Chapter 16 Collins
Collins
“So,” Brady asked as I helped him put all his tools away. “Where are we going this weekend?”
“I’ve been thinking about that, actually,” I said.
“One should hope so.”
I bumped him with my hip and Brady dropped the tack hammer he was holding, and it clattered onto the bench. When I looked up at him, it seemed like a blush started to creep up his neck.
“S-so,” he stammered. “What were you thinking?”
“I have two options for you,” I said. “And it’s going to depend on whether you want to interact with other living people, or if you just want to take in a view.”
“Which one do you think gets you closer to interacting with nonliving people?” Brady asked.
“This is your quest, too, Brady,” I said. “And I took you to an accidental ”—I emphasized that—“murder house a few days ago, so I think the least I can do is let you pick.”
“I’m not really in a people mood,” Brady sighed. “The past week has been a lot.”
I nodded, agreeing. It had been pretty nonstop. “It’s good, though, right? People coming into the store, being busy?”
“Absolutely.” Brady nodded. “No complaints.”
Something about the way he said that made me want to backtrack a little. “You can complain, you know,” I said. “It’s a basic human right.”
“I don’t think complaining because I’ve had a little bit of a business boom is the right message to send to the universe.”
“Okay, then don’t complain about that,” I said. “But it’s okay to complain about being tired because of it or how many tacks you’ve stepped on or the fact that we can’t find the magnet strip that picks them all up.”
“I guess.”
“So, I actually think you should complain more.”
“This is exactly one of the things I dreamed when I moved here,” Brady responded. “I like putting in hard work and having it pay off.”
“Just because it’s a dream doesn’t mean it can’t also be exhausting,” I said. “C’mon—just one little complaint.”
Brady rolled his eyes until they nailed me with a pointed look. “My back hurts.” He straightened his spine a little, and I heard it make a few cartilaginous pops.
“Okay, good start.” I nodded. “So, for the no-living-people option, I was thinking we head up to the river. We’re at that time of year when we could either have another month of warm weather or it could snow tomorrow.”
“Good point,” Brady said.
“It’s honestly a miracle it didn’t snow once in August,” I said. “When did you move here last year?”
“Halloween,” he said.
“Ooooh, spooky. I like it.”
Brady shook his head. “It was just like any other day.”
“Moving to a ghost town on Halloween is not just like any other day. I bet it was foggy and dreary, and I know the crows were squawky.”
“I don’t remember,” Brady said. “Well, maybe the crows were kind of noisy. I hadn’t heard anything like that before.”
“What did it feel like when you got here for the first time?” I asked. “I’ve always wondered how this place feels to other people—to people who haven’t grown up with all of the shadows.”
“I wasn’t really focused on how the town felt.”
“What were you focused on?”
There was a pause. “How I felt.”
“And how did you feel?”
Brady turned and leaned his hip against the workbench. “Free, I guess. A little scared—the same feeling I get when I’m standing on the edge of something that’s high up.”
“Are you afraid of heights?” I asked.
“Not like petrified, but I have a healthy fear of them.”
“So you were healthily afraid of Sweetwater Peak?” I gave Brady a half smile. “That kind of proves my point.”
“Not of Sweetwater Peak. Of a new beginning, I guess,” Brady said.
“But new beginnings are freeing,” I said.
I used to be the poster child for new beginnings—maybe not a big, life-altering one like the one Brady had made for himself, but small ones, like when I went from place to place on assignment.
I loved it—especially coming from a place like this, where everything stayed the same.
“There was a lot of pressure on this one,” Brady said. “I really wanted it to work.”
I looked around at the groups of furniture that had come in over the past couple of days and the fabric scraps all over the floor. “Well, I think it’s working.”
Brady shrugged. “It has been lately.”
“You’ve certainly gotten a lot less boring.” I nodded.
A noise came out of Brady that might’ve been a laugh. “Would Boring Brady say that we can close up shop even though it’s not even two, so we can get up to the river with daylight to spare?”
“Only a boring person would think that would qualify them as not boring,” I said with a grin.
But the truth was, I loved spending this time with Brady.
I looked forward to it. Yeah, we were pretty much constantly in each other’s orbit given the living and working situation, but when we went on these little adventures, it felt like…
more, I guess. More intentional, maybe, like he was choosing to spend time with me outside of the shop or apartment.
I liked that—being chosen.
