“I’m not messing with you.” I scooped up an entry for the spa raffle and filled it out.
“You ready?” Bright asked, joining the two of us.
I deposited my entry into the basket. “Yep. See you, Ma.”
“Where are y’all going?” She directed her question to Bright because she already knew I wasn’t about to play with her and her interrogation.
“To see what we can see,” he told her vaguely. “We up.”
As we walked, he told me that we missed the pet parade and hot dog eating contest. I wasn’t sad to have missed either one of those events. He led me over to the carnival.
I stopped in my tracks.
“What’s wrong?”
“I don’t ride anything that arrived packed up in a suitcase and will go back into a suitcase to get to the next town.”
Bright laughed aloud. “Oh shit. Okay. Okay. We don’t have to ride nothin’. Let’s just hang. It’s part of the spring festival vibe.”
I agreed with a nod of my head. “Okay.” The smells, the sights, and the sounds provided a familiar backdrop as we made our way through the space. When we ended up at the game area, Bright asked if I wanted anything.
“You’re good at carnival games?” Xander was notoriously terrible at carnival games. It got to the point where we would bypass the entire area at Six Flags.
“My mother was the chairperson of the spring festival for the first twenty-five years of my life. She made me and all of my brothers work the carnival. We sold pretzels, made snow cones, and cotton candy. We ran the rides and we all worked the games. I could probably win you anything you point at.”
“Wow. Okay. Well, I’ve never liked those big obnoxious teddy bears, so . . .”
He pulled me over to a basketball game. “This is my shit. When I hit five baskets in a row from different distances, they’ll give you the stuffed basketball.”
I looked over to where he pointed with his finger. The stuffed basketball was about the size of a real basketball. “Okay,” I agreed.
As we leftthe carnival area, I balanced my stuffed basketball under one arm so I could hold the plate of funnel cake with my free hand. I followed Bright to a seating area that was set up with picnic tables. We sat down to finish our snacks. I had my funnel cake, and he had a soft pretzel. I pulled the zipper on my jacket up to my throat. It was April in the mountains. There was definitely a chill in the air, but there was also the smell of violets floating on the breeze along with laughter and the voices of the festival attendees.
“What was it like to grow up here?”
“It was the best place in the world to grow up, especially for a family with four sons. It was just wide open spaces for us to run around, ride our bikes, and shoot our BB guns. We had nerf gun wars and we camped in tents in my parents’ backyard. We rode ATVs and jumped in the creek. We rode horses and built a tree house with our dad.” He shook his head at the memory. “It was good as hell. As a kid, it was good as hell. As a teenager it was a little more difficult to find the good. Everybody was in your business. My parents are active in the community, so everybody had something to say about the four of us. Damn. If Bayliss talked at the movie theater during the previews, my parents heard about it.”
“Ugh. That must’ve been annoying as hell.”
“Fa’sho. But the sense of community is real here. That’s the reason Brewer and Beck both moved back. They thought they could be as happy somewhere else. I thought I could be as happy somewhere else. Didn’t happen.”
We sat in companionable silence until the musical guests of the night took the stage. It was a country group that I didn’trecognize. But the two men and the young lady must’ve been familiar to the rest of the crowd. They were up on their feet immediately. The next thing I knew, hordes of people were on the makeshift dancefloor doing a line dance.
Bright stood, taking my hand as he did so. “Let’s go, city girl. Let me show you how we do it in the country.”
He led me to the dance floor. It was a fight against my nature not to watch the ease of the rhythm he had when moving to the music. Bright had a way about him that said he was good in bed. I just knew he was sending those female lodge guests home with smiles on their faces. I shook my head in an effort to shake away the thoughts. Technically, I was still a married woman. It probably wasn’t right for me to lust after my brother/uncle in-law. But hell, I was a woman. And I did have eyes. It was probably okay for me to look as long as I didn’t touch.
“What are you over there thinking about? You look like you’re concentratin’ hard as hell,” he teased.
“Shut up.” I chuckled lightly, surprising myself by not giving any pushback before following him. “Just teach me the dance.”
As a runner, I understood movement and cadence. It didn’t take long for Bright to have me working through the steps of the line dance like a professional.
“Okay,” he complimented me with a grin. “You’re not like your sister. Your feet aren’t getting all tangled up.”
I laughed aloud, knowing he was referring to Collins. That girl knew she had two left feet. She was the clumsiest person I knew. If falling and hurting yourself was a person, it was Collins. “Leave my sister alone.” I looked over at him. The way the light from the lamp post lit up his face had me staring. The splatter of freckles across his light brown skin were evident. The freckles, along with his full cheeks gave his face a boyishness, despite him having hooded eyes, a semi-broad nose, and full kissable lips. His sandy brown hair was cut in a fade, and the edges wereforever crisp. It didn’t seem like Bright ever missed a haircut appointment.
“Why you keep staring at me?”
