Chapter 14
FOURTEEN
Icouldn’t remember having so much fun with somebody. Bree had no idea what she was doing—I wasn’t even certain she had a frame of reference for croquet other than the movie Heathers—but she turned it into a competition.
We played two rounds. I won the first, and when it became apparent she wouldn’t quit unless she won the second, I purposely played poorly.
She was competitive to the point of being distracting.
I was competitive, too, but had nothing on her.
Fortunately, she didn’t realize I’d deliberately flubbed my final few shots, because if she had, she wouldn’t have accepted the win.
It was almost midnight when she dropped me off at my house. My father’s vehicle was gone. I didn’t know if that was a good or bad thing.
“Do you think they’re still together?” she asked.
“I have no idea.” I pulled out my phone.
I hadn’t checked for messages when we’d been playing, because it had seemed like a waste of time.
I had one voicemail from my father, surprisingly enough, and it relaxed me a bit.
“He had someone pick him up here,” I told Bree when I was finished listening.
“One of the men from his company. They drove his car back to his house.”
Bree looked as relieved as I felt. “That’s a good thing, right?”
“It’s better than the alternative.”
“Yes, well…” She rubbed her lips together, and something inside me made a sizzling noise, like bacon being thrown on the griddle.
That was weird.
“I had fun,” she said.
“I did too.” Admitting that was harder than it should have been, because it stirred up a feeling of vulnerability. “I had no idea you knew so much about the movie Heathers.”
She snorted. “It was one of my mother’s favorite movies when she was a teenager, I guess. She watched it on a loop when I was growing up, along with Pump Up the Volume, Gleaming the Cube, and Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves.”
“That sounds like an eclectic group of movies.”
She shrugged. “Christian Slater must have been her jam back in the day.”
“I’m not sure I’ve ever seen Gleaming the Cube.” I racked my memory. “What is it?”
“Oh, it’s the sort of movie you have to see to understand.”
“Meaning?”
“Let’s just say a group of kids on skateboards take down an international smuggling regime.”
“On skateboards?”
“Yes.” She nodded.
“Well … I guess I’ll have to see if I can find it.” The longer I stayed in her cart, the more awkward things were becoming. If this were a date, we’d be making out. It wasn’t a date, though. “So…”
“So,” she agreed.
I dragged my eyes to her. The light was limited—the Landings had decent lighting on the main roads but not the side streets—but her eyes were clear, and her plump lips were pursed. All I wanted to do was lean over so I could see if her lips felt as soft as they looked.
In that moment, when I imagined kissing her, a few other scenes invaded my mind.
None of them were sweet Hallmark movie moments.
And yes, I had done some research on Hallmark versus Lifetime movies.
Bree was exactly right about them. I was more of a Lifetime guy, which meant the kiss I was envisioning was not sweet and nice.
No, it was down and dirty. But it wasn’t exactly a Lifetime kiss, either, since those movies so often involved murder.
“I should go,” I blurted at the same time that she said, “I should be getting home.”
I laughed, nervousness fluttering through my stomach. I could tell we were on the same page here. She wasn’t waiting for me to kiss her, no matter how much fun we’d had together, and she recognized that this moment was as awkward for me as it was for her.
I swung out of the cart. Then something occurred to me. “Maybe I should go home with you.”
“What?” she sputtered.
“It’s dark out. It’s late.” I held out my hands. “I can walk home from your house once I know you’re safe inside.”
She did not look keen on that idea. “I’m not too worried about it.” She flashed a flat smile. “It’s the Landings, not Detroit.”
“Crime can happen anywhere.”
“Yes, but I’m literally two minutes from home. I’ll be fine.” She waved off my concern as if swatting at a pesky gnat. “Don’t worry about me. I’m perfectly fine.”
I could have argued—part of me wanted to—but I smiled all the same. “Do me a favor and text when you get there, huh? I won’t be able to sleep otherwise.”
“Because you’ll be imagining a Lifetime movie gone awry?”
That made me laugh. “Now that you mention it, I’ve got a few of them marked on my app to watch. I find just reading the summaries fascinating.”
