11. Archer
CHAPTER 11
Archer
“Holy shit,” Ryder whistles, his eyes tracking the hustle going on around us. He walks up to the stage that started getting built at three o’clock this morning and paces the front perimeter of it. “Is this?—”
“A scale replica of what she performs on?” I laugh. “Yeah, it is.”
“Your girl does not do anythin’ by half measures does she?”
“No, she does not.”
“Ellie’s gonna be talking about this birthday for years to come. Seriously, how am I gonna top Tins putin’ on a damn concert for my daughter next year?”
Briar, who's been sucking back enough caffeine to be concerning and walking around like a general preparing for war, trots down a set of steps at the back of the stage and heads right for us. She’s in sneakers, jean shorts, and some sort of light purple top with straps all over the place showing off her stomach. In her hand is a cell phone and clipped to her hip is a radio with a curled cord connecting it to an earpiece. She holds up a finger when she reaches us and pinches the mic on the collar of her tank.
“Tins and Ellie are doing a run through in forty minutes; I need those marks on the stage now !” There’s a pause where she pushes on the earpiece to listen. Whatever they say is not good. She looks at us, sucking in a deep breath, hands curling into a fist as she swallows an actual growl.
My brother leans into me and tries not to be heard laughing as he whispers, “I think my balls just ran for cover.”
“It’s tape, not rocket science!” she yells back before ripping the earpiece out. “Sorry about that.
“Anyway, if you two will come with me to the main house. Mikey and John want to run through a few security things with you and we think it’ll go over better with the parents if it comes from you and not us,” she says to Ryder. And to me she says, “And Tins—” but is interrupted by my phone ringing.
“Sorry,” I murmur, pulling it out of my pocket with the intention of silencing it, but when I see it’s my mom calling I tell Briar to hold on. “Hey Mom, what’s—hi,” I change, my voice growing soft and lips tugging into a smile when I hear Tinsley.
“Hi,” she shyly says back. “I hope it’s okay; Eleanor let me use her phone to call you since I don't have one.”
“You don’t have a phone?”
Her laugh is nervous and so damn adorable I can’t help but smile as I turn away from Briar and my brother, who are watching me like I’m the latest episode of their favorite TV show.
“I uh, got rid of it a while back. Everyone had started contactin’ me through Briar anyway, so there was really no reason to keep it.”
I’ve missed the rise and fall of her sugared voice. Its sweet lilt something I don’t understand why she’d cover up but now am selfishly happy that she’s only letting it out with me. It does nothing, though, to soothe the grip of worry that’s taken hold in my chest.
“Shortcake, that’s not safe. What about when she’s not with you? Or you’re driving? Or just home alone—do you at least have a house phone?”
“Archer, I’m never alone,” she laughs at the same time Briar answers with, “She’s, like, never alone.”
Tinsley continues, “As for driving, I don’t. I haven’t in eight years. I don’t even have an active license anymore; it’s just not safe. For me or other people.”
“Oh baby, we’re gonna have to fix that,” I murmur. “I don’t like the idea of you not bein’ able to drive and havin’ to rely on other people.”
She’s quiet for a minute and when she does speak, she asks, “Will you come up to the house? I want to see you.”
“I’m on my way.”
Hanging up, I push the phone back into my pocket while Briar says, “That’s what I was going to say. She asked me down here to get you, but I got sidetracked with the shit show over there,” she gestures behind her to the stage.
“Well, come on then,” Ryder says. “My truck’s just over there.”
The main house is where we grew up and where Ryder now raises Ellie. It’s about 200 years old, with live oak trees older than that lining the long drive up to the front. When the canopy of trees open, it’s to a painfully symmetrical three story home made up of columns, a double wrap around porch, pure white siding that growing up we were punished by having to wash in the summers, shutters painted a custom shade of green that matches the lake’s surface, and red brick chimneys coming from the top that match the partially above ground brick basement. Several acres past the back of the house, there’s even a mausoleum where numerous generations of our ancestors are at rest.
Growing up, it never bothered us. They were just there. Tinsley, however, used to joke about being happy I wasn’t the oldest son and thus not the one to inherit the historic home. She said the dead people in the backyard gave her the heebie-jeebies. So much so that when she started staying the night with me and eventually moved in, I moved from my room to a guest room so my windows didn’t overlook the distant dot of the mausoleum because she had nightmares her first night here.
