Chapter 14 #2
“Chocolate Fudge Brownie. Yours?”
“Strawberry Cheesecake.”
“That sounds about right.” He grabbed the carton out of my hands and walked us toward the cashier. Along the way, he plucked a pack of plastic spoons off the shelf.
“Are you judging my ice cream flavor?”
“Yes.”
“How?”
“Too sweet. That explains a lot of things.”
“That I’m sweet?”
He shot me a look. “Too sweet. You need some dark chocolate in there.”
“Dark chocolate is a scourge upon the earth.”
“It’s delicious and understated and doesn’t try to be anything else.”
“If by understated you mean bitter and in dire need of more sugar, then you’re right.”
A smile brushed his lips, but by then we were ready to check out. Tate set our ice cream on the conveyor belt and pulled out his wallet.
Once back in his truck, instead of heading toward the Walker farm, he surprised me again, driving us down a winding dirt road near his home.
We passed hay fields and rustling trees before he parked the truck underneath a canopy of limbs that had grown together.
Before us, shining in the moonlight, was Leeland’s pond.
A floating boat dock meandered slowly across the shimmering water. The place was deserted.
Tate killed the engine, leaving us in the dark. Immediately, panic began to crawl up my spine as I frantically searched for the lock button on the door.
“Whoops, sorry,” Tate mumbled as the truck rumbled to life again.
“That was just a reflex.” He looked over at me and probably saw the blind panic and said, “Sorry, we can go back if you’re not comfortable here.
I wasn’t thinking straight. I didn’t want to take you to the ridge, and I thought you’d like it.
My brothers and I used to swim here all the time.
” He looked once more at me. “Do you want to leave? I wasn’t planning to get out or anything, just to sit and eat our ice cream. ”
By this time, my heart rate had dropped considerably, and Tate looked so adorably out of tune that I probably would have done anything he asked to get that furrow out of his brow.
“Why don’t you want to take me to Make-Out Ridge?” I teased, trying to bring us back. “Isn’t it good for our cover?”
He gave me a look. “You couldn’t handle the ridge with me. Do you want to go?”
“To Make-Out Ridge? Sure,” I supplied with a smile.
“Rawlins. I’ve noticed you getting a little more feisty lately, which I like, but you need to start thinking about something else besides how sexy I am all the time.”
I laughed.
“Are you good here?” he asked again.
“Yeah. I think. I…get jumpy in the dark sometimes. I keep my phone flashlight on all night because I’m scared of the dark now. Like a little kid. So that’s fun for me.”
I cursed myself for saying that. I tended to ramble when I was nervous, but my confession made me sound like a child.
And sure enough, my face burned as I felt him study me for a long moment before he rustled through our bag and handed me a spoon and my ice cream.
And then, to my surprise, he put his arm on the seat behind me and began backing up the truck.
“Where are you going?” I asked.
“We’re leaving. It’s creepy as hell here.”
A laugh burst from my mouth. Our ice cream was getting soft as he wound his way back up the driveway to his parents’ house. He parked his truck, opened my door, and led us to a swing on the corner of the porch. He motioned for me to sit, and as soon as I was comfortable, he settled down beside me.
I pointed toward the tree that stood right next to my room. His old window. “Is that the cause of all your broken bones growing up? That’s a pretty tempting escape route.”
He followed my gaze and smiled. “Nah, sneaking in and out of the bedroom window was more Ben’s style.”
“How did you get hurt so much?”
“Crashing motorcycles, misjudging the space between the dock and the water at Leeland’s pond, fights, football…that kind of stuff. Jax tried to beat my record of broken bones, but he couldn’t quite pull it off.”
“Your poor mother is a saint.”
He nodded in agreement. For the next few moments, we rocked quietly as we focused on our ice cream.
“Coleson said you saved his life?” I ventured slowly.
Tate stilled, and the rhythm we’d gained swinging together became momentarily disrupted before he got us back on track.
He huffed out a bitter laugh. “If it weren’t for me, he wouldn’t have needed his life saved.”
“What happened?” I asked, the sweetness from my strawberry ice cream feeling out of place with our discussion. “Is it really classified?”
