There was a pause. Then a laugh. “The ATV? I was grounded for three weeks. How could I forget?”
Theo smiled to himself. “It was so cold that night. Do you remember how cold it was?”
Though her face was half obscured by her loose curls, he saw her wistful smile. “My fingers nearly froze clicking that flashlight so many dang times. I thought you’d never see it.”
He chuckled. “Oh. I always saw it.”
She didn’t respond, no doubt because she didn’t need to. They both knew he did. By the time they were teens, every weekend, every summer break, every chance he could convince his family to pack up and drive to Evergreen for a reprieve, he always went to bed keeping one eye on his window, just in case he’d see that blinking flashlight. Their code.
“It just took a while to see it coming from the barn,” he continued.
The tractor rolled past Skye’s cottage, the roof dappled with sunlight that spilled through the leaves of the great maple.
The sign for Evergreen Farm came into view, and Skye turned onto the gravel. “The snow was coming down too thick for you to see from my bedroom, and besides, I had to rig up the four-wheeler. I was coming for you whether you were sleeping or not.”
He grinned as they progressed along the bumpy gravel driveway between the trees. He recalled the energy, the adrenaline high, of spotting her blinking flashlight through the heavy snowfall. How he’d bounded out of his bed. How quickly he’d slipped into his warmest boots and bibs, barely snatching up his toboggan before cracking open the heavy front door andsneaking outside. He never had any idea what Skye planned; he was only certain there was nowhere else he’d rather be.
That evening, Skye screamed and laughed as she whipped the four-wheeler in figure eights beneath the midnight storm on the snow-covered field. Theo gripped the sled for dear life and laughed along with her. Screamed and laughed. Screamed and laughed. Until they saw her father in the distance, stalking out of the woods.
Theo blinked toward that empty field, now filled with rows of adolescent trees. “That was by far the most fun evening of my life.”
Her eyes flickered almost imperceptibly to the thirty-foot Fraser fir standing in the center of the field. The one in all this time he’d never cut down. “The most?”
He pressed his lips together. He could never forget the night before he’d left for UVA.
“The mostfun. Another evening has its own category for simply being the most.”
She let go of the wheel with one hand to pull her hair behind one ear. Her large brown eyes gazed back at him. The corner of her mouth turned upward. “The most. You have a category where one evening wins for beingthe most. If that isn’t the most grammatically incorrect thing I’ve ever heard from you—”
Her hair slipped from her ear and covered one eye. Without thinking, he returned it to its place.
Suddenly they both stopped. Words stopped. Theo felt the tractor slow to a stop. And what was in her wide brown eyes welled, brimming with emotions, questions, memories.
His breath caught in his lungs, a heady strawberries-and-cream scent encapsulated by four walls of glass.
But then one word came to mind.Ashleigh.
“You know, I forgot I needed to make a few calls before we got started,” Theo said. He nodded to the cabin not so far in the distance. “I’ll just hop out here and meet you at the tractor.”
“Good plan,” she said, only too eager to push the door open and move down the steps before her sentence was finished. “It’ll take me a while to get the rachet straps on anyway.”
While the tractor continued puttering in the opposite direction toward the ridge, Theo took his first clear breath. Put his hands on his hips as he strode up the gravel driveway and then made his way to the cabin’s wide porch steps.
He couldn’t pretend anymore.
It was time.
***
Theo slid the landline phone off the counter. Picked it up and began tapping.
Before eight thirty yesterday evening, he had been happy. He was in a relationship with someone who was as eager to be with him as he was her. If their relationship were a flower, it’d be a sunflower growing six inches a day. They were thriving.
But then the woman he once loved more fiercely than his own life had returned, as if from the dead. And maybe she didn’t care a whit about him. Maybe he didn’t have a chance, but he couldn’t go for it this time without giving his all.
And he wouldn’t—ever—try to build the foundation of his relationship with Skye on a lie.
He had fallen before for a girl at UVA, a friend who’d somehow, without clear definition, turned into something more over the course of months.