Plus, I was excited to bring Brady to this spot. There weren’t really that many ghosts to be seen—ghosts that I knew and would recognize, anyway—but I was going to show Brady one of my favorite places in Sweetwater Peak that I thought he would love, too.
I didn’t think he’d venture back to the church or Larry’s house on his own, but maybe where I was taking him tonight could be his place—somewhere he could go for himself, by himself, after I made my way out of Sweetwater Peak again.
The thought of leaving Sweetwater Peak didn’t make me sad, but it didn’t feel…
inevitable anymore—like it was something I had to do to survive.
I knew I probably would leave eventually, but it felt more like a choice than it ever had before.
And there was something about Brady that made me feel like it wouldn’t be an easy one, something that would make me think more about what I was leaving behind.
“So we’re closing?” I asked hopefully.
“We’re closing,” Brady said, and without thinking, I threw my arms around his neck.
The sound that came out of him was somewhere between a laugh and a grunt—like I’d accidentally knocked the wind out of him.
I shocked both of us, but if he knew what I was thinking about a second ago, he’d understand.
He put one of his arms around me and lifted me in the air with ease, and I instinctively wound my arms tighter.
We stayed there for a second—suspended in time—just long enough for me to remember that I liked the feeling of his arms around me.
When he set me down, the air felt heavier, but I felt lighter. Brady’s eyes were so blue. I’d never really noticed the crinkles around them before or how his floppy hair fell so perfectly by them.
Brady’s hand lingered on my waist for a few seconds. He nodded his head. “Go lock the door,” he said gruffly. For half a second, my mind went somewhere it absolutely should not have gone, which included but was not limited to sex on the half-finished couch he’d been working on today.
“Wh-what?” I stammered.
“Closing, remember?” Right. Of course. Brady wanted me to lock the door because we were leaving—not because he wanted to take me on the couch.
Bummer.
No, not a bummer, Collins. Get a fucking grip.
I walked toward the front door and swiped the key off my desk on the way. I noticed that two orbs were glowing in my path—spinning around each other. It almost looked like they were dancing, which would be new. “Good afternoon,” I said to them as I walked by.
The orbs disappeared. “Okay, bad afternoon, then, assholes,” I muttered.
The front door to Coop’s was also an asshole.
My success rate of locking it on the first try was embarrassingly low.
You had to put the key halfway in, give the knob an aggressive jiggle, push the key in slightly more, then give it a gentler jiggle, and then maybe, just maybe, the key would go all the way in the slot.
But even if that happened, the likelihood of the tumblers actually turning when you turned the key were pretty low, so you had to just keep jiggling everything until whatever maze was inside the doorknob gave way and let you lock it.
I was in the process of the final jiggle when I let out a frustrated grunt. “Why don’t you get a new doorknob?” I called back to Brady, who had taken off his leather apron and was washing his hands in the back sink.
“I like that one,” he called back. “Builds character.”
I gave the doorknob one more shake, and the key finally turned to lock the door. Now I just had to get it out, which was a whole other thing.
“I would rather dig a five-by-five hole to build character than lock this goddamn door,” I said.
“Is that a Holes reference?”
“Nothing gets past you,” I responded with a pointed look at Brady, who just smiled at me. He really had to stop doing that.
—
It took nearly an hour to get up to the Sweetwater River, and then a thirty-minute hike to the lookout point I wanted to see.
“For a small town, I sure do have to drive a lot,” Brady said. “I thought everything would be within walking distance or whatever.”
“If you’re on Main or Elm, everything is within walking distance,” I countered. “But Sweetwater Peak is the name of both the town and the county. Everything around us might not be Sweetwater Peak proper, but it’s Sweetwater Peak County.”
“Is anything else in Sweetwater Peak County besides Sweetwater Peak?”
“Nope.” I popped the p.
“That’s confusing,” Brady said. Before we left, he’d changed into a new pair of jeans, a gray hoodie, and a dark green beanie. His dark brown hair was long enough that pieces of it stuck out of the bottom.
I was still working with my capsule wardrobe, so I wore the same thing I wore to the church, but switched out my Docs for an old pair of hiking boots I kept in the trunk of my car, along with a small daypack.
“What’s in there?” Brady asked.
“It’s just like a hiking pack,” I said. “Extra water, first-aid kit, compass, a couple of those foil blankets—that sort of thing.”
“That seems oddly…prepared for you.”