Chapter 13
Will: This shouldn’t have to be said, but I don’t need any pictures of the two of you “undercover” anymore. Why are you sitting that close on the wagon?
Tate: She’s cold.
Will: Please. I can tell she’s faking. She would never smile that much sitting next to you.
Tate: She’s a good actress.
Will: Don’t touch my sister. Or at least, don’t send me any more pictures.
When we arrived at the farm, we were ushered into the gift shop, where we met up with James’s mom, heard the maple spiel, and tasted the different grades of syrup.
Tate only fidgeted slightly like a caged animal throughout the presentation.
Mae Carver sweetly answered all my questions, waiting patiently as I jotted down some notes.
Eventually, we were released outside to take a self-guided tour through the woods.
Sadie and James waved us on, hanging back to help his mom, and told us to take our time.
They’d meet up with us for the ride home when we were finished.
There were a few small groups of tourists scattered about the farm, looking at the vacuum pumps and plastic pipes attached to trees and reading the signs. We lingered at a few. I read almost everything while Tate remained ever watchful.
It all felt so ridiculous.
Having a bodyguard in a place as wholesome and friendly as this.
I wrapped my scarf around my neck and nestled closer to Tate.
The air felt much colder in the thick of the trees.
The leaves crunched beneath my feet as we strolled down the dirt pathway.
All of that, mixed with the damp moisture in the air, left me rejuvenated and giddy and feeling almost positive that I’d dreamed the entire past six months with Leroy.
The tour had ended a few trees back, but we kept meandering down the dirt pathway, his hand holding mine, our fingers linked.
I hardly thought about the hand-holding now.
Before, it had been strange, but now…I liked it.
It was the little things. The way he’d squeeze my hand when I took too long to answer a question.
The way he helped me across fallen tree trunks without letting go.
The way he kept holding my hand, tight in his, long after we’d passed the last tourist looking at trees.
Tate began looking around, confusion etched on his face.
“What?” I asked in mild alarm.
“I’m just checking my surroundings. This seems like the kind of place a guy might get taken advantage of when he’s out here all alone with a romance screenwriter.”
My cheeks heated while my lips curved in a smile.
“Are we far enough away to get all your research in about the kissing trees?”
I shook my head and smiled, my heart doing its thing at turbo speed. “Autumn-kissed trees.”
“Sounds the same to me.”
A laugh slipped out of me. Before I could stop myself, I said, “You would never kiss me.”
He stopped and turned to face me, disbelief flashing across his face. “What was that?”
I faltered beneath the spark in his eyes, then pressed on. “You wouldn't kiss me. I’m like your sister. This is a job for you.”
“A job,” he repeated.
“Yeah.”
He stared a moment longer, then nodded once, as though settling something in himself, and stepped closer until he was looking directly into my eyes.
“Let's get a few things straight, Rawlins. This is a job. Which means I will prioritize your safety over everything else.”
My breath caught while his gaze held mine.
“But you are absolutely not my sister.”
Butterflies swooped low in my belly, but before they could take flight, he grabbed my hand and got us moving again.
We walked in silence for a while, the crunch of the leaves and the smell of a wood stove burning from somewhere nearby providing immaculate ambiance.
I should have been nervous in the woods.
Wasn’t that the most cliché place of all for something scary to happen to a person?
But I wasn’t. Tate was here, and even amid the flirting, he was holding my hand and watching.
“Do you think Leroy knows I’m not at home?” I asked. I was hesitant to ask, but I needed to know.
“Yeah.”
I sucked in a breath through my nose and forced myself to ask the next. “And do you think he knows I’m here?”
“If he doesn’t yet, he’s probably trying to figure it out.”
“But there’s a good chance he does know?”
“Yeah,” his voice was soft but matter-of-fact. Like someone had asked him if he watched the game.
“Do you ever get scared?” I asked him as we passed a squirrel scampering up a large maple tree.
“About what?”
“About this.” I motioned to our surroundings. “Or with your job? How did you get to be someone who runs toward the danger?”
