Chapter Nine
The next morning, when James pulls up to the pebble driveway, Dad sits straight up from the couch like a meerkat.
“Whose Jeep is that?”
I push his shoulder so he’s back to reclining on the couch and put a homemade sausage McMuffin in his lap.
“How could you possibly tell that’s a Jeep just by listening?”
Dad’s mouth is already full with his first bite, but he taps the back of his ear and looks at me knowingly.
“I might be old, but these ears could tell you if it’s a Ford or a Chevy truck coming up to deliver feed just by how it sounds driving through the grass by the main barn at the ranch. Years of honing and—”
He jumps out of his skin when the doorbell rings. The McMuffin flips over on its plate like a cartoon, landing in the pile of syrup.
“You were saying?” I ask, walking to the door. “It’s James, Dad. Remember the guy who came by to drop off his card, and you let him go up to your alone-at-home daughter’s room while you went to hide at the diner?”
Dad’s mouth is still full when he answers, “Sure do. Like that boy. Like him a lot, actually, just from the few minutes I talked to him. And I’ve got a keen sense for people, you know.”
“Let’s hope your people skills are better than your hearing,” I mutter under my breath.
“I heard that,” Dad says.
When I open the door, I worry I’m going to find the taciturn, uncooperative James again, the one with the checkbook and the insistence that we do literally anything else.
It’s hard to tell at first if my worries are founded. James is half off the porch with his back to me. He looks furtive, agitated, moving back and forth on the balls of his feet like he’s trying to intercept a basketball from a talented rival.
“Getting a workout in?” I joke, holding my breath a little.
He whirls to face me, a bouquet in his hands.
“Oh,” I answer, my mind blanking at the site of flowers grasped in his too-tight fist. “So not a workout, then.”
“No,” he says, rubbing his neck with his free hand. “No, but maybe that would have been a better idea than to…to…”
I’m usually the kind of person who would rather swallow my own tongue than watch somebody else flounder.
My overactive empathy usually means I cover my eyes in movie scenes that give major secondhand embarrassment, and I wear earplugs when I go to medical clinics because I can’t bear to hear kids crying in nearby rooms.
But watching James look around Dad’s tiny porch like he might retroactively find somewhere to stash the flowers rather than give them to me is not something I can look away from.
“To bring me flowers?” I offer.
“God, it’s a fucking cliché. I’m sorry. Well, you said that thing about the last guy being a bummer, and I know that we know the truth, but we’re kind of…”
He trails off again, dropping his arms so the bouquet dangles at his side.
“Dating?” I say. I lower my voice so Dad can’t hear. “We have to get used to saying it, remember?”
“Dating, yes,” James says. He closes his eyes and inhales deeply, collecting himself. He looks more assured when he starts again. “Since we’re dating now, it felt wrong to come here empty-handed. I thought you’d like these. They reminded me of—”
“ The Meadow. ” I smile. “Thank you. They’re lovely.”
“Um, they’re black-and-white anemones and red hypericums,” James rattles off. “The florist said one of them is for creativity and one of them is for hope or something, but I don’t remember which is which.”
I don’t think I’ve ever seen James Neely nervous. The night of Romeo and Juliet, he was agitated, perturbed, but not nervous.
It’s endearing. And definitely promising, because this might be the first time our easy phone conversations have bled into the reality of a new day. I tell myself this will be useful for work and anything else—how the dormant butterflies in my stomach have all taken flight at once—is superfluous.
“I wish I could say that I’ve never been given flowers before,” I tell him, “but my mom went through a flower arranging phase and I was the regrettable beneficiary of a number of her creations for about two weeks.”
“Regrettable?”
“She wasn’t very good,” I say with a laugh. “But she never minded. That’s how all her hobbies went: fun until they weren’t.” James is still holding the flowers, so I gesture to them. “And her arrangements looked nothing like these.”
He jolts forward, thrusting the bouquet into my hand like he, too, has just realized I should be the one holding them.
“They’re for you,” he says. “Obviously.”
It’s a little stupid, and a little perfect, and I remind my idiot heart beating too strongly in my chest that it’s more than a little pretend.
“Come meet my dad,” I say, turning so he can walk through the door. “He’s laid up with a bruised leg thanks to a belligerent horse.”
“A belligerent cowboy, you mean,” Dad yells from the couch, and I flinch knowing he’s likely heard the whole flower exchange between James and me. “Told the kid not to walk too close to the new foal because it would spook the mama, and what was the first thing he did?”
