That evening I drove home as usual. But once I hit the city limits I glanced at the clock and turned left toward the high school instead of continuing straight home. The sun had started to dip on the horizon, but there was plenty of daylight left. I’d made good time; it was only a few minutes past six.
When I pulled into the high school parking lot, baseball practice was filtering out. I didn’t even need to venture back toward the fields. Kids milled around the parking lot, some heading toward their cars in the senior lot while the younger kids waited for parents to pick them up. Mitch was out front in an intense discussion with one of the kids. Each of them held a baseball, and Mitch demonstrated different ways to grip it, which the boy beside him tried to emulate. His fingers were long and his grip was good from what I could see, and Mitch nodded in satisfaction. He raised his head as I approached.
“Hey, Mama!”
I rolled my eyes and did not take the proffered fist bump. “Seriously? In front of the kids?”
He shrugged. “They’re not listening.” He was right; even the boy he’d been coaching on his grip had wandered off. Boys scrolled through their phones as they waited for parents and talked to each other in small clumps here and there. “So what’s up?”
“Well, I was thinking about your . . . you know, that thing you asked me to do.” God, that sounded even worse than just coming out with it.
“Oh, the thing?” His eyes lit up, and joy suffused his face. But joy always suffused his face: Mitch was a joyful guy. “Are you in?”
I sighed. “Yeah. I’m in. But I have a condition.”
“A condition?” His brow furrowed. “You mean a medical condition? Like allergies? Or like a food thing? Because I can find out what we’re having if that’s the—”
I snorted. “No, a condition. As in, if I do this for you, you do something for me.”
“Oh.” The concern cleared off his face. “Sure. What do you need? Don’t worry, I’ll be the best boyfriend you ever had.” He shot me a wink and I laughed despite myself. I usually tried not to laugh around Mitch; it only encouraged him.
“I’m sure you will.” Not a lot to compare to, but I didn’t need to go there right now. “I need some help.”
His eyebrows shot up, and his gaze turned teasingly appraising. “With what?”
How? How did he turn those two words into an innuendo? “With my house,” I said. “I need to get some work done on it before I put it on the market, so—”
“Wait, you’re moving?” His face fell, and I felt his frown in my solar plexus. It hadn’t occurred to me that someone else might give a shit that I was planning to leave Willow Creek. My own sister had hardly reacted when I’d first told her. Why did Mitch care?
I mentally brushed away the thought. He was probably worried I’d leave before I could help him out with this family dinner thing. “Not for a while. But if you want me to be your fake girlfriend, I need you to come over and help me stain my deck.”
He narrowed his eyes at me, and I met his gaze squarely; I wasn’t going to lose this staring contest. Finally he nodded.
“Okay. That’s fair.” He squinted again, this time in thought. “Did you just build it?”
That startled a laugh out of me—the thought of me wielding a hammer and putting this deck together. “No, I had it built a while back.”
“Hmm.” He tilted his head and looked like he was doing some mental calculations. “You’re going to want to clean it before you stain it, then. Do you have a pressure washer?”
I blinked. “Uh. No.” Was that something I was supposed to have? “Can I rent one?”
He waved a hand. “Nah. My dad has one. I’ll drop it off tomorrow, and then next weekend we can stain it.”
“Next weekend . . . wait. Isn’t that when Ren Faire tryouts are? Don’t you need to be there for that?” The closer it came to Ren Faire time, the more excited Caitlin had become, so it was definitely on my radar. Mitch was another one in town who, like Simon, had been part of the whole thing since the beginning. I couldn’t imagine him missing out on it.
But he shrugged. “Eh. Between you and me, I’m kind of a shoo-in. I don’t think Simon will mind if I skip tryouts.”
I had a feeling that Simon would absolutely mind, but I wasn’t going to argue with Mitch about it. “Okay, then. Come by sometime in the morning. Whenever you like, I’m an early riser. We can talk strategy while we work.”
“Strategy? What kind of strategy do we need to stain a deck? We get some stain, we put it on the deck. Boom.”
I rolled my eyes so hard my head fell back on my neck. “For the dinner.”
“Oh.” He looked thoughtful. “Good point.”
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I won’t keep you at my house all day. You can still go out Saturday night.”
He looked blank. “Saturday night? Do I have plans I don’t know about?”
I tilted my head. “Isn’t Saturday your prime hookup time?”
“Funny.” He’d started looking around as we talked, his eyes scanning the kids who were still milling about. It belatedly occurred to me that he was in charge of all these kids, making sure their parents picked them up and they got home without incident. I probably shouldn’t have shown up to distract him, but he didn’t seem annoyed about it. The man was capable of multitasking.
“Funny?” I leaned my back against the wall of the building, indulging in a little stretch. I sat all day, with a fairly long drive both to and from work. My SUV was comfortable, but my days involved a lot of sitting and not a lot of moving. By the end of the day my back was always stiff. My gaze went to the track, a few hundred feet to the right of the main building. Sometimes I missed running.
I shook off that thought too. What was it about Mitch lately that made me thoughtful? “How’s it funny? I’ve seen you at Jackson’s plenty of times. Isn’t that what you do?”
“Meh.” He shrugged, his shoulders massive under his T-shirt. “It’s losing its appeal, if you want to know the truth. I end up there a lot of times because there aren’t a whole lot of options in this town.”
I had to admit he had a point. “Okay, then. We can—”
“Nope.” Mitch’s voice was harsh, and I jumped at the sound of it. What did he mean, “nope”? He was the one who’d suggested Saturday. But he wasn’t talking to me. He’d reached out to one of the kids walking by, snagging the back of his T-shirt collar. “Say that again,” he said to the kid.