He rolled his head to gaze at me. The moonglow fell on his face. He was so handsome, so smart, and so scared.
“You’re one of a kind,” he whispered, reaching up to let his fingers trail through my overgrown hair. “I think…I think I could be strong. For you. I…there are…I’d like to explore things with you, Ford. I’d like to try not to be scared. I’d like to see if this knot in my chest when I look at you is love or if it’s just terror. Do those emotions feel the same?”
“Yeah, sometimes.” I rested my head on my arm as my hand splayed over his rapidly beating heart. “I’d really like to explore things with you too. I want to stay here with you, in your life and bed and arms forever. Does that freak you out?”
“A little, but I’m done being a coward. Let’s do this thing then. Will you stay in Bastian Grange long enough for us to see if this love thing is all it’s cracked up to be?”
“Yeah, I’ll be here.” I leaned down to kiss him while offering up a prayer that what I’d just vowed to this man I loved would be a promise I’d be able to keep.
14
Chapter Fourteen
Idiscovered Black Friday was a whole different thing at Bastian Acres.
Back home in Brooklyn, Mom would have set her alarm for five to make sure she was on the train by six to be at the nearest TJ Maxx by six-thirty for the seven a.m. opening of the doors.
Out here, there wasn’t a TJ Maxx to be seen. Or a mall of any kind. The feed store was opening at seven, but it normally did, so I wasn’t sure that was any kind of big holiday-shopping draw. Unless you needed a gift bag of duck chow for your kids, then maybe.
Black Friday was a day when little shopping was done unless it was online, but a lot of toting boxes out of the attic took place. Aiden had appointments out the butt due to the holiday yesterday, so it was just me wading into the bedlam as I arrived back home. I took a minute to feed Lady some dry kibble then made my way to the second floor.
Granny was at the top of the stairs, seated in a folding chair, directing the incoming flights down the attic steps like an octogenarian air traffic controller. She was rummaging through a long, flat box thick with strapping tape when I climbed up to see if they needed any help.
“Morning, Ford. Baker. Baker!” she yelled upward into the hole in the ceiling as Bella stood on the folding stairs with her arms full of holiday wrapping paper. My bestie gave me a sweet little smile, and I returned it. “Baker!”
“What?!” Baker bellowed from above, his face coming into view of a lone white bulb. “Ford.”
“Baker,” I replied, listening to the floorboards creak ominously as Linc, or so I assumed, made his way around in the attic. Either it was Lincoln, or we had Sasquatch up there looking for boxes of decorations. “Where’s Hanley? Is he up there too?”
“No, he flew out early to spend a couple of weeks in Yosemite,” Baker stated, the small lines on his brow whenever his man left on nature shoots already deep. “What did you want, Granny?”
“Where’s my plastic mistletoe ball?” She lifted her sight from the box of garland on her lap.
“How the hell should I know? You packed all this shit. Where did you put it?” Baker asked, kneeling at the edge of the trapdoor, his arm resting on his left leg. His head was coated with cobwebs.
“If I knew where I put it, I wouldn’t be asking you where it was,” Granny fired back. “Bella, honey, would you put that down and go up into the attic to help these fools? See if you can find my mistletoe ball. It ain’t the holidays without my mistletoe ball over the kitchen doorway.”
“Of course.” Bella handed me the rolls of new and half-used paper and climbed upward. She was in black leggings and one of Linc’s massive Chicago Blackhawks sweatshirts. Wearing hisstuff was becoming more and more common. I’d have to ask to make sure I had the details lined up right in my head. “Can you take those downstairs?”
“Sure. This one looks chewed on,” I pointed out and waved a tube of blue and gold paper at her. Tiny bits of shredded wrapping paper and a mouse flew out the end of the tube. Bella shrieked and dove at me, climbing into my arms, which were full of wrapping paper. Granny said a bad word I’d never heard her say before then yanked a tube of paper from my arms to try to hit the mouse. Guess she was better at lobbing grapefruit at foxes than boinking mice on the head. She missed loads of times. Bella screamed in my ear to kill it. So I tried to stomp it as it ran around in confused circles. Lady charged up the stairs at the shout, saw the mouse, and joined in trying to catch it. She failed but did knock over a tote filled with used gift boxes that could be used again. My mom did the same thing, so that was like Brooklyn.
“No, don’t step on it! Don’t hurt it!” Bella yelled at the top of her lungs.
“You just told me to kill it,” I replied, holding her with one hand, her feet off the floor, while cradling several rolls of wrapping paper to my chest with the other. A tube fell to the ground. Granny whacked it with her tube. The mouse froze, eyes wide, and then raced down the hall and into Bella’s room.
Searching for holiday decorations was put on hold for an hour or so until we found the mouse, trapped it in a shoebox, and asked Bella what we should do with the rodent.
“Take it to the barn,” she said from behind Linc. Protecting her from a mouse. I guess? He kind of liked her pressed into his back was my thought.
“It’ll just come back into the house,” Granny mumbled, clearly not as keen on trapping and releasing mice who might end up in her kitchen.
“We don’t want them in the barns either,” Baker said while plucking webs from his hair. “They carry all kinds of diseases that livestock can pick up. Give the damn shoebox to me. I’ll take care of it.”
“No!Linc, will you drive the mouse down to the main road, then let it go?” She turned those big, sad green eyes on my big brother. He melted like butter in a frying pan.
“Sure, yeah, I can do that.” Linc took the box. Bella kissed him on his hairy cheek. His nose turned red as a radish before he left to chauffeur a mouse to a new home a few miles away.
“Glad that’s settled. You boys get back up in the attic and find my mistletoe ball,” Granny barked at Baker and me. Bella waved her fingers at us before we climbed back into mouse central to search for the all-important plastic ball of mistletoe while Bella tried to talk Granny into getting a cat. Lady sneezed at that idea.
