Only a few blissful minutes later, I heard the dogs barking downstairs I reluctantly pulled myself away from Pete and peered out the front window. My dad's truck was parked in the driveway. I scrambled to the floor and tossed Pete's shirts at him and pulled my sweater over my head.

"My dad's home," I explained as I smoothed my tousled hair. "Shit. I'm not ready for this. Are you ready for this?"

He grinned lazily. "If I'm not ready for this, do I get to live in your bedroom forever?"

"I guess that wouldn't be so bad." I leaned over to kiss him one more time. "But put your shirt on just in case. I'm gonna go talk to him."

Downstairs, Dad was washing his travel mug at the kitchen sink.

"I have a friend upstairs," I confessed immediately. "It's a guy."

He remained deathly quiet as he turned off the faucet, tipped the mug onto the drying rack and then stared out the window.

"That's not authorized," he finally said without turning around.

"I know. I'm sorry. I just wanted to warn you, so you...behave yourself."

"Don't talk to me about behaving myself."

"You're right. I just want you to know that he's important to me. For real. So please don't try to scare him away." I paused and waited for his comeback, but he stayed silent. "So, you good? Or should I set up that fire escape ladder and send him out the window?"

"Oh, I'm good," he said in an uncharacteristically chipper tone. "Good as gold."

Surprisingly, after I introduced them, my dad didn't try to force awkward conversation with Pete. It actually seemed like he wanted to escape the situation more than Pete did.

"Well, I'll be out in the garage," he announced. "I've gotta figure out what's going on with the starter on the Blazer."

My dad had three different vehicles, one of which was usually functioning properly at any given time, while the other two gave him an excuse to retreat to the garage by himself for hours.

"Can I help?" Pete offered.

"I don't know, can you? This truck's older than you are."

"That's my specialty," Pete said as he shot me a knowing look.

"Your specialty, huh?" Dad asked with heavy skepticism.  "How old are you?"

"Twenty-two."

Dad briefly closed his eyes and his nostrils flared as he took a deep breath, obviously trying his best to withhold a strong reaction to the age difference between us. "Did you graduate with her brother, Jason?"

"No, I didn't go to Palmer."

"Alright then, Pete. I'm going to need more information. Could you give me your full name, address, and social security number so I can run a background check?"

"Stop," I protested.

I couldn't relax while Pete was out there with my dad. I tried to sew, I tried to watch something on television, but all I could do was pace the floor and stare out the window at the garage, looking for signs of distress. I wondered if I should go check on them, under the guise of offering coffee or something, but I thought Pete might not appreciate that. And so I waited.

When the garage door finally opened and my dad's black and white Blazer rolled out onto the ice-packed driveway, I couldn't wait any longer. I slipped on my boots and got outside in time to see Pete step out of the driver's side. He and Dad shook hands and then my dad walked toward the house, patting me on the shoulder as he passed.

"How did that go?" I asked Pete once my dad was out of listening range.

"About as well as it could have. It looks like I won't need to buy a car right away. Your dad is letting me borrow one."

"He's not letting you borrow the Blazer, is he? That thing is his pride and joy."

"Yup," Pete grinned.

"No, seriously. I think he loves the Blazer more than he loves me. Did he tell you he's had it since-"

"Nineteen eighty-five. Oh, he told me, alright. He said that I have to wash it twice a week while there's salt on the roads and I'm not allowed to touch you in it."

"Oh I see. It comes with stipulations."

"How much does a car wash cost nowadays?" Pete wondered.

"Like eight dollars."

"Eight dollars?! Geez. It's a good thing he found me a job, too."

"Are you serious?"

"I am. He made a call to a friend who owns a shop in Mayville who needs some help between Christmas and New Years, and maybe after that, too."

"Oh my God, you won him over." I shook my head in disbelief.

"I don't know about that, but he wanted to help me out."

"What did you tell him?"

"I told him that I lost everything in a fire, and I'm looking for a job and a new start. Closer to you."

"You did not tell him that."

"I sure did."

"And he lives to tell the tale," I whispered dramatically.

"I'm worried about the background check, though. I made up a different social security number."

"He's not going to do a background check," I assured him. "That's just his schtick."

His mouth twisted up in a thoughtful smirk. "His schtick, huh?"

"Don't overthink it. He hasn't had many opportunities to try it out."

