This was not an attitude Galen had ever felt comfortable with, but maybe he could understand how prison might cause Blaze to think that way. To make all ex-cons think that way.
However, he couldn’t change any of them, and it probably wasn’t smart to spend so much time focusing on something he couldn’t change.
It was only for the rest of the summer, anyway. He’d do the job he’d signed up to do and move on. But to where? Back to the farm?
To combat wasting any more energy on the overwhelming choices that loomed in front of him, Galen stood by the fire pit and focused on the small flames licking at the small teepee of kindling that Blaze had arranged and set alight.
The air was bright and warm by the fire, the gold and orange and blue flames making the night seem darker all of a sudden.
Galen shivered. Maybe he’d need his jean jacket after all.
Chapter 7
Galen
Going back to the hay bale, Galen reached for his jacket, almost bumping into Bede, who gave Galen a quick glance, then laid his own jean jacket next to Galen’s on the hay bale.
“I can’t tell whether I’m hot or cold,” Bede said, as he sat down on a hay bale one over from the jackets.
Galen sat on a hay bale on the other side of the jackets. He was close enough to the fire to feel its warmth but far enough away to feel like he was in the shadows, so he could watch without being seen.
Bede showered and shaved and changed out of his prison garb and into the uniform of the valley: blue jeans and blue chambray shirt.
Firelight flickered off the curves and angles of the circle and triangle tattoos on one side of his neck. Galen had noticed them before in the photos in Bede’s file, but now they were up close. Quite fresh looking and visible.
With dark hair sleek against his head, and a freshly shaven jaw, Bede looked just about as dapper as a man could. As if he’d not just spent the last five years in prison for making and selling drugs.
Maybe Bede didn’t realize Galen was studying him, didn’t know that Galen could see, quite clearly, an odd vulnerability in Bede’s expression as he cast his gaze over the fire pit.
It was an ordinary setting of a newly built campfire, a few men hovering over the growing flames as if trying to be helpful when only one man was needed to tend the fire and another man to lay out the supplies for making s’mores.
To Bede, after five years in prison, it must have seemed like he’d landed on the moon or found himself in some faraway, unknown country.
Galen watched Bede settle forward, elbows on his knees like a man who has arrived early for a meeting and doesn’t quite know what the meeting was about. The cloth of his shirt along his arms pulled across muscle.
Galen tried to look away. It wasn’t right to stare, even if he couldn’t be seen staring, but Bede, in the glow of the firelight, seemed transformed. From the top of his short-cropped dark hair gleaming in the firelight to the new boots on his feet, he was a new man.
Slowly, he sat up and rolled up the sleeves of his blue chambray snap-button shirt. An ordinary garment, pale blue against the tan of his forearm, veins leaving long thin shadows that trapped Galen’s eyes.
Zeke had forearms like that, long, densely muscled. Casually indifferent to his own prowess, it seemed, when he’d cross his arms over his chest, and now Bede was doing the same thing. A shift of his head, dark eyelashes catching the light, a sheen of moisture on his lips. A flash of teeth as Bede took a breath.
Galen looked away. Hard. He’d just about succeeded in keeping his gaze pointed in the other direction when he heard Bede laugh under his breath. And had to look again.
Blaze was passing out roasting sticks and holding a bag of marshmallows, and Gabe was passing out chocolate bars and graham crackers.
Bede was taking the items like he couldn’t believe what he was seeing. Then he looked right at Gabe and said, “What am I, a ten-year-old kid?”
It wasn’t funny, but it was. The way he said it, low, his voice burry soft. Self-deprecating in a way that surprised him made Galen feel he could just about picture how Bede might have looked as a young boy. Gangly legs. Wearing a striped shirt, for some reason. Just about as cute as a cut button and ready to laugh. Smiling because he was going to make Galen laugh, too.
Galen snorted in spite of himself, surprised at how easily Bede made him laugh when, in reality, he wasn’t even trying. And then thought about the last time he himself had roasted a marshmallow for a s’more. Ages ago. In another life. At summer camp. Once. Long ago.
“It’ll be too sweet now,” said Galen, unable to stop himself from responding, though he did have an unexpected impulse to share memories of summer camp.
“No, it won’t.”
He wasn’t expecting a reply, but Bede sounded so sure, like he knew he didn’t have to convince Galen at all, because it wouldn’t be too sweet. It would be perfect.
Filled with a warmth that he couldn’t tie down or dismiss, Galen pushed the marshmallow onto the stick and leaned forward to roast it.
