I'm not sure there's anything much more gratifying than Derek in Denial.
Maybe Casey in Denial.
Maybe Chair P*rn.
Maybe coffee.
It's not that big a deal, he knows, and if he can just tough it out for a month or two, then his wild teenage boy vacillations will eventually pull him –inevitably, invariably—in another direction. He's confident of this fact; confident enough that it doesn't even really affect his behavior. Sure, he doesn't really bring any other girls over for a while after she moves in, and maybe he spends most of his waking hours antagonizing her, pranking her, or planning to prank and/or antagonize her (because her eyes are never more bright and blue, her cheeks never more effusively pink than when she is tearing into him), but that doesn't mean it's a Big Deal. Girls have affected him this way before (he can't recall a specific instance, necessarily, but surely, surely this is not an isolated incident). This is just a bit of a…special case, is all. A Casey case. Heh. That's kinda funny, actually. (Beyond it being laughable that he's attracted to her at all, anyway.)
His mental reassurances become tenuous and insubstantial, however, when he vomits one night after dinner, six years later, after she announces to the family that she's engaged to be married.
We author-folk make this boy do an unGODLY amount of puking.