"So, do you have any plans tonight?" he asked. "What do you say we go do something?"

~~~~~~

We went to a brick oven pizza place in Newport and Pete agreed to let me pay for dinner if he could cover the next one after he started his new job. It was a Friday night, and the eve of Christmas Eve and the restaurant was busy and warm and twinkling with festive lights. It was hard not to compare Pete's experience with my first time eating at the diner with him when he had to push a Coke bottle into my hand and open doors for me, not only to be polite, but because I wasn't strong enough to do it myself. Even though it couldn't have been easy for him mentally; physically, he could do whatever he needed without an issue. He even drove us there.

Pete commented on the heat in the room and began to roll up his sleeves, but when he folded up the cuff of his shirt and revealed part of the anchor on his arm, he paused and smoothed it back down.

"You don't have to hide your tattoo."

"Oh, you noticed that, huh?" He absentmindedly touched his forearm. "That was a bad decision."

"People don't really care anymore. Tattoos are pretty common now."

"Oh, so now I'm common?" He smiled playfully.

"Mainstream? They're more mainstream. No one's going to think you're a criminal if you have tattoos. Except for maybe my mom."

"Oh, great."

"So, what's the story there?" I asked. "I want to hear all about your bad decisions."

"All of them?" He asked with an eyebrow raised.

"Oh God, probably not," I backtracked. "Let's start with this one."

"Alright, so after I wrote you that last letter, I went from Seattle to Alaska thinking I'd spend a season working on a fishing boat. I'd heard you could do really well up there. I figured worst case I'd get thrown from a boat and drown, which at the time didn't sound all that bad to me."

I reached across the table and squeezed his hand. I was right after all about his letter; it was bleak, and not exactly hopeful for a new start.

"I thought you were afraid of the water. Why would you get a job on a fishing boat?"

"It didn't last long. I got so seasick, I was pretty useless out there. Another guy bet me I couldn't make it through an entire day on the boat without getting sick. When I lost the bet, I had to get this." He lifted his arm and rolled his eyes. "So, it's actually a badge of shame. After a month of feeling like death warmed over, I ended up working in a cannery."

He leaned forward and lowered his voice as he continued, but his words would have been drowned out anyway by all the conversations in the room and the holiday music playing over the speakers. "At the cannery, I saw a woman get her arm crushed in one of the machines. It was the worst thing I've ever seen. She fainted and I was working with a couple others on getting her arm released. Once it was out, her arm was completely wrecked, probably would have had to have it amputated, but I held onto it, on instinct I suppose, and after a minute or so her arm was good as new.

"I didn't know. Not until that happened. There were a couple times my little sister, June, got cuts and scrapes and I bandaged them for her and they were better right away, but those were little things and I didn't think anything of it. And with you, you thought the time change made you better, so I believed that, too. Anyway, that's what made me come back that summer. I thought maybe you'd survived that accident after all, and maybe you'd come back to find me again."

"But if you believed that sending me back through the pool would save me, why did you spend all that time thinking I might not have made it?"

"Your friend was there that night. The one who you told me is June's daughter. Liz. When I drove you to the pool, Rose was next to you in the cab and Liz must have climbed into the back of the truck. They both saw you disappear in the water. When I told them not to worry, that you'd be okay, Liz said I was wrong. She told me she could do what you can do, too, and said, 'You'd better pray when she gets back that someone sees her in there and calls an ambulance.'"

"So, I did." He studied our clasped hands resting on the tabletop. "Everyday. And it sounds like your buddy Eric was the answer to my prayers, funnily enough."

After dinner, we strolled arm in arm through downtown Newport. It was lightly snowing, the kind of snowflakes that appeared in their crystallized six-pointed form as they landed and ignited a childlike urge to examine each one before it clumped together with the others or melted against warm skin or a wet sidewalk.

The fresh snow dusted the striped awnings over the storefronts and the artificial evergreen garlands that stretched across the street and wound down along the old-fashioned lamp posts. Pete stopped to look up and pointed to a wreath in the center of one of the garlands, holding three electric candles with flickering orange bulbs.

"Those look exactly like the ones they decorated with sixty years ago," he said.

"Maybe they are the same."

He studied the gold lettering in the window of a wine bar. "I've never heard of a wine bar before, or a vape shop, but the bones of this town look no different than they did then."

"That's one of the kinda bad, kinda good things about small towns, I guess. They like to hold onto the past."

"That might work out alright for me."

"Would you want to stay around here?" I asked without thinking.

I wasn't sure if I wanted to hear the answer to that yet. When I'd known him before, Pete had no plans to ever leave Palmer. And I'd dreamt of leaving for as long as I could remember. But this version of Pete left Palmer behind and worked as he traveled across the country. Maybe he was different.

And Pete had never actually said he'd decided to stay long term. Sure, we spent the afternoon in my bed and he had a job lined up for a week, but that wasn't a promise of anything more. Maybe this was only our chance at a better, longer goodbye.

