“Couldn’t risk being late,” I say, opening the passenger door for her. I toss her a wink. “The sunrise waits for no one.”
She laughs as she climbs in. “Such a gentleman.”
My chest rumbles at her words.
Good.
This is going very well so far for the twenty seconds we’ve interacted.
Though I still have time to muck it up.
Can’t do that.
I shut the door and circle back to the driver’s seat, feeling like I’m walking a foot above the pavement. It isn’t long before we’re back on the road, headed toward the mountain that overlooks Honeysuckle Grove from the west.
“This spot I’m taking you to? I found it not too long after I hitchhiked into Honeysuckle Grove.”
“Oh?” she asks as her gaze turns to the profile of my face. “How old were you when you got here?”
“It wasn’t too long after I turned eighteen.” I rest my hand on my thigh, keeping my other hand on the wheel. “I knew from a very young age that living in the big city wasn’t for me. Too many sights and smells. Too many memories.”
When she goes silent on me, I peer over at her, only to catch her staring at my hand. She quickly looks back towardthe window at the world outside, and I act like I didn’t see her staring at it. I take a chance, though.
I slip my hand from my thigh to her knee, wondering if she’s wanting my touch.
Shockingly enough, I feel her relax.
That’s my Sunshine.
“It’s okay to ask questions, if you’re curious,” I say, urging her to talk about whatever’s on her mind.
I want her to want to get to know me.
I want her to know it’s okay to ask the hard questions.
“I still can’t believe you lived on the streets,” she says softly. “I can’t believe the system didn’t take better care of you than that.”
I chuckle as I keep my eyes on the road. “To be fair, I didn’t let them do a lot of helping. I was an angry kid. And being an angry boy in the foster care system really limits your options. It completely eliminates being adopted. I’m lucky enough that I found myself in a foster home that didn’t really care about what I did with my time.”
She shakes her head. “That’s so wrong. I’m so sorry, Knox.”
“Hey, I’m not complaining,” I say, taking a left off the two-lane road heading into town. “A couple of days after I hitchhiked into Honeysuckle Grove, I bartered my way into my first job with Bea, at the bowling alley.”
Her head whips back toward me. “You did? What did she need?”
I peek over at her before paying attention to the road again. “She lives not too far away from the bowling alley. Got this fence around her backyard that was dilapidated and rotting away from the bottom up. Terrible idea, using unsealed wood for a fence. And she made me a deal: fix her fence, and as long as I was working on it, I could bunk on a cot in the bowling alley at night and use the kitchen to make myself food whenever I got hungry.”
Her smile is easy. “That’s really awesome of her to do.”
I nod. “She was just getting the bowling alley up and going back then. She didn’t have a lot of money to throw into a project like that, but we worked it out. That fence gave me a hell of a time, though. I was prying up the old fence posts, and one of them whacked me underneath the chin. That’s how I first met Dr. Quinn.”
She giggles. “Was it bad?”
I lift my chin and point to the scar. “Needed ten stitches and a bit of glue to fix everything up.”
She leans over and peeks at it. “You know, Amber was telling me last night about how she needed stitches when she was around five years old. She was playing outside and slammed her knee onto a rock when she fell. Eli says she needed seven stitches to close it up.”
I chuckle. “That sounds like Amber. She’s always had a lot of energy. Eli says she gets that from her mother. But I don’t know, he seemed pretty energetic at the bowling alley during our little competition.”
