“Think there will be any cute guys at the opening ceremony of the festival tonight?” She waggled her eyebrows at me in her typically goofy way.
A sharp laugh bubbled out of me as I looked at her and shook my head. “If we haven’t run into them in the past few days, I’m not terribly hopeful.”
Deep down, I secretly hoped that I would be proven wrong. I needed something in this rinky-dink town to make the move here worthwhile.
Chapter
Three
“Seen the new girl?” I asked as I leaned against a stack of crates filled with freshly-picked apples from the next town over. The festival volunteers had left them here in the high school’s neglected baseball field in preparation for the festival’s apple shooting game.
Ever since the old Faust homestead had been left uncared for, the town’s local supply of sweet McIntoshes had dissipated. Instead, we were stuck with the flavorless Red Delicious variety from the grand ole town of Sunford.
My hands remained tucked in the front pockets of my jeans, keeping them warm from the crisp autumn air. The worn fingerless gloves on my hands did fuck all against the dropping temperatures of the season.
One of Corbin’s brows raised. “Which one?”
Exhaling sharply, I curled my hands into fists inside my pockets.
“You know damn well which one. The one that moved into the old farmhouse.”
He pulled out a cigarette from the pack that was always tucked into his back pocket. “Again, I’ll ask, which one?”
Using a cheap lighter from the gas station that only worked half the time, he lit up the tip of the cigarette while speaking around the filter-end between his lips.
“Two sisters. One barely legal, and the other old enough that she shouldn’t be living at home—or in the cottage, as it may be.”
My hands slowly unfurled from their clenched state. “The older one, is she the one who was poking around the town archives?”
Last night, we overheard the town’s librarian making note of her interest in the town’s history. Mrs. Sampson was quite the lush and gossiper. She would talk your ear off about the importance of the Dewey Decimal system while simultaneously disclosing the secret ingredient in Larry Stillwater’s famous pumpkin pie. Needless to say, everyone in Falston now knew that the ‘special something’ in his pie was canned filling.
The part of last night’s interaction that grabbed my attention inside the town’s sole watering hole was how Mrs. Sampson described the new girl.
“That Lenoir girl is smart as a whip, perhaps too much for her own good. Though someone ought to tell her it’s time toleave the nest and build one of her own. She’s too pretty of a thing for her womb to be collecting more dust than the archives section.”
“Oh, her. Yeah.”
Seemingly taking a moment to further consider my inquiry, Corbin took another long draw from his cigarette. Slowly, he exhaled the smoke upward towards the cloudless sky. “She was at Bill’s this morning. I may have flown by.”
I raised a brow at the way he held his breath before all but confirming he had seen her. Of course, the nosy bastard couldn’t resist taking flight in his crow form to spy on one of Falston’s newest inhabitants.
“And?” I prompted for more details. Specifically, whether she was worth tossing into the corn maze or not.
He gave a shrug that said nothing and everything. The motion caused a long strand of midnight black hair to fall forward just shy of brushing his upper lip. All the remaining strands stayed slicked back like some modern-day emo rock god.
Corbin’s nonchalance was infuriating. There were days when I wished my idiot best friend would be less enigmatic and more brutally straightforward.
Losing the last of my patience, I muttered, “Have to do everything my godsdamn self.” Then, I pushed away from the apple crates.
His hand shot out and grabbed my shoulder. “Now wait just a damn minute. I thought we had a plan laid outfor this year: we rig the corn chase for the sheriff’s daughter.”
If I rolled my eyes any harder, it would have hurt. “You mean Hannah-the-Ho Hawkins? If I wanted a subpar blow job, I’d have visited her after her boyfriend broke up with her on Valentine’s Day.”
Snorting, he tossed his cigarette butt carelessly onto the ground near the base of a few stacked straw bales.
My eyes widened.
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” I quickly stomped out the fire hazard with my boot. “Try using that damn brain once in a while, huh?”