It was something she and our mom had further bonded over—our parents always telling the story about how when Dad proposed, Mom told him she’d only accept if the master bedroom was moved somewhere she wouldn’t see our dead ancestors first thing in the morning.
At the house, things are much more calm, the itch of too many people being around leaving from between my shoulders. On the front porch, two guys who I can admit I wouldn’t want to end up in a fight against are waiting. Several more who weren’t here this morning mill about in matching black t-shirts, jeans, and tactical boots.
Hunter pulls up beside us as we’re getting out. He slams the door to his truck closed and mutters, “Does she think she’s the President or somethin’?” gingerly taking Ellie’s cake out from the floor of his backseat.
Briar makes a disgusted noise, her lip curling. “Photos of where the President is spending his vacation aren’t worth several thousand dollars a piece. And the amount of money a tabloid would be willing to pay for a story about Archer as the man that inspired Summer Haze, is infinitely more than that. This is for the privacy of your family as much as it is for her protection.
“Now get your hillbilly ass inside with that cake. This humidity will melt the buttercream right off.”
“Oh sweetheart,” Hunter laughs. “My tax bracket is way too high to be a hillbilly. Imma redneck.”
“Call me sweetheart again and see what happens,” she threatens, making Hunter snap his teeth at her with a purring growl.
“Definitely terrified,” Ryder whistles. “Hunter, don’t antagonize her; you ain’t gonna win this one.”
“We’ll see,” he parts, carrying the cake inside. “See ya later, Barbie!”
One of Tinsley’s bodyguards—the one with long hair that’s half tied back like Ryder wears his—grabs Briar by the arms as she starts shouting obscenities and lifts her to stand behind him, telling her, “Easy tiger. After what that prick did to Miss Jacobs’s house, getting his team to not charge her with felony vandalism for his car was easy. Keeping you from a felony assault charge is another story.”
“He has it coming, Mikey; trust me.”
The other one, whose hair is cropped in a close military style cut and I now assume to be John, says to me, “Second floor, left?—”
“Corner,” I murmur as he says it. “It was our room.”
Inside, I take my hat off and hang it on the spur hooks by the door and make my way up the grand staircase in what might possibly be record time. I haven’t seen Tinsley since she came to the ranch and breathed life back into me with that kiss more than a week ago. It’s taken all I’ve had not to get in my truck and drive out to the lake house she’s staying at just to see her. But after she left, I promised myself that if she ever returned, I wouldn’t be so suffocating so as to send her running away from me again.
Needing space was the only thing I could think of that made her flee the way she did, and I didn’t want to risk further pushing her away by reaching out before she was ready. Otherwise, I would’ve gotten my ass on a plane—more realistically in my truck since I have a fear of flying—and followed her across the country. And while navigating the tentative course we’re setting is precarious, the mistakes I made ten years ago will not be the ones I make now.
Before her, my world was black and white, carefully constructed and controlled to mitigate the anxiety and get me through the day acting as normal as I possibly could. Then she blew in and flipped my world upside down in a bright explosion of technicolor. And when she left, that color was slowly leached from my world until nothing remained but gray.
It’s a hollow existence I don’t ever want to return to.
Knowing now, though, that she doesn’t have her own phone and doesn’t drive or even have a valid license, I have to wonder how much the space between us this last week and a half was something she needed or if it was something placed there by the circumstances born of her celebrity. Because if she wants me to chase her, I’ll run and pursue her to the ends of the earth, never stopping even after she’s in my arms again. She deserves nothing less than always to feel wanted.
When I get to our old room on the east corner of the house, the door is partially open. Thinking it an invitation, I don’t knock and push it open the rest of the way, letting myself in.
What greets me is a fucking vision.
Tinsley’s standing in the middle of the room, white little shorts over glittery tights, her hair falling down the swoop of her bare back in that messy way that hints at having had fingers tangled in it for hours prior, and her weight shifting from the tips of her toes on one foot to the other. She softly sings, repeating herself at different tempos and inflections and I know what’s happened since she called. Something sparked in her mind, a new song coming to life, and it has completely stolen her attention.
I’m speechless, standing still and possessed by a single thought: it’s been too long since she’s been mine, and I want to erase every touch she’s felt that wasn’t mine from her memory.