He huffed out a laugh. “My mom always said I was born without any fear. She has the doctor bills for all my broken bones to prove it.”
I laughed softly.
He scratched his head. “When I was maybe ten or eleven, this kid was picking on me and a friend of mine. It was just stupid stuff, him making fun of us about something. And I remember taking it for a minute, not really sure what to do. Then he gave my friend a shove, and it was like something lit up inside of me. I wasn’t taller than him, but I was faster, and I’d grown up wrestling Ben and Jaxon. So I jumped on him.”
“What happened?”
He smiled. “I got myself a black eye. But I swear he looked worse than me.”
I laughed.
“But he left him alone after that,” he added.
Something inside of me glowed. “Was that friend Will?”
He smiled sheepishly. “Yeah.”
“You guys have been looking after each other for a long time.”
His nose crinkled. “Don’t say it like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like the least manly way possible. We’ve been buddies for a long time. The end.”
I laughed, tucking a piece of hair behind my ear.
“Looking after you kept me the busiest, though,” he said.
“You did that yourself, so you can’t blame me.”
“I can blame you for a lot of things.”
“Ha!” I exclaimed. “You pulled over my boyfriend and made him walk the line and do a pen test even though you knew he wasn’t drunk.”
“I stand by that.”
“The whole school saw it.”
He laughed. “I forgot about that.”
“You knew he wasn’t drunk. But you kept making him do more tests,” I said, folding my arms. I was more curious now than anything else, but I had broached the subject. I might as well hear it all.
“If I remember right, he swerved right in front of me. I needed to be sure.”
“He dropped his can of soda on the floor, and then he swerved.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“We told you that,” I said.
“People tell me a lot of things.”
“But why did you keep making him do more tests? He proved he wasn’t drunk after the first one.”
“I wasn’t sure. Rookie cop, remember?”
He ran a hand through his hair, feigning a casual attitude, but he would no longer look at me. I couldn’t help the surge of annoyance that slipped through me at the memories.
“Alright,” he began, surprising me. “What if I told you that a week before I pulled you guys over, your boyfriend had been at a party and drove home drunk. Another cop was on him, but he somehow got away. So when I saw him driving my friend’s little sister home and swerving, I was definitely going to make sure he wasn’t drunk…
and maybe punish him a little for the last time. ”
I processed that for a long while. The news startled me, though not as much as it probably should have.
Clearly, I had been right to dump Brock after I’d found out he’d been kissing another girl behind my back, but I was having a hard time working out how I felt about this newfound knowledge of the night I’d been secretly harboring resentment over for years.
“Okay, but you can’t tell me that you didn’t also enjoy ticking me off that night.”
He smiled. “Oh, I enjoyed it immensely. But I was mostly there because your boyfriend was a reckless moron.”
Our eyes met and held for a long moment before we broke the connection.
The air between us became softer somehow.
I had always liked Tate. I resented him at times, yes, but I’d always known he was a safe place for me to land, if I ever fell too hard or too fast. I thought I knew everything he’d done for me, but suddenly it felt like I had only cracked the shell of his safe-keeping throughout my life.
We walked in silence for a bit longer, a handful of birds chirping softly in the trees.
“He honestly wasn’t as bad as the guy I dated for a month who made me pay for my share of our dates.”
Tate looked over at me incredulously. “What?”
I laughed like it wasn’t a big deal. “It was a long time ago. I was a poor college student. He had graduated and had a nice car. I had student loans and two jobs, but he said he wanted us to feel like an equal team so one of us didn’t hold all the power.”
“We’d better turn back,” Tate mumbled as he turned us around on the trail. “Have you ever picked a good one?”
“What? A boyfriend? Yeah,” I said the word automatically, with a touch of defensiveness. But as I scoured my brain for past boyfriends, I hoped he wouldn’t ask me for a name.
“Will and I worried about you for good reason back then. You know that, right?”
