First contact “Mom?” Raine and her mother were in their tent, shelling peas for lunch. “Who’s the guy with the dreads,” whilst this description may have been enough to clarify in other circles, it needed much further elaboration amongst their family, “The short ones - short dreads, I mean. He’s quite tall.” She had noticed him a few times around the site, including that morning when they’d made very interesting eye contact. She had been midway through her morning flexibility routine and, when she had gone into front splits with a back bend, had caught him watching her, upside down from her perspective, from where he was helping to unpack.
“Dallas?”
“I guess so. Who is he?” Raine knew two things; pretty much everyone on site was family and, contrary to what people said about families like theirs, they did not actually sleep with their cousins. But two of her cousins had got married a while back because one was from dad’s side and one was from mom’s, so whilst they were both related to her, they weren’t to each other. Family was a complicated, over-arching term therefore, in which there were sometimes exceptions or loopholes.
“He’s your Auntie Lyn’s, she got married to a guy with a couple of kids. I suppose technically that makes him what… your step-cousin, if there is such a thing?”
“So,” Raine smiled broadly, “He and I aren’t related?”
Her mother looked up, catching the expression on her daughter’s face that indicated that this was very, very good news. It seemed it was time they had a talk about one or two things…