Chapter 23
Grey
Sabrina shoves hiking poles at me and then nudges Jitter toward the fork on the left without waiting to see if I’ll keep up. I step cautiously, but the tools she gave me for my boots have good traction.
“Wow. Makes a big difference. Thank you,” I say to her.
“Welcome to physics.”
“I know physics.”
She slides me a look. “Do you know it as well as you know, say, how to run a restaurant?”
That wasn’t sly at all. “I know physics better.”
“Believable.”
“But I’m a fast learner.”
“Also believable. Speaking of learning, I heard Zen say your villain era doesn’t really suit you.”
Zing . She lines up, takes her shot, and she scores.
“Midlife crisis.”
“You’re thirty-three.”
“You’ve done your homework.”
“You’d expect nothing less.”
She’s not wrong.
And even knowing it’s dangerous, I like knowing that she’s thinking about me as much as I’m thinking about her.
Also?
Not a single soul has asked me if I’m okay after my dizzy spell the other day. Nor has anyone other than Sabrina asked what Chandler did to me or how I feel about my former research lab partner actually being in his villain era.
They’ve only hinted that they suspect Sabrina and I are hooking up.
She’s not posting secret videos of my confessions all over the internet.
Not like someone posted a video of the House of Curry food fight my first week here.
Sabrina seems to take her gossip seriously. She’s up-front that she knows everything and will disclose it when she thinks it’s necessary. I’ve seen it in action. And not just with the woman who posted the wedding video, though that was definitely the most direct.
We hike in silence for a few minutes save for the sound of Jitter’s happy panting and the crunch of our shoes and poles on the trail.
It’s fascinating to me that the path is covered in packed snow, like this trail is hiked often, even in the winter, though we seem to be the only people here now.
The sky’s a clear blue peeking through the pine trees, and there’s something unexpectedly peaceful and almost enjoyable about being out here.
My fingers are cold. My toes are cold.
But not unbearably so.
“Is what your lab partner did to you the only reason you’re in your villain era now?” Sabrina asks.
And honestly?
I like that about her.
No hiding. No games. No small talk. She’s straight to the point.
I shake my head. “Just the final straw.”
“And the rest of the straws?”
“A lifetime of being manipulated.”
She slides a look my way. Does she know it was my family? Does she suspect it?
Or am I reading more into that look than is actually there because I want to tell her?
Some older lady came in yesterday and was grilling Zen about their personal history and our relationship, which sent Zen into a retreat.
I know Sabrina noticed.
Not because she said anything.
But because she did something. She popped out from the kitchen, where she still insists she belongs at every opportunity, and asked the woman something about an old friend, which distracted the lady from grilling Zen and put her instead on a tangent about a cheating husband.
“I didn’t put together that manipulation was the right word for it until Zen used it for the first time after they moved in with me,” I add.
“Your ex?” she asks.
“Yes, but she wasn’t the first.”
I get another side glance.
“My parents and siblings,” I clarify.
“You’re younger than the rest.”
She has done all of her homework. “The inconvenient one who was blamed for arriving ten years later than the previous youngest child, stealing the baby spot in the family, and needing things they’d all grown out of. Yes.”
Her nose wrinkles. “You didn’t have nannies?”
“When my mother could see the writing on the wall about the direction the family trust fund was headed? The nannies were only for when other people were watching.”
She glances at me again, and I wish I had the power to read faces the way she seems to.
It matters to me not just that I’m honest with her, but that she knows I’m being honest.
That she knows I’m putting my secrets on the line and trusting her with them.
That she knows I’m not tearing apart her café because I enjoy punishing her .
It’s Chandler. I need a win over an asshole.
“Jitter, slow down,” she says.
He grins back at us with his larger-than-life doggie grin, then forges ahead, not at all bothered by slippery or uneven spots on the snow-packed path.
Or willing to take directions on how fast or where to go.
“My mom never wanted kids,” she says quietly after we’ve taken two more turns on the path between towering pine trees.
“She didn’t want to get married. Her dream was to be free as the wind to go wherever she wanted in the world with nothing tying her down.
Work just enough to make ends meet and fund her travels.
But when she found out she was pregnant after a short-term fling with a guy who was passing through, she decided to keep me.
And she’s never once made me feel like I kept her from the life she would’ve had otherwise even though she hasn’t traveled much since I was born. ”
“I always wondered what it would’ve been like to know I was wanted.”
