It was time.
* * *
Theo slid the landline phone off the counter. Picked it up and began tapping.
Before eight thirty yesterday evening, he had been happy. He was in a relationship with someone who was as eager to be with him as he was her. If their relationship were a flower, it’d be a sunflower growing six inches a day. They were thriving.
But then the woman he once loved more fiercely than his own life had returned, as if from the dead. And maybe she didn’t care a whit about him. Maybe he didn’t have a chance, but he couldn’t go for it this time without giving his all.
And he wouldn’t—ever—try to build the foundation of his relationship with Skye on a lie.
He had fallen before for a girl at UVA, a friend who’d somehow, without clear definition, turned into something more over the course of months.
He wasn’t even sure how it had happened all those years ago. He started dating Skye mere hours before he left for UVA, and then, through five more long semesters, he lived apart from her. Day in. Day out. Making friends. Memories. Growing a whole life apart from her. Trying his best to make a life out of calling every night, visiting on the infrequent weekend. But with every passing semester the workload grew, the hours hunched over those books lengthened, and the calls shortened. It got harder to deny the bond growing with Chloe as they pored over books and met with friends. Just before winter break of junior year, they’d taken one step too far. Then Chloe, with mutual friends in tow, had hopped in a car during winter break to surprise him at Evergreen.
And it all went horribly, horribly wrong.
He’d realized the lines had blurred then and, without redrawing them sharply, he just let them bleed.
He would not do that again.
“Hello?”
Ashleigh’s voice came on the line and he took a breath, lifting his gaze to the row of oil paintings lining the living room wall. His eyes traced the small cursive script in the corner of each one: S Fuller.
“Ashleigh . . . there’s something I need to tell you.”
Chapter 10
Skye
She had to pull herself together.
Skye gave the toe strap one final yank at the anchor point of the overturned tractor and hopped off the tire. Already she could see Theo walking toward her in the distance, although to be fair, people in a plane seven miles up could see his blazing orange flannel.
They hadn’t been reunited even twenty-four hours and already her emotions were getting in the way. She had to remember the issues at hand and not even think about making out like teenagers in Daddy’s tractor. The fact of her father’s abysmal pay remained. And while Theo was and always had been a master wielder of words, his actions were indisputable: he was a man driving around in a hundred-thousand-dollar Tesla while paying her father, who had been the farm’s faithful employee more than thirty-five years, a quarter of that. A quarter. That was a fact. Along with the fact that while Evergreen Farm’s eight-seater hot tub and Peloton bike waited shiny and ready for the occasional Watkins weekend visitor, her parents were living with the same furniture in the double-wide of her youth. These were facts.
She needed to focus on getting that figured out instead of doing something she regretted.
She wiped her dirty hands against her pants, then shaded her eyes and watched Theo move into the forest. Her lips turned up in a smile.
“Theo, what are you doing? You look like a chicken.”
Theo’s casual gait had turned into something else. He was lifting his knees unusually high and slow as he stepped over broken tree limbs and moved cautiously around thickets. A long, slender branch stood before him and he carefully pinched it between his fingers and pushed it aside to pass.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I look like a sensible man who is aware that three to 384 spiders—two of whom live in our area and are fatal—exist within one square meter of you at any given time. You, on the other hand, look like a Neanderthal.”
“Well, this Neanderthal would outlive you by a hundred years if we got stuck out here, so how about you give walking like a human a try?”
As he stepped over a thick log, she turned back to Luke’s tractor.
“C’mon, you can help me run this strap to the hitch.” As she stepped over snapped limbs, she worked to undo an unruly knot in the toe strap. “Once we get the tractor upright, we’ll need to keep the tension on it so I can get it over that mound without flipping it again. I’ll need you to move the—”
“Skye!”
Skye barely had time to turn her neck his way when she felt Theo’s chest crash into her body and then, a moment later, was swept off her feet. Literally swept. Followed shortly by a branch slapping her across the face as he began barreling through the woods.
For a moment, all she could do was hang on to his neck for dear life. And notice, despite herself, how firm his chest was. Good grief, it’s just like a marble chessboard. Like the hardest pillow you’ve ever slept on in your life. Like asphalt. If I just press my cheek against it . . .
She jolted at the thought and pulled her neck as far away from him as she could, which, given the circumstances, wasn’t very far.
“Theo! What are you doing?”
Skye yelped as Theo high-kneed into her back as he ran.
“Stop, you crazy man! Stop!” She felt like she was trying to command a runaway horse to yield. “Theo!”
It was time for another tactic. Her cheek scraped against his orange flannel as she put both arms around his neck and began pulling herself up. Good grief. How is the man not getting hives from this material?
She yanked her legs out of his arms like the pair of them were in a swing-dancing act and swung back until her boots hit ground.
They dragged against twigs and dirt for a moment, her arms still locked around his neck, his arms wrapped tightly around her rib cage.
To his credit he didn’t tumble; instead, Theo slowed to a stop. He looked down at her feet as though to ensure she was securely grounded, his clean-shaven chin brushing her forehead. A tingle crept up her spine as he let go.
For a couple moments they just stood there, inches apart, the wind dancing on newly sprouted leaves as it passed through the trees.
And then, most awkwardly, she realized she hadn’t let go.
“Your shirt is horrible,” Skye said, letting go of his tree-trunk neck and half expecting her cheek to have been rubbed raw. She touched it and looked up at him, partly wanting to laugh, partly wanting to ask if he’d just gone clinically insane.
“There was a snake,” he said through breaths. He pointed behind her. “There was a snake.”
Skye blinked and took in the man, like a poor alien in this place called Earth. “So you hoisted me up and knee-highed me out of there.”
She smiled, her tone lighthearted, but the world in her periphery was shifting subtly. The blanket of trees and their leaves gained a more vibrant green hue. The sunlight peeking through the dimpled leaves shone a more golden yellow.
The man deathly afraid of snakes had stepped into striking distance to save her. Was willing to put himself in front of his greatest fear in order to help her escape. It was touching. Absolutely crazy and ridiculous and paranoid, but also . . . touching.
“A rattlesnake can strike up to half its length in distance,” he continued. “And given the rattlesnake typically can get as large as six feet—”