“Now you are playing dirty,” he said, his voice a hoarse whisper. “And if you go any farther, I’m not going to want to stop.”
“Me neither,” she whispered, then hung her head. Reluctantly, she moved her hand away, and the lack of contact felt like a sharp pain. Like a void that needed to be filled, but couldn’t because there were lines you cross and lines you don’t cross. She loved her brother more than anyone, and she didn’t want to disappoint him. Nor did she want to disappoint herself. Even though they weren’t on a path to a real future, she could already feel the first tugs of something with Becker, something more than the fling she’d envisioned the morning after they met. She pictured it playing out if they spent more time together, and she could sense how easily she could slide from wanting him to wanting all of him. Even if they returned to Plan A and simply enjoyed each other’s company while she was in town, she was sure she’d fall hard for him.
With no safety net in sight.
She’d vowed never to fall for a man with a dangerous job, because she had the blueprint of what she might become. She’d seen it in her own mother for years. A vacuum. A black hole of years missed.
Images flickered by. A photo album of lost days and nights, with pictures of her mother leaving Megan and Travis to get themselves up every morning, make breakfast, pack lunch boxes, then find their own way home after school. They’d come home, make the dinner, do the laundry, help each other with homework, lean on each other more than her.
Slowly, steadily her mom climbed her way out of the grief and the sorrow, and Megan found it hard to fault her for that kind of reaction to the love of your life dying. But she certainly didn’t want to chance that kind of life herself, no matter how much heat flared between her and Becker.
She stared off at the river, slow-moving and meandering, moseying on down the riverbed, crossing rocks that jutted out of the mud. “I used to spend so much time here when I was a kid. I always ran off to the river when I was sad,” she said as she sank down on a rock. Maybe it was the river, maybe it was the memories, maybe it was him asking a simple yeah? that led her to keep talking as he joined her. “And then sometimes when I wasn’t sad. It just became my place, like a safe spot where I couldn’t get hurt. Travis started coming with me and we’d hang out by the river. I felt like this was the only place in the whole wide world that was immune to trouble.”
“What’d you guys do here?”
“We made mud pies. The best mud pies in the whole county. One time, we loaded them up in the crate attached to the back of my bike, and brought them back into town. We set up a little stand with a card table in the town square and tried to sell our mud pies.”
He laughed softly. “Get any takers?”
“Shockingly, no. But the local paper took our picture so we thought we were hot shit. Then we decided to bake brownies and sell those instead, and let me tell you—thanks to our mud pie picture in the paper we made a killing with our brownie stand. Called them Mud Pie Brownies.”
“And no one was worried they were actually made with mud?”
She gave him a sideways glance. “I was eight. Travis was twelve. We knew everyone. We weren’t trying to hoodwink the people of Hidden Oaks. But we did include extra dark chocolate and that’s why everyone loved them so much.”
“You still make Mud Pie Brownies?”
“Sometimes. I’m not that into cooking, but I’m damn good at baking.”
“What else?”
“What else do I bake?”
He smiled lightly, then shook his head. “What else did you do at the river?”
His voice had a soft quality to it, or maybe he was just relaxed, sitting here on a rock with her, enjoying her stories of how she’d grown up.
“I can make an excellent dam. Don’t make a beaver joke,” she added quickly, fixing him with a serious stare.
He held up his hands in surrender. “No beaver jokes, I swear.”
“It’s all because of Travis. He taught me. We could spend hours laying twigs and stones and branches right over there.” She pointed to a bend in the river. “Doing everything we could to divert a little bit of water, and to see how long the dam would hold. He said it was, and I quote”—she began imitating her brother’s voice—“a vital skill for any sister of mine to have.”
Becker nodded. “I can hear him saying that. It sounds like him.”
Maybe talking about her brother wasn’t such a good idea, since he didn’t want anything to happen between them. Even so, she had such fond memories of her times with Travis here at the river, and sharing those stories with Becker simply felt right. This river was her place, the spot she’d run to, the place where she felt at peace with the world and all the terrible things that had happened to her family. The place she’d been when she decided to get her owl.