He smiled slightly. “Most of this stuff is in the news now, so I can tell you that at least. But they should be wrapping everything up in a couple of weeks, I guess.”
“Ok, so…what happened, then?”
He hesitated slightly before he said, “It started as a normal drug buy.”
“What does that mean?”
“We go undercover and buy drugs from dealers. We do it to gather evidence, try to figure out where they’re buying from, that kind of thing.”
He reached across the seat, took a scoop of my strawberry ice cream, and placed it in his mouth. His face wrinkled.
“Gross. How do you eat this?”
I smiled and rooted around for a big bite with strawberry and cheesecake pieces. “With gusto. What happened next?”
He sighed. “We’d bought from these guys before. It was just supposed to be a routine buy. We were close to getting all the evidence we needed to put them away for a long time. But apparently, they’d caught on to who we were and set us up.”
“What does that mean?” I asked, leaning close enough to take a scoop out of his pint.
He watched me expectantly as I took the bite.
The bitter chocolate assaulted my delicate taste buds, and I immediately dove in for another bite of my much superior flavor.
“Excuse me while I try to extract the rancid bitterness from my mouth. Keep going.”
“So, these guys had been trafficking fentanyl and cocaine all over the state. Just before we got there, they’d messaged us and said they just wanted one of us to come inside.
We should have called it off right there.
There were so many red flags, but we both wanted it.
We were so close to making an arrest. If we made this deal, we had them. ”
“Coleson said he wanted to go and wouldn’t take no for an answer.
I should have called the whole thing off, but instead, I watched him go inside.
He turned the corner into the warehouse, and the communication went static.
I heard gunshots.” Tate trailed off for a moment, looking like he was reliving the whole thing.
Finally, he blinked and continued. “Anyway, I busted in there as fast as I could, but by that point, Coleson was already down. They were about to finish him off. I took down the one closest to him, but the other guy saw me and got a shot off before I could get him. Coleson shot him just before he passed out.”
For a moment, I was taken away by the image of Tate dressed like a drug dealer, going undercover, and willingly putting himself in that kind of danger. The image of it all struck me for a long moment. It was easy to forget about that side of his life when I’d never been exposed to it.
“Did they…?” I trailed off, not quite sure how to phrase my question.
“Nobody died,” he said. “They were both in the hospital for a week or so before going to jail. Now they’re waiting for their court date.”
I absently took another bite of my ice cream while my thoughts churned. I wasn’t sure what you said to a person who had experienced something at this scale. I decided to request more facts.
“And what happened to Coleson?”
“They shot him in the back.” His voice came out bitter—like some code of honor had been broken. “He never saw it coming.”
“And he survived that?”
“Never seen a luckier guy. It was an incomplete spinal cord injury. That was the only thing that saved him. His lower half was temporarily paralyzed for a while. That’s why he’s been in rehab for so long.
He had to relearn how to walk. He’s done well.
Better than the doctors expected. It’ll still take a while before he has full mobility, but at least he’ll be home soon. ”
“You guys were both lucky,” I said.
He sighed. “Yeah. If the bullet had gone a half inch in any other direction, his life would have been over. We think they were planning to take Coleson down quietly first and then text me from his phone to come inside. But Coleson put up a fight.”
At some point, my hand moved to cover my mouth as I listened to his story. A story that sounded more fit for the big screen than small-town Vermont.
He had grown silent, attempting a nonchalance as he took another bite before glancing out the window. I had so many questions, but I wasn’t sure how to ask any of them.
“What’s the part that keeps you up at night?”
His eyes flicked over to mine before he took another bite of my ice cream. By now, we’d gotten quite comfortable sneaking bites from each other. Surprisingly, the two flavors together created a perfect balance.
“For a week or two after, I dealt with some PTSD. The department sent us both to counseling, which is pretty standard. We were lucky, and I knew it, but the what-ifs can drive you absolutely crazy. But mostly, I’m just running it all through my head a million times, trying to figure out if it could have been handled any other way.
What if I’d just called it off? Or tailed him into the warehouse. ”