"Is it too soon to say I'd go wherever you want to go?" he asked. "If you'll have me."

A swell of joy filled me at the sound of the answer I wanted to hear and lifted me up onto my toes. I grabbed the front of Pete's coat and planted a kiss on him right there on the sidewalk.

"Not too soon," I said as I sank back down to Earth.

He screwed his face up in thought. "Do you think if we put our paychecks together we could afford a basement apartment without the rats?"

"Let's worry about that when we get to it." I threaded my arm through his again and we continued walking. "So, out of all the jobs you had in the last two years, which one was your favorite?"

"I went back to working as a mechanic when I was in Marquette," he said. "So probably that."

"Do you love it?"

"Do I love working on cars? Not really. But I don't hate it. There are other things I'd rather be doing. But I think I'm pretty good at it and there's a paycheck when it's all said and done."

"What other things would you rather be doing? Like, what do you like to do when you're not working?" Then my own question made me feel uncomfortable. Did I not know Pete well enough to know how he liked to spend his free time? The expression on his face reflected my lingering doubt that we actually knew each other at all. But now we had time, I reminded myself, to get to know each other better than before.

"Well, as you saw, I like to play guitar," he said slowly and thoughtfully, as if he were at a job interview. How was open mic night only the night before? Things had changed so much, it seemed like a week had passed.

"I meant to ask you, when you sang that song yesterday, were you thinking of someone in particular?"

"I was. She was sitting right there in front of me. And she seemed very interested in the ceiling for some reason."

"She might have been staring at the ceiling because she was afraid you were thinking of someone else that you left behind."

"No, dimwit. It was for you." I tightened my hold on his arm and felt a huge, silly grin take over my face, as he continued, "And I'm not here because I want to be a tourist in the twenty-first century, or because I want to date your friend Kaitlin," he tipped his head toward mine and said quietly, "who I think might be a lesbian, or her sister, or any of the three billion other women on the planet. I'm here because I want to be with you."

"Actually, Kaitlin's bisexual. So, it's still within the realm of possibility."

"On the drive home, she was talking, uh, very openly about a girl she met at a party. You might've been asleep. I've learned a lot over the past few days and I still have a long way to go."

"I'll do everything I can to catch you up."

"You know," he said, "since you asked, there was one girl I left behind that meant a lot to me. I'll probably never see her again though."

"Oh."

"She was real sweet, but had kind of a wild side." Why was he telling me this? "She used to visit me sometimes at the cabin. She wasn't like you, she loved...meat, and everytime I cooked she'd smell it and wander out of the woods to have dinner with me. I named her Wendy.  She was a stray dog... or maybe she was a coyote, or part wolf, maybe? I wasn't sure."

"You're hilarious." I rolled my eyes and elbowed him in the arm. "So you like to play guitar and befriend stray wolf-dogs. What else?"

"Read. Walk in the woods. Split firewood. Cook." His answers were not what I expected.  I wasn't sure what I expected. "I tried planting a garden last year. That was alright."

"Splitting firewood seems like it would be satisfying."

"It is. And the house had a wood-burning stove. Had to split logs to stay warm."

"But you can always use unread love letters in a pinch."

"Do you realize that if I hadn't thrown your letter in the fire, we wouldn't be here right now? I'd rather have you here in real life than your words on paper."

"Okay, okay, you're right." A deep, satisfied sigh escaped my lungs and clouded the air. "All your hobbies are pretty wholesome."

"What were you expecting?"

"I don't know. Bar fights? One-night stands? Hard drugs?"

"I'm still the same person," Pete insisted.

"But you're two years different. A lot can change in two years."

"Alright, there's another thing, but you're not gonna like it." I held my breath as he went on, "I started hunting while I was up there. Deer and turkey."

"O-kay, there it is," I said, jokingly throwing my hands in the air. "I don't know if I can get over that."

"I kept enough for myself and gave the rest away. There's a soup kitchen at a church that takes it and, come on, it helps to feed people for Christsakes!" he raised his voice defensively.

I wrapped my arms around him and squeezed him tight.  "You really are the same person."

I caught a glimpse of our reflection in a store window. We were kind of adorable. We looked like a couple I'd either admire or be incredibly jealous of, depending on my mood. The antique store was closed, but the ceramic winter village in the window display was still illuminated. Warm light shone from the tiny windows of the buildings and from beneath the cottony blanket of fake snow.

Pete draped his arm over my shoulder and sighed. "Well, look at us."

Our reflection in the window was too impermanent. I needed to prove the existence of us.

"Can we take a selfie?" I asked as I reached for the phone in my pocket. "I mean, can we take a picture together?"

As soon as I took the photo, I quickly held the screen to my chest.

"I'm half afraid you won't be in it, like a vampire."

I lifted the phone to take one more right as Pete leaned in to nip at my neck. In the photo my face was scrunched up as I started to laugh. The tip of Pete's nose was nudged against my jaw, his eyes were closed, and he had that content, relaxed grin on his face.

I felt ridiculously, stupidly happy. So happy it hurt if I thought about it too much.