I kept my eyes on the trees, critically assessing every bit of shadow before moving on. “I had two obsessive mother hens following me around everywhere. I definitely got the hint that you were worried.”
He made a sound of amusement. “You made it easy to worry.”
“They were mostly harmless. Ari and Reese were always with me. And Jaxon. He wouldn’t have let anything too horrible happen.”
“When I caught you at Make-Out Ridge with Wade Stevenson, were you planning to make out?”
I shrugged, feeling so disconnected from my past life. “I don’t know. Probably. That would have been it, though. Wade was a good friend. We were both just looking for something to do on a Friday night.”
Tate let out a hiss of air. “See? That’s why we were worried.”
“But you came. And turning your lights on right next to us on the ridge was a nice touch.”
He huffed out a laugh. “I thought so.”
I waited a beat, trying to decide if I wanted to share this. “To be honest, I was almost waiting for you to show up.”
His head turned to me. “What?”
I huffed out a laugh. “It got to the point where I had this safety net always underneath me. I don’t know how you always knew where I was, but you always came. Or sometimes Will.”
“You hated when we showed up,” he countered.
“I did on the outside. But there were actually…” I trailed off, wondering what I could say, how much to say.
He was looking over at me now, waiting.
“There were quite a few times where I’d gotten in over my head and wasn’t sure how to escape a situation. And making out with Wade Stevenson was pretty high on that list.” I grinned cheekily at him.
He shook his head, his lips lifting in a smile, but his gaze was faraway.
We walked along in silence for a bit. Me because my heart was somewhere in my throat. Tate because he was back to watching the trees to our sides.
A movement in the distance caught my eye.
Two hundred yards ahead, there was a round mass in the shadow of a tree. It was probably a bird. Or a squirrel. I squinted closer, stomach clenched, as we kept walking. Tate was busy surveying the trees at our left, teasing me about something.
I was sure it was nothing.
But if it were something, one could almost describe it as a head in the shadows peeking out from behind the large trunk.
But it wouldn’t be. It would be just like all the other times where, from a distance, branches and rocks could look like a bobcat or a raccoon.
I kept walking, trying to tamp down my imagination that began to run rampant.
It was nothing, and yet my eyes remained trained on the spot.
I felt Tate look my way before following my gaze.
And then it moved.
I gasped at the same time Tate swore, brandishing a gun from the back of his waist in seconds.
He grabbed my hand and ran, keeping me behind him as we flew down the trail to where the shadowed round mass used to be.
I squinted through the trees, but the woods were thick and dark, with a mixture of maple and birch blocking our view.
There was nothing there but the slightest indentation on a pile of leaves on the root of a tree. From a shoe? I didn’t voice that thought, but it was clear Tate was thinking it.
“Keep looking, let me know if you see anything move,” he mumbled as his eyes pored over the ground, searching for footsteps or any sign that it was human.
But a thick crop of trees covered the ground.
The roots had grown up and out of the packed dirt, curling into each other and creating more of a wood-like floor than dirt.
A wood-like floor covered in colorful leaves. Not great for tracking footprints.
“Maybe it was a squirrel?”
Tate didn’t answer. Instead, he moved farther up the hill and off the trail, scouring the ground and the trees. His body was tense, held in a slight crouch, like a tiger waiting for any opportunity to pounce.
“You can run up and check if you want to. I can wait here. Or go with you.”
He finally looked back at me, agitation etched across his face. “I can’t take you with me, and I’m not going to leave you alone.”
“Maybe it wasn’t...” I trailed off, not wanting to put words to the obvious, while at the same time, wanting reassurance that it wasn’t.
Tate did neither. Instead, he made his way back down to me, regret in his eyes. I knew he would be scouring the hills right now if he had backup. But he didn’t. It was just him and me and a forest full of shadows and whispers from the wind.
He grabbed my hand again, leading me back down the trail. We were almost to the farm before he holstered his gun. His hand was warm in mine, his grip tight and firm, but our carefree walk was over.
Plot Twist: It had been such a nice day. I’d much rather leave this plot twist out.