“Spooked the mare?” James offers.
“Smart boy you’ve got here, Junie. You like horses, Jameson?”
“James,” James says, leaning forward to shake Dad’s hand. “And sorry, sir, but I don’t have enough experiences with horses to have much of an opinion.”
“How about puzzles?” Dad asks. “Those are pretty fun and educational, don’t you think?”
I shoot Dad a glare and roll my eyes at how this must sound to James, who was blessedly not present for the puzzles as romance metaphor discussion.
“I used to do puzzles with my mom,” James says, nonplussed. “It was one of our favorite things to do. I’ve had more bruises from bumping into furniture trying to retrieve her dropped pieces than I’ve gotten from just about anything else.”
If James is confused by my father’s line of questioning, he doesn’t show it. He looks at ease, hands in his pockets and nearly smiling at my dad, who is busy waggling his eyebrows at me like a vaudeville villain.
“Perfect,” Dad declares. “A picker upper is as good as a fixer in my book. I give my hearty consent to your dating the boy, kid. I told you I had a good feeling about him. You two have fun, but not too much fun.”
“Dad.”
“I’ll take good care of her, sir,” James says, and it’s filled with such trust me I’m an actor sincerity, it makes me want to punch him.
“Hope my poodle skirt fits in your car,” I mutter. “Might not be room with all the patriarchy cluttering up the area.”
“It will,” James responds.
“I’m going to book us a place for lunch that only serves cheese and has a known tick infestation,” I mutter.
“I brought you flowers,” James murmurs back, like Dad can’t hear us. “And I’m just trying to be polite. Put down your sword and your health code violations.”
“No surrender, no retreat,” I say.
“Hardly Shakespeare, that one, is it?” James asks.
“Okay,” Dad interrupts. “Correction: Please have too much fun. It’s better than the alternative, which I guess is the two of you coming back in pieces.”
—
There’s a new awareness between us. I notice it the moment the door closes behind us and we walk toward James’s Wrangler side by side.
First our fingers brush. It’s hardly enough to register as a touch, and yet James nearly walks into a bush sidestepping away from me like he’s been burned.
“Thought I saw a bee,” he says.
My cheeks are red, and the heat—from the touch, from his reaction—is so new and traitorous, I answer, “I saw it, too.”
Then there’s the awkward moment when James comes around to open the door for me and stands there as I put my foot into the cab and—having overestimated how high a step it is—nearly fall backward back into James’s arms. As it is, I barely catch myself on the frame and James still has to put his hand on my hips to steady me, which is…
Well, it doesn’t matter what it is. It was necessary to keep me from biting it on the gravel. Nothing more.
After checking at least a dozen times that I’m okay with it, James starts the drive to take us to his rental house to record what he swears is going to “get you all the views you want and more, Juniper. Trust me.”
I do trust him. But about fifteen minutes into the drive, the winding mountain road that is more mountain than road has me dubious.
“Can you stop clutching the grab handle, please?” James asks. “You’re giving me anxiety.”
“What did you type into the search engine when you looked for this place?” I ask, reaching until I’ve contorted myself to hold on to the handle with both hands. “Isolated, nobody can find me, more elk than people, anyone tries to find me they can die trying?”
It’s definitely a smile on his face, the biggest I think I’ve seen from him, which I’d marvel at if I wasn’t fearing for my life.
“Something like that.”
“This better be worth it,” I say into my elbow. “Your master plan.”
“You want your views, right?”
“I want to live is what I want,” I say as we hit a rather large bump. “The rest is becoming increasingly negotiable.”
“You’ll live,” James says. “ But… maybe don’t look out your window just now.”
He might as well have pushed my face to the glass. I can’t not look.
“Oh my god.”
“Juniper—”
“You could have murdered me at home!” I cry. “You could have murdered me at the studio. Oh my god. How is this even legal ? There should be guardrails or—”
“I’ve driven this road at least—”
“ Sure, ” I yell, my eyes glued to the steep drop-off from the barely-large-enough-for-one-car gravel road. “That’s what they’ll put on your headstone. James Fucking Neely: He Did It Successfully Dozens of Times Until He Didn’t.”
“My father would never spring for that many words,” James says, irritatingly calm. “I’ll be lucky to have a pauper’s grave if he has any say.”
“Because you don’t get along?”
“Because we value different things,” James answers. “I value art, and he values the money I can make from art.”