He nodded in agreement, looked over at her, and asked, “Did you ever realize just how much in tune we are with each other?”
She snorted. “I was thinking about that earlier,” she said.
“And,” he asked teasingly, “any decisions?”
“No, not at all.” She laughed. Then she hesitated and added, “Sometimes I wonder if we aren’t too close.”
He stopped, stared at her in surprise, a questioning look in his eyes. “Is that a problem?”
“Only if we’re both missing the same point. Otherwise I don’t think so,” she replied, “but I haven’t really figured it out.”
“Well, maybe this is just one of those things that you don’t need to figure out, but maybe just accept.”
She smiled and nodded. “That probably works too.”
“Too close,” Ryattmuttered to himself and worried over that concept for several days. He didn’t say anything to her, but he wondered. When his sister showed up a few days later, he looked at her, smiled, and asked, “How are you doing?”
“I’m doing fine,” she said. “I came by to see how you were doing though.”
He shrugged. “I’m okay.”
“And yet you seem a little preoccupied. What’s going on?”
He laughed. “Just because you’re my big sister doesn’t mean I tell you everything.”
“You always used to,” she noted in a cajoling voice. “Don’t you remember?”
“Sure, but I was… what? All of five?”
She burst out laughing. “Maybe. However, sometimes it’s just nice to talk to somebody.”
He shrugged. “Just something somebody said that I’m not sure how to take.”
“Like what?”
He frowned, hesitated, and then figured, why not share? “Well, what the heck.” And he mentioned what Lana had told him.
“Too much alike,” Quinton repeated thoughtfully, staring off in the distance. “Well, I guess that can be considered in two ways. One, that’s a good thing—in the sense that you’re very compatible, that you understand each other, and, because your thoughts would be very similar to each other, your way of thinking would be similar to each other, maybe almost like being old friends, yet in a short amount of time.”
He nodded. “I was thinking along that line, but I’m not so sure.”
“Well, the other way to look at it would be that there’s no spark, there’s no excitement, because you already know each other so well,” she suggested. “So I guess it depends on how you feel about it. Do you think that you’re already past that stage of getting to know each other so that you already are at thecomfortable like an old shoetype of relationship?”
He shook his head. “I don’t think so. I just… It was an odd thing for her to say.”
“But it seems like you’ve had a lot of conversations with her, where you’re on the same side of thegetting to know each othermat, and maybe that’s all that she means.”
“Maybe.” Ryatt frowned. “It just made me a little…” And then he didn’t know what to say. “I don’t… I don’t know. It’s foolish, and, no matter what I say at this point in time, it makes me look like an idiot.”
She burst out laughing. “That is something you’re not and never have been.”
“Maybe not,” he agreed, “but I’m also still struggling with my future and what I want to do when I get out of here.”
“Well, pick wisely,” she said, and then she stopped and shook her head. “No. Forget that. Do what you can now, and, if you need to change it down the road, do so. The question for you on that earlier issue is, how do you feel about her in your heart? Does she feel like somebody you want to have close all the time, or does she feel like an old friend you’d like to visit with but, you know it’s okay when she leaves again?”
He winced at that. “That doesn’t sound very romantic.”
“There’s a lot to be said for romance, and there’s an awful lot more to be said for love.”