Page 87 of Cherry Picking

“Briggs. If it’s something urgent, you should—”

“I don’t want to.” He catches my hand under the table, his mouth finding my knuckles for a lingering second. “I’m not spending your weekend here on the phone with Ted. He can take a hike.”

I let the subject drop, because I’m just as greedy for the uninterrupted time as he is.

After we polish off the peach pie and vanilla ice cream, Briggs vanishes to help Sam wrangle the toddler into pajamas, and I find myself on the back porch under the glow of a heat lamp.

Augie is there, leaning against the rail, and he’s apparently decided he’s my new best friend. “Can I let you in on a secret,” he asks, “as the man who’s been burdened with him longer than anyone else in this organization?”

“I have a feeling you’re going to volunteer it regardless.”

“I am. He’s a stubborn son of a bitch.” He points his beer toward the glass door, where Briggs is visible inside, hunkered on the rug helping Lily’s kid stack blocks into a tower. “I’ve been begging him for three seasons to bring someone to these things. Did you know I never even met the former fiancée?”

I give my best performance of a woman hearing this for the first time, my eyes widening for effect. “Briggs was engaged?”

Augie goes rigid. The color drains from his face, his beer stopping halfway to his mouth. “Fuck. Shit. Oh, goddamn it.”

He begins pacing the length of the porch, dragging a frantic hand down his face like a man who’s just committed a felony. I let him suffer for a solid thirty seconds of silent panic.

“Kidding,” I say sweetly. “He told me all about Ophelia.”

He stops mid-stride, his whole face splitting into a relieved grin. “You’re a little shit, aren’t you? You fit right in with him.”

“Some people might make that case.”

“I’m keeping you.” He shakes his head, and his expression goes briefly serious. “He’s the best guy I know and the absolute worst at letting people in, you know? When his brother died, I thought—well, that’s the end of it. He’s going behind the fortress for good. We’ve lost him. And then—” He gestures at me with the bottle. “You arrived.”

“I’m just a temporary assistant,” I argue, offering a careless shrug. “I heat up his father’s dinner.”

“Yeah.” Augie studies me, the usual class-clown mask dropping away entirely. “I think you’re a hell of a lot more than that to him, Evie.”

I have to look out at the dark yard for a heartbeat, watching the heat lamps pulse against the brick. Briggs and I aren’t a couple. We aren’t even a finished conversation yet, and I’m catching a plane back to my real life after the game tomorrow.

How can we be anything at all with two thousand miles of desert and pine sitting between us?

My stomach drops, slow and total, like a coin disappearing into the dark of a well. I know exactly what’s happening. I’ve been outrunning the name of it for weeks, keeping it tucked small in my coat pocket with the rest of my secrets.

I have real, terrifyingly strong feelings for Briggs Maxwell. And I’m having a wonderful time here in his city.

I genuinely like these people. I like Lily’s textural sunroom and Zarah’s easy, clinical laugh and the way this whole loud house folds a stranger into the mix without a second thought. I love the sharp scent of woodsmoke and the way the trees create a gray tunnel overhead.

And still, I could never make a life here.

My father is in Vegas with a business he’s built brick by brick. Hazel is in Vegas, barking her loud, beautiful laugh across our favorite sticky-vinyl bar. My mother is buried in that same dry desert dirt.

My entire existence is stacked up in a beige valley.

And Briggs—his whole world is hockey. It’s in this neighborhood, in that blue-ice rink, in these people who love him. He built this life here on his own. There’s no room in it for the desert, and no version of him that follows me back into it.

What’s a girl like me to do with a man like that?

CHAPTER 25

EVIE

Iwake up in Charlotte with a hockey player’s heavy arm anchored across my waist and no concept of the time.

The room is still dark, and Briggs is a radiator. His breath comes in a slow, steady wave of heat against my neck, the entire solid weight of him tiered around me like I’m something valuable he’s afraid might slip away.