“My daddy used to take me hunting,” he said. “Some things stick.”
I was clearly also not cut out for hunting.
Not that I cared to. I had absolutely no desire to shoot any animals—or people, even with paintballs—at all.
“I thought you’d be thrilled to be my best man, y’know,” he spoke up again.
I gave him another look that I hoped communicated just how baffled I was, because I was still too out of breath to trust my voice.
Corey shrugged. “This way you get to make sure I marry someone who isn’t Theo,” he said.
What?
“I’m not stupid,” he continued, craning his neck to look around the hay bales as though he was discussing paintball tactics. “I may not have a master’s degree in… information science or whatever, but I could always see the way you looked at him. And me.”
How thefuckdid he know what my degree was in? I couldn’t imagine him being interested enough to find out.
Theo might’ve told him? I wouldn’t have thought he’d remember, though.
“I—”
Don’t know what you’re talking about,I stopped myself from saying at the last second. It was so automatic a response that two days of pretending to date Theo didn’t stand a chance of changing it. I’d been denying how I felt about Theo to nearly everyone for almost as long as I’d known him.
“It’s fine,” Corey said. “Happy for y’all.”
He leaned over the hay bales and let off four shots—either covering fire, or there’d actually been someone there and I just hadn’t heard them.
I wasn’t sure if I was more grateful for the break or wary of the conversation. I neither liked nor trusted Corey.
Theo would’ve been surprised. He thought I perceived everyone as sunshine and rainbows with the best of intentions at heart.
I just liked to give everyone a fair chance.
I’d given Corey his, and he’d plunged my best friend into a breakdown I wasn’t sure he’d come out the other side of. That, as far as I was concerned, was unforgivable.
“Uh huh,” I said, wary about where this was going. My impression of Corey was that he always had an angle, that nothing was ever straightforward with him. “Delilah wants to go to school,” I tried, wondering if that would edge us closer to what he wanted from me.
To my surprise, Corey’s face lit up. Not the way a fox lights up when it sees an unguarded chicken, but...
The way a man in love lights up when the person they love comes up. I knew that look. I’d been feeling it on my own face a handful of times a week for over a decade.
“She wants to be a vet,” he said, as though no one had ever had a nobler desire.
“For horses, yeah. She told me.”
The sound of running made me sit up, paintball gun at the ready. I hadn’t hit anything I’d aimed at all day, but there was a first time for everything.
I fired as soon as whoever it was came around the corner of the hay bales.
And missed by maybe a foot and a half.
Luckily, the overalls on my target were blue.
Corey laughed and waved Cameron off in an unmistakableprivate conversationgesture, and he jogged away with a lazy salute.
“They pull to the left,” Corey said, patting the barrel of my paintball gun. “You gotta take that into account when you aim. About five inches.”
I’d missed by more than five inches, but I appreciated the attempt at advice I hoped I’d never need again.
