Brynn and Sebastian Hate Each Other, page 19
After wrapping my right arm around the tree, clenching a thick branch with my hand, and stabilizing my running shoes between the trunk and some burl, I lifted my left wrist to my mouth and ordered Siri to call Sebastian Sudworth.
Except I hadn’t saved him in my contacts.
“Do you mean Sebastian Stan?”
I rolled my eyes and then briefly contemplated letting that call go through. An Avenger would surely pull off a better high-stakes rescue than a guy who’d lost more Pulitzer Prizes than he’d won, right?
I sighed. Ultimately, it was all about proximity.
At first, as the squirrel grew more courageous and began freely staring at me from four feet away, I couldn’t think of how to make the call work. But once I remembered my most recent text had been from non-Avenger Sebastian, I knew I could at least get Siri to reply.
Thanks for your text. Would love to discuss more. Have some time now?
I waited a few seconds for a reply, but when one didn’t come, I realized I would have to go ahead and be honest. Better for it to be a marathon rather than a sprint toward total mortification.
I’m stuck in a tree at the Fielding farm. Is it still the Fielding farm? The big pine on County Loop 42. If you can help get me down, I promise to sit quietly for three whole minutes and allow you to make fun of me however you see fit. Please?
His response came almost immediately.
Make it five minutes and you’ve got a deal. Be right there.
Not even a minute later I heard a motor start up with a rumble, interrupting the deep-throated craw-craw of the two ravens flying overhead. They seemed to share the curiosity of my squirrel friend, who was stuffing his cheeks with his eyes glued to me, like I was the horror film he couldn’t tear himself away from. I turned my head as much as I dared, and though I couldn’t see through the surrounding trees, I was able to gather that the vehicle was getting closer. Just another minute or so later, I saw the orange-and-white Ford Bronco turning onto the farm’s property.
I braced myself. Yes, for the quickly approaching moment when I would have to release my death grip on the tree, but mostly for the inevitable period of humbling myself to simultaneously accept both his help and ridicule.
“Whatcha doin’ up there?” he asked from the ground.
I wasn’t scared of heights. That wasn’t the problem, so I didn’t have any trouble looking down at him. “Oh, nothing. Just hanging out.”
He laughed softly and created a visor over his eyes with his hand. “You’ve actually got some decent footing for the first six or seven feet. It’s more stable than it probably looks from your vantage point.”
“And after the first six or seven feet?”
He squinted up at me. “Yeah, after that you’re going to have to jump.”
My eyes flew open. “I won’t be able to jump!”
“Oh, come on.” He unzipped his jacket and pulled it off, then threw it onto the ground behind him, where the direct sunlight had melted away the snow and revealed brown patches of mostly dead grass. “It will only be about ten or twelve feet at that point. Not enough to kill you. I’ll even move my coat over to cushion the fall.”
He wasn’t wearing his glasses today, and I was able to see the mischievous twinkle in his squinting eyes, even from that distance. “Okay . . . you were joking.”
“Of course I was joking, Brynn. You’ll be fine. You’re just going to have to trust me a little.”
Huh. Well, if I didn’t want the squirrel to win, I was going to have to try.
With footwork so deft I would have made an Edward Cullen “spider monkey” reference if not for my hesitance to open myself up to more ridicule, Sebastian jumped up and grabbed on to a branch three feet over his head. Then he pulled himself up like he was doing chin-ups on the branch, revealing surprisingly impressive biceps for a man wearing a Weezer T-shirt, ascended a few more feet as easily as if he had found a marble staircase I hadn’t been able to see, and then his face was at my knee. His hand was on my hip.
“Okay, you’re going to need to rotate around and face the tree.” He tapped on my left hip to indicate the direction.
“But I won’t be able to see where I’m going.”
“That’s what I’m for.”
“But you can’t see either.”
He groaned and let his forehead fall against my knee for just a second. He was probably wishing it was a wall he could bang against. “Yes, you’re right, but I’m not the one who’s stuck.”