“Right?” Bree bobbed her head. “Do you know that Lifetime was designed to appeal to women?”
“I believe I did know that.”
“So, what does it say about women that most Lifetime movies involve violence or kidnapped children?”
“Something profound,” I said.
“Or something dark.”
I considered it. “Am I supposed to be taking something from this conversation?” I asked finally, confused.
“No.” She shook her head. “I’m just saying it’s creepy.”
She wasn’t wrong. Since I couldn’t think of anything to say in response, I just waved at her. “Good night, Bree.”
She waved back. “Good night, Brody.”
“Don’t forget to text.” I started up the walkway to my front door. “I’ll definitely be thinking about Lifetime movies—and far too much—if you don’t.”
Her giggle sent the parts of me that had quieted back to zinging. “I’ll text you the second I’m inside and the door is locked.”
“Thank you.”
“No, thank you.” Her expression was sincere when I glanced over my shoulder. “I can’t remember when I’ve had a more fun evening.”
“It was pretty great.”
“Even though we risked the wrath of the rent-a-cops.”
“Maybe because of it.”
She considered that for a second. “Yeah, I think that did add to the fun.”
I DREAMED ABOUT brEE AND NOT IN a gentlemanly way.
The dream involved a different sort of croquet—no clothes were required—and I woke up on the verge of messing up my sheets.
Since I was so embarrassed, and maybe a little worried that my feelings were veering into dangerous territory, I did the only sensible thing I could think of.
I ignored Bree for the next week and a half.
Not in a cruel way or anything. It wasn’t as if she was texting me and I was ignoring her messages. I just didn’t reach out to her. She didn’t reach out to me either. I also made sure my walks didn’t lead me past her house.
I told myself I wasn’t ghosting her. There wasn’t anything to ghost. We weren’t in a relationship. We were just two colleagues who occasionally crossed paths with one another… and we’d been so busy there were no paths to cross.
On my end, that was true. Well, kind of.
I was writing again. I wasn’t just back to my previous pace—I’d surpassed it.
Things were going so well for me that I’d started a second book, though it wasn’t one I would tell anybody about.
It was a murder mystery, something I’d always wanted to try my hand at but had never had the confidence.
When I’d told Bree I wanted to try writing a murder mystery, she’d suggested I wouldn’t be able to rest until I did. So I was doing it.
I rationalized that nobody would have to know about the book if I didn’t like the final product. It was possible I would be terrible at it. If I got a few more chapters in and hated it, or thought it wasn’t coming together, I could dump it. No muss, no fuss.
The new project wasn’t getting in the way of my fantasy book.
I was still cranking out five thousand words a day on that.
If I kept going, I would have a rough draft ready to send to my editor with time to spare.
Normally I polished my own work—went through it at least three times—but that might not happen this time.
I only needed to have something to hand in, I reminded myself.
They would send edits back regardless. The polish could happen then.
As for the mystery, I didn’t know what I would do with it when I finished.
I told myself that if I ended up hiding it in a file on my desktop and never looking at it again, that didn’t mean I could never write another mystery.
As with anything, writing got better the more you did it.
My second mystery might be ten times better than the first.
Because I’d convinced myself that nobody would ever read it, I was writing with the sort of abandon I used to possess when I was in high school and none of my writing assignments mattered.
The thing was—and this was hard to admit even to myself—the book didn’t feel bad.
Sure, it was rough around the edges and there would be things to clean up when editing—I’d been keeping notes—but there was no timetable for when this book needed to be finished.
I could tinker with it to my heart’s content.
As for selling it, I wasn’t certain how that would go.
My readers were used to high fantasy. It wasn’t that there was no crossover between fantasy and mystery readers.
It just wasn’t a large crossover. There was more crossover between my readers and Bree’s than there was between my readers and mystery readers.
Still, there were options. I could do a pen name.
I could do “B. B. Bates, writing as” so any curious readers could check it out without being confused or disappointed.
I could do absolutely nothing and hide the book for the rest of my life.
It was free to do whatever I wanted with it, which was probably why it was coming together so fast. There were no expectations.