Taking A Break

2024-07-13 “Taking A Break” by Emma

Me, Jenn and Merritt have been here at The James King music festival all day. We decided to get off by ourselves for a little while, so we went down the beach a ways and found a place to sit down.

“Who wants a hog dog?” Jenn asked.

“Here,” Merritt replied, “I’ll go get some.”

Jenn shook her head. “I need to do something else that you can’t do for me, but I appreciate your offer.”

I tol’ her I’d be grateful for a hot dog, and she took off leaving me an’ Merritt to look after our belongings. 

“I liked that last band,” Merritt said.

Jenn had called it a tribute band to an old music group known as Led Zeppelin. That was a band that was popular back a little before Merritt got time shifted from 1984. They was some other bands Jenn and Merritt said was doing covers of songs they knew. ‘Course none of the bands did song I ever heard of, but music in my time wasn’t like this.

Well, while we sat there, I got an urge to say something nice that I’d been thinking for a few days. I didn’t want to say it but somehow it just came out.

“Merrett,” I said, “I wanna say something. I like how you look at me.”

I felt my face flush up, but I kept going. “You have real kind eyes and when I look at ‘em I feel like you can see right inside me. Like you know if I’m about to tear up over somethin’ that don’t even matter, or if I’m scared or confused. I… feel like you’re looking after me.”

Merritt smiled and leaned back, relaxed like. “I try to look after you. You’ve said it. We’re connected. We need to get through all this, and looks like we’re meant to do it together.”

“I’m glad,” I said. “I’ll try to look after you, too. And Jenn… She’s looking after both of us, if you think about it.”

“I know…” Merritt nodded. “We’ll make if we stick with each other. And… since you brought it up… Looking at you… and looking after you… it’s nice.”

I took that to mean he wasn’t offended by what I said.

We didn’t say much more ‘til Jenn got back, then we had hot dogs.

Thanks for reading this little story! Bye for now!