy said this, knowing she meant it as a double entendre. It hadn't been an accident, but as Stacy stepped up and gave her mom a hug, Aunt Nora showed no signs of understanding the innuendo behind the statement. I saw Stacy's skirt pull up just a smidge as she gave her father a hug, but all it just showed was a little more leg. I couldn't help myself, seeing the flesh of the back of her legs exposed caused my mind to move just those few inches higher, to the top, where I knew that since it was a skirt there probably weren't any panties.