“I’m not stuck, exactly . . .”
“Oh, you’re not?” His hand left my hip and grabbed on to a branch. “Then I’ll just be going—”
“Wait!” Dang it. “Fine. I’m a little stuck. Not because I’m scared, though. I want you to know I’m not scared. I think I just got in my head a little too much, and—”
“Hey, Dr. Phil, this is fascinating stuff, but do you think we could possibly climb down from the 150-year-old state-protected tree before we dive too deep into psychoanalysis?”
“Fine,” I said again, but this time I grumbled it. “But that little Dr. Phil jab counts against your five minutes.”
“Worth it.” He smiled at me and placed the palm of his right hand on my left hip again.
It was so warm out that I had left the inn in only my high-rise lululemon running tights and my adidas by Stella McCartney cropped hoodie, and when I was running, with the sun getting higher and higher in the sky, that had been plenty. But I’d been in the tree for a while now, and no sunlight was getting through the thick, piney branches. As I turned against his fingers, it took everything in me to focus on the task at hand rather than how nice the warmth of his touch felt through the thin material. And how self-conscious that made me.
Soon my abdomen was pressed up against the tree, and I was having to put equal effort into holding on to the bark as my fingers got colder and not thinking about the view Sebastian had as he looked up from just below.
“Good. Okay, now I’m going to guide your foot to the next knob.” He grabbed my ankle, bare between the tights and my no-show socks, and I responded to the pressure he placed, first on one foot and then the other. “Good job. We’re going to do that same thing a few more times.”
And we did. It was easy, and he never once led me astray, and by the time his right hand rested on the cold, exposed strip of skin at my waist, my squirrel friend had scampered off above, and the warmth of Sebastian’s chest was against my back, and his breath was dancing against my ear.
“I’m sorry you had to come help me,” I breathed. “This . . . Well, this is pretty humiliating.”
His breath against me stopped, as did the heaving of his chest, and if not for the pounding of his heartbeat against my shoulder blade and the slight twitching of his fingertips against my skin, I might have wondered if he had abandoned me.
“There’s no reason to feel humiliated,” he finally whispered. “I’m pretty impressed, to be honest.”
I scoffed, still humiliated, whether he thought there was reason to be or not. “Impressed? That I can get stuck in a tree?”
“That you tried to climb it at all.” His rhythmic breathing resumed as he moved into action again. “Now the next part’s going to be a little trickier. The branches and knobs are plenty big, but we’ll have to step down together. Just try to stay in step with me and you’ll be fine.”
I didn’t know why he thought that part would be trickier. It was the easiest thing in the world, like staying in step with a shoe once you had strapped it onto your foot. His hand pulled away from my abdomen for a moment. Just long enough for him to ask, “Is this okay?” as he wrapped his left arm completely around my waist, and I nodded. And then my knee bent as his bent. My foot stepped as his stepped. My hips pivoted as his pivoted. My lungs breathed as his did.
“I fell out of this tree about twenty-five years ago,” I confessed as we continued our descent.
“You fell? How high up were you?”
I turned my chin to the right to try to get some perspective, but I hadn’t realized his face would be right there. A perfectly scruffy five o’clock shadow at ten in the morning, unruly tufts of brown hair poking out from under a Real Madrid Club de Fútbol cap, and dazzling green eyes reflecting back at me the sun and the shadows bouncing off the pine needles.
So much for perspective.
I cleared my throat and faced the bark again. “A little lower than this. Of course I was a lot smaller than I am now. It sure seemed higher then.” And yet then I’d been fearless, just chasing the freedom.
“Were you hurt?”
“I was, actually. My stylist complains every single time about the scar on the back of my head and how it makes my hair grow in weird there.”
I could feel the warmth of his breath lingering at the back of my head, and I knew he was wondering if he could see the scar, or at least the cowlick.