“And not grow up to want to be Super Vengeance Man ? I’m sorry, but clearly, your suffering was necessary for the good of the world.” She grins at me, and I nearly go lightheaded.
In the good way.
She hasn’t sparkled at me since Hawaii, and Sabrina Sullivan with teasing mischief twinkling in her bright green eyes takes my breath away.
My steps slow.
Her smile falters. “I didn’t mean that.”
“I know.”
“Everyone should feel wanted.”
“I have people in my life who fulfill my emotional needs.”
“Drink your water.”
“I’m fine.”
“If you pass out on the trail, I’m going back to my car without you and leaving you to the mountain lions.”
“That jives with who you were in Hawaii.”
She stops fully and turns to face me. “ I don’t date .”
That muscle in my chest squeezes and dips like I’m on a runaway train.
I don’t want another long-term relationship. I don’t want to date either.
Except I can’t get this woman out of my head, and the more I see her here, where she belongs, doing what she was born to do, the more I want to know everything there is to know about her.
She’s my new research project.
Fuck.
Fuck .
I need to get back to a lab. Give my brain something else to obsess over.
But the thought still hurts too much, whereas the idea of making something right doesn’t hurt.
Or it wouldn’t, if it wouldn’t hurt her too.
“I don’t either,” I assure her with a confidence I don’t feel. “We can be friends who not-date together. Maybe naked sometimes.”
Her pupils dilate, and she sucks in a quick breath.
My dick goes half-mast.
I would absolutely not-date this woman nonstop for the next week if we could do it naked.
And there’s the rest of my hard-on.
Go hike with Sabrina , my brain said.
So we can ask her to get naked , my other brain said.
She bites her lower lip.
I take a half step toward her, wanting to bite that lower lip myself, but she ducks her head and spins back to the trail. “C’mon, Jitter. Sun’s setting too soon.”
I subtly adjust myself, then follow along while Jitter happily leads again, clearly knowing where he’s going.
“This a private trail?” I ask Sabrina.
“Nope. Just not very busy close to dusk.”
“You walk alone out here often?”
She slides me a glance, and I can’t tell if she’s still suppressing a desire to pull me off the trail and do what comes naturally out here in nature, or if that’s just me and my teenage fantasies.
“I’m not alone,” she says. “I have my dog.”
“So you and Jitter have done this a lot by yourselves?”
“Laney and Emma used to come with us a lot.”
“Mm.”
“Laney has a broken leg.”
“I noticed.”
“Emma’s back.”
“I heard.”
“If you see her and say a single dick thing to her, I will haunt you for the rest of your life.”
“You’ll be dead?”
“I’m an overachiever. I can haunt you while I’m still alive.”
“Probably easier that way.”
She cuts another glance at me. “You know I don’t actually believe you’d be a dick to Emma.”
That makes me smile. “Only because we have a common enemy.”
“Why is Chandler your enemy?”
“Wow, really nice hike until you said the Cheese Turd word.”
She coughs, and I’m certain she’s covering a laugh, though I’m not certain if it’s a happy laugh or a desperate laugh, and now I feel like an ass.
I don’t want to hurt her. But I don’t know how to change course without feeling like I’ve let someone else get the better of me again.
“Are you drinking the water I gave you?” Sabrina asks.
“Just had a big gulp.”
She draws to a stop and turns to face me again as the trees open up around us. “Take another one.”
Felicia had no qualms about ordering me around. Neither did my siblings for most of my life.
But I like it when Sabrina does it.
Sit down. Drink your tea. Wear safety tools on your feet. Have you eaten?
It’s vastly different from buy me this. Go here with me. Smile bigger for the picture . Can you pretend you’re happy to be here? Make Zen get a real job and not be so dependent on you.
I loop the hiking poles over one wrist and obediently drink from the water bottle.
But as I lift it, I catch sight of something unexpected on the horizon, and it’s not until I feel the chill of water dribbling down the side of my mouth that I remember I’m drinking and jerk the bottle away to stare.
The pine-shrouded valley gives way to snowcapped mountains touching the majestic orange glow lighting the wispy clouds in the sky. There’s a hazy softness to the peaks, and the sky has melted from the deep blue I noticed this morning to a soft baby blue hugging the glowing clouds.
So this is why people tolerate the cold.
To not just stare at the landscape from behind glass, but to be part of it. Breathing in the clear air, chilly but alive . Nothing between me and the sky but a few green pine branches. Snow and rock beneath my feet.