“I did not!” She was blushing now.
“You said you’ve always wanted to mess me up a bit.”
“I would never say that!”
“You said you liked my body best, but my face was something special.” Newman laughed as her mouth fell open. “You seriously didn’t expect me to not use that against you, Hope. If the roles had been reversed, you wouldn’t have hesitated.”
“I hate you.” Her words had no sting.
“Ouch,” Newman drawled.
“I’m going, and I can lose you easily.”
Newman grabbed her hand as she tried to stand, and held her still. “You can try.”
“Why are you doing this, Newman?”
“Because you may be awkward, prickly, belligerent, and those are your good qualities. However, you are also a friend from home who is in trouble. Howlers always help each other, Hope. You know the code.”
She muttered something unflattering about the code and sat again.
“Another coffee please,” he said, releasing her as the waiter appeared. “And another honey and lemon beverage for the child.”
“I hate you.”
“Sticks and stones.”
Her eyes shot to the door behind him.
“Go on, try it, see how far you get.”
“You won’t make a scene.”
Newman smiled, and it wasn’t pleasant, more a curling up of his lip to expose his teeth. Which, admittedly, were white and straight, and according to his mother, one of the best smiles in Lake Howling.
“If I tell you, you can’t do anything about it. It’s done, nothing can change that.”
“Okay. And, Hope… don’t lie to me, because I’ll know. Your eye twitches. It always has.”
They may not have been tight as kids, but when you lived in a small town and spent enough time with someone, you got to know things about them. Hope Lawrence couldn’t lie worth shit.
“I was part of this project studying the whooping crane.”
“That’s actually a thing? I thought you were shitting me.”
She glared at him. “Seriously? Become more aware, Newman. You need to know that we are losing many species because people like you don’t care, and you should!”
“Right, I’ll try and do better, I promise,” he said, to appease her so she’d continue.
“The whooping crane is the tallest North American bird. It lives to its midtwenties.”
“Tough,” Newman said, but she ignored him.
Her eyes suddenly came to life as she talked about her work. This was her passion, taking photos of wildlife, and had always been her thing.
“Unregulated hunting and diminishing habitat had reduced the numbers dramatically to just sixteen birds in 1941. As of 2015, there were 603.”
“Nice.”