That could have been the end of the story. We kept descending, a few inches at a time, and Sebastian didn’t pry. Maybe he wasn’t interested. Maybe he was busy focusing so neither of us obtained any new scars that would mess with our hairlines. And maybe I was just too aware of how much I was enjoying the feel of his body against mine to be comfortable in the silence. For whatever reason, I decided to tell a story I had never shared with anyone.
“Laila, Addie, and I climbed together, but I was the only one who fell. I hit my head pretty good, as evidenced by the scar, and for two days I convinced them both to pretend we were playing a round-the-clock game of Soap Opera to explain the bandage we’d wrapped around my head.”
Sebastian stopped mid-step. “Soap Opera?”
I chuckled. “Yeah. My character, Jessica LaFontaine”—I adopted Jessica’s deep southern drawl, which I had probably picked up from Steel Magnolias, as I said her name for the first time in decades—“had just come out of a coma and had amnesia. After a brain transplant, of course.”
“Of course.” He began descending again, and my body went where his did.
“Wes was my twin brother, from whom I’d been separated at birth, and Cole was my husband I had no memory of—not that either of the boys were aware of any of it. We were just so scared of getting in trouble.”
My toes slipped on a loose piece of bark, and I gasped. Sebastian’s arm tightened around my waist. “I’ve got you. We’re almost there.”
My breath was shallow after that, for a whole bunch of reasons, and without saying a word about it, I could tell his lack of motion was for my benefit, to give me a moment to regulate my breathing. As if that was going to happen the longer we stood there, molded together.
“So why would you have gotten in trouble for falling out of a tree?” he asked against my hair.
“There was a No Trespassing sign,” I whispered. Again, that could have been the end of it. But the truth was that the No Trespassing sign was behind my friends’ fear. Addie and Laila had parents they respected, who set rules and boundaries, and they loved their parents enough to not want to disappoint them. My fear looked a bit different. “And besides, I knew a visit to the doctor would have meant a doctor’s bill, which probably would have meant my mom would have to work more hours. And I’d have been paying for that for a long time.” I choked out a humorless laugh. “The key to my best possible life with Elaine Cornell was to lay low and hope she forgot I was there. But when my head started bleeding at school and my vision got blurry, we couldn’t blame it on my brain transplant anymore.”
I felt Sebastian’s pulse accelerating against me, and I wanted to make a joke. Blow it off. Maybe climb back up and settle into my new life as a tree person. That was what I had always done, right? (Minus the tree-person part.) And that was even among my friends. The people who loved me. Why was I telling any of this to the mysterious reporter who hated me?
Because he’s broken too.
The response came from deep within me, and I had to fight to swallow down the wave of emotion the answer had brought with it.
“I remember crying and asking Doc if I could do chores around the clinic to pay the bill. I remember him having to shave a spot on my head and sewing me up with ten stitches. I remember him telling me I had a concussion, and that it was really dangerous to not have known sooner. He told me there would always be consequences for my actions, but the sooner I owned up to them, the sooner I could start healing. And I remember him telling my mom that he needed to keep me at his house for a couple weeks for observation. I was a lot older before I realized how unnecessary that had been.” A sob bubbled out of me but I forced it back down. “Before I realized how wrong it was that my mother never questioned it. She was just glad someone else was footing the bill and taking me off her hands for a while.”
He breathed against me, slow and steady, and then we were making our way down the tree again, just as slow and just as steady. And before either of us said another word, I heard his feet crunch against the snow. His right arm joined his left around my waist and lifted me the last foot to the ground. His grip on me loosened and he began to pull away, but I crossed my arms across my abdomen and gripped his forearms with my fingertips.
“Thank you.”
I felt his fingers flinch, but he didn’t constrict me within his grasp again. He didn’t pull away either.
“No problem.”
We stood there like that, in silence, for a few more seconds, until a voice shouted at us from farther back on the property.
“What do you kids think you’re doing?”
