Katie
The more time that went on during the week, the more I began to feel better about what Connor and I were doing.
We had agreed to meet up on that Saturday. He texted me much more than I would have thought. I even teased him a couple of times, asking him if he had club business he needed to attend to, but when I did, he brushed it off, saying that the Black Reapers were laying low for a spell.
I didn’t press him on that. Tara and Elizabeth had beaten their warning into me enough. You didn’t ask the Black Reapers about their club business. That was something they handled between themselves, and if you pressed them on it, that was a good way for them to stop fucking talking to you.
But that didn’t mean I wasn’t going to try and find ways to get him to talk eventually.
This time, for our date, we agreed to have it on a Saturday afternoon and for us to go on a hike in the nearby mountains. Again, it seemed so very unlike Connor; I didn’t see him as the guy who wanted to go for a bunch of hikes and explore nature. But if this last week was, in fact, Connor talking to me, it showed just how little I knew of him.
When I met him at the hiking trail, he pulled up in almost the exact same clothes as he had the previous date. But aside from how he dressed, there was something much more different about his demeanor and how he came across.
For starters, when he didn’t realize I was looking at him, he seemed much…much more brooding, almost. His face was a scowl, even beyond what he usually had done, like he was furious at a sibling or something. Perhaps that had something to do with the uptick in texting we had done.
But when he saw me, he wasn’t guarded or trying to remain distant. Well, he wasn’t opening his soul up to me, but there was a certain low-level anticipation he seemed to show. He didn’t scowl when he saw me and walked to me. He wasn’t smiling, but compared to last time, when he’d looked like he wanted to be anywhere but with me, this was a major upgrade.
“Hello there,” I said, caution in my voice. “How’s it going?”
“It’s going,” he said.
“Crazy week?”
“One of the more unusual ones,” he said, but he added nothing else. “Shall we?”
I nodded, curious now more than ever to hear more. Just because Tara and Elizabeth had ingrained the need to respect the club privacy into me didn’t mean that I couldn’t get curious to hear more. And Connor’s coy behavior was only making that desire to learn more even stronger.
But for now, I decided to bite my lip as the ground beneath us changed from asphalt to rocky dirt. I loved hikes for dates, especially recently, because it was a great way to weed out the crazies that I normally went for from the good guys. A crazy guy could perform in a bar, especially when he had alcohol and enough liquid courage to get going on whatever he wanted to.
But on a hike? With no ambient noise, no liquids, and nothing but his own guile to get him through? They’d usually reveal themselves—thankfully, not literally.
Right now, though, Connor was revealing as much as a turtle tucked into a shell with a predator nearby. That was not going to cut it.
“So what changed for you?”
“What do you mean?” Connor said, his eyes straight ahead.
“Well, there are two ways I could ask that question, so I’ll start with the first. Why did you reach back out after the disastrous way that first date ended?”
“Disastrous?”
Oh, shit. He doesn’t think it was that.
“That was disastrous?”
I laughed.
“I tried to kiss you and you gave me your cheek.”
Connor seemed utterly nonplussed by that fact.
“I had a lot running through my mind. And besides, I didn’t want to move fast.”
That’s…odd.
But he doesn’t mean physically. He would have fucked me if he could have.
“OK then,” I said, wanting to press him. Maybe later on the date, if things were going well, I’d try and get more information out of him. For now, I’d play nice. “And the rest of this week?”
