“I can handle a door.”
Ani heard Sanan’s voice behind her. “Shh, let’s let them work it out.” She glanced back to see Sanan with a hand on Chris’s forearm. Well, not so shy anymore.
As twigs crunched under her boots, she realized it might be grimy in the shed and she would die if she got her coat dirty. So when she approached a bench, she swept off her coat and carefully folded it. Then, not wanting it to touch thebench, either, she set down her tote bag and placed her coat atop it.
“Getting warm?” Raffi asked.
“Don’t want your cobwebbed shed to get my coat dirty.”
“For your information, it is spick-and-span—it’s actually quite new. But don’t let me talk you out of it.”
They passed by two guys carrying a barrel. Raffi stepped up to them and gave each that arm wrestling slap hug. “Jerry, Mike, my guys,” he said, and they gave him friendly smiles.
“Cold one today, chief,” the guy named Jerry said.
“But not frosty, so that’s good for the grapes, right?”
“You got it.”
The men walked on. Ani felt a shiver from the cold Jerry mentioned.
“Didn’t you say it was right back here?” she asked.
“Nah, never said that,” Raffi said, smiling. “Aren’t you glad I came with you, though?”
“You’re going to ax-murder me back here, aren’t you?”
Raffi laughed loudly, throwing his head back the way he had with Chris. “I wouldn’t use anax. Do I look like a brute?”
“I’ll have you know,” Ani said, letting a smile peek out, “I am very well loved, and people will come to find me and exact their revenge.”
She wasn’t sure if the latter was true, but she did think, in the moment, of her parents and sister. Often pains in the ass, but always out of love.
“I’m sure you are, I’m sure you are,” Raffi said softly.
Okay…He sounded sincere. She filed away yet another piece of the Raffi enigma.
Finally, they reached the shed, which was fairly large and,from the outside at least, looked well maintained. Raffi entered a key code before opening the door and holding it open for her. “Opened doors for her,” Ani heard her sister say, remembering the Raffi playbook.
In response to the memory, Ani put her hand on the door and declared, “I got it.” Raffi shrugged and walked in first.
As he had promised, the shed was not a cobwebbed mess but meticulously organized and sparkling clean. She wondered if this was Raffi’s doing or his staff’s.
“Whatever you do, don’t let the door shut,” he said, right as a mouse darted out from behind a shelf, and Ani, despite her intentions not to bethat girl, screamed—but then so did Raffi, a smaller, softer shriek. When the mouse ran toward them, Ani fled to Raffi’s direction and accidentally rammed into him. Raffi stumbled back and caught her before they both fell. The heavy door slammed shut, and the mouse ran out of sight.
Ani caught her breath, her heart still racing, and she could feel Raffi doing the same against her. For a moment, she was acutely aware of how close they were—close enough that his windswept-desert scent was stronger now, while the solid weight of his arms wrapped around her. Her cheeks burned.
“Um, sorry about that,” Raffi said, stepping back quickly, releasing his hold. “That was—” But he seemed to have lost his words, and he was turning red, which was almost endearing, if she didn’t know better.
Ani gathered as much composure as she could scrounge, then asked, “So, what happens when the door shuts?”
He hesitated, meeting her eyes. Then he finally spoke. “It locks us in,” he said quietly.
“You’re kidding, right?”
Raffi shrugged. “Sadly not. It’s a new shed, and it came with this dumb locking mechanism that we haven’t had time to change yet. It’s fine. We can just call someone to get us.”
Then, for some reason, he looked toward Ani expectantly.