Instead, I do the proper thing and grab a button down shirt that’s tossed on the bed. When I shut the door to afford her more privacy, she startles and turns around.
“Archer!” she squeaks, slapping her arm over her chest, though it only serves to push the fullness of her breasts up, her hand stretching to cover the outer curve instead of her pretty, strawberry pink nipples.
I look up at the ceiling and hold out the shirt, explaining, “The door was open, and I assumed?—”
“No, I mean yes,” she stumbles, not taking the shirt. “I just… hold on.”
She has the cutest little hopping run as she heads into the attached bathroom. When she comes out a second later, however, she’s still not dressed. At least not all the way. She’s stepped into her costume—a white dress with little cutouts along her ribs and hundreds of crystals sewn into the top and falling like raindrops onto the very full and very short skirt—and is tightly holding the front to herself.
Stopping in front of the vanity’s mirror, she slowly turns around and murmurs, “Zip me up?” sweeping her hair off her back and over her shoulder.
I step up behind her, my phone pulled out, and unlock it, bringing up the notes app. “Write it down before you forget it, baby,” I whisper, not wanting her to lose whatever words are pouring from her heart.
“Thank you,” she smiles in the mirror, her fingers flying over the screen as the words leave her in a deluge.
Hand on her hip and my eyes on her in the mirror, I murmur, “Always,” slowly lowering my lips to her bare shoulder and watching goosebumps ripple down her body when I kiss her.
A soft hum vibrates from her throat, and her neck gently stretches open, offering itself to me. I place another kiss closer to the curve of her neck and another on her pulse. Distantly, I hear my phone thud against the rug, but I’m too consumed by her.
Her head rolls back onto my chest, and my hand reaches around her hip to press her into me. My lips find her jaw, and in the mirror, her half-lidded eyes meet mine.
She’s so small against me. My body is both wider and taller than hers to the point that to wrap her up in me, I have to curl and bend around her.
My name is a breathy whisper on her parted lips. One arm releases its hold on her dress and lays over top of where I hold her. Our fingers lace together and she repeats my name, squeezing my hand.
Tinsley’s eyes are glazed as if she’s dreaming and fall closed as she turns her head more and tilts her mouth up to mine.
“I don’t want to ruin your makeup, Shortcake,” I murmur, transfixed by the shiver I see rolling down her body and the sigh I feel passing from her to me.
I used to be so easily captivated by how Tinsley responded to my touch. My experience before her was minimal. Back then, almost every touch and exchange we shared was as new for me as it was for her. But I never felt like I was stumbling my way through the dark. It was as if she had been coded just for me. The one person on this earth who could quiet the constant stream of thought and anxiousness in my mind.
A few years after she left—when I finally began to let go of my hope for her return and started to realize I had made a mistake in not going after her to at the very least get answers, if not win her back—I had tried to find that feeling again. But it didn’t take long for me to gather the data needed to back up my theory that what we had was something I’d only experience once in my life.
For me, it’s her or no one.
“It can be fixed,” she pleads. “I need to kiss you.”
My protest was already weak, so she doesn’t need to do much to convince me. Kissing her again is all I’ve been thinking about.
I spin her around and lift her by her hips onto the vanity. Tinsley’s quick to open her legs and lock them around me, pulling us flush together. My fingers find their way into her hair, my other hand still resting on her hip as I grip the soft curve through the many layers of her dress. This close, she releases her hold on her dress, using where I’m pressed against her to keep it up, and cups the back of my head.
Our mouths are like magnets coming together and not easily separated. A field of electricity races through my blood and is set on fire the moment my tongue touches hers. The vibrancy of it all reminds me just how dull my life has been in her absence.
A desperate whimper passes between us and it’s not until I feel and hear Tinsley moan against me, melting into me as she kisses me more urgently, that I realize it came from me. The sound spirals her further down into me and us until the world is quiet and still except for ardent noises passing between us as we get lost in the storm.
When we pull apart, her lips are swollen and her lipstick and gloss smudged to hell. Her skin is flushed and glowing, and her chest rapidly rises with the struggle to catch her breath. And her hair—it’s completely untamed, with my fingers still buried amongst her waves, refusing to let go.
She’s never been more beautiful to me, and it has my words running free as I demand more than ask, “Go out with me tonight.”
And to my utter shock, she nods her head, smiling as she responds, “Pick me up at six, Superman.”