I jumped away from him and turned to the angry-sounding elderly man. “I’m so sorry. We were just . . .” I shielded my eyes from the sun with my hand, as Sebastian had earlier, as I looked at another blast from the past. “Mr. Fielding? Oh my goodness. I’m not sure if you remember me—”
“Of course I do.”
Unexpected nostalgia and tenderness for a man I had never known very well washed over me. The sentiment didn’t last long.
“How many times do I have to tell you and your friends to stay away from my tree? Seb, is that you? You should know better. You both should. Didn’t you see the No Trespassing sign? D’you think I just put that up as decoration? Go. Get. I have the right to call the authorities, you know. Do you know that this tree is protected by the land conservancy and the state and—”
“Yes, sir. I’m so sorry, Mr. Fielding. I assure you we didn’t do any damage to the tree. She’s a beaut, alright.” Sebastian had such an earnest expression on his face, and that was ultimately what made the giggle burst through my tightly clenched lips.
I began backing toward his vehicle as the laughter became more uncontrollable, and I tugged the back of Sebastian’s T-shirt to get him to move along too. “Yes. A beaut.” It was hopeless, my attempt to keep a straight face, and made more so by the fact that Sebastian was fighting his own losing battle.
“If I ever see you near my tree again . . .”
I hurried around to the passenger-side door before he could finish his threat, but I jumped out again just as Sebastian climbed in without his jacket. “Shoot!” I ran over and picked it up from the ground as the vehicle rumbled to life. “Good to see you again, Mr. Fielding!” I hopped back into the Bronco, and we were peeling down the driveway, laughing all the way, before I’d even shut my door.
Chapter 20
Sebastian
Tuesday, March 22
10:11 a.m. Mountain Daylight Time
They weren’t saying anything as Sebastian drove them back into town, but every now and then a quiet laugh would escape from one of them or the other. He was grateful for the laughter. He didn’t know what he was going to do when their frantic escape from the Fielding farm was forgotten and the focus was once again on everything before it.
When she texted, he’d just wandered out from the pines after his lather-rinse-repeat regimen of screaming at the sky until his voice gave out, running along the trails until he got winded, and then skipping stones across the partially frozen pond until the frustration boiled up in him again.
He and Erin had stopped talking by the end. Long before the end. It had taken a lot of therapy to sort through a lot of things, but there was no big mystery as to why his marriage hadn’t worked out. It failed because he’d taken for granted that it would succeed. He’d worked hard at everything else, but he treated his relationship with his wife like it was the one thing he shouldn’t have to work at.
He couldn’t have gotten it more wrong.
Sebastian may not have had any romantic interests since moving to Adelaide Springs, but he’d tried to apply that hard-won lesson to all his relationships. He’d have been so much more comfortable, most of the time, if he could have just become a miserable, antisocial recluse. He knew from experience that it was much easier to worry only about himself. But the first time he’d found himself in Doc’s clinic, a shaking, numb, unable-to-breathe victim of a severe panic attack—when he was supposed to be in the off-the-beaten-path little town to relax—he made a promise to the kind doctor he’d just met. He promised not to take the easy way out.
He took a deep breath and pulled over to the side of the road, just a few yards away from the start of downtown. He put the Bronco in Park, turned off the motor, and unbuckled his seat belt before turning to face Brynn.
“Would you mind telling me what you were thinking when you told Bill Kimball it was a good idea to bring back Township Days?”
The smile dropped from her lips. Well, that was nice while it lasted. It would have been so much easier to take the easy way out rather than start another fight with her.
She considered the question and then shrugged her shoulders. “I just walked through the door that opened.”
“Because I don’t think you realize—” Hang on. “Oh. I sort of thought you’d make up some excuse.”
She smiled, but only with her mouth. Her eyes looked sad. “It’s always easier to use someone to get what you want if they want to use you too.” Her shoulders rose and fell again. “Old Man Kimball got some new fuel for what he wants, and I got him to step aside so I can do what I need to do.”
