Reaper

by Lena North

  “Totally,” I said, and got the grin I wanted.

  “Do you want to go for a walk?” he asked.

  “Sure.”

  “Nature or locusts?”

  I frowned, not quite sure what he meant. He was also inconsistent.

  “Locusts are a form of grasshoppers within the Acrididae family, which means they’re a part of nature, so either way my answer has to be yes.”

  His hands slid down my back as he backed me into the wall, and when his laughing mouth touched mine, I felt them cup my behind to lift me up a little. When he broke the kiss and leaned back, he was still grinning.

  “I won’t ever let you go. You get that, right?”

  All air left my lungs in a swoosh, and I couldn't get a word out, so I nodded stupidly.

  “Good,” he said. “We can walk down toward the pond, or we can walk into Norton and face everyone.”

  Ah. I understood the reference to a swarm of grasshoppers.

  “Norton,” I told him.

  “You sure?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  I wasn’t, but I wouldn’t hide at the farm, just because it was easier. I would also not start who we were together by creating another isolated bubble for myself, so I’d walk into Norton with him, even though the thought made me a little nauseous.

  “Both Gramps and you mentioned something about whipped cream, Olly. What’s that about?” I asked when we turned off their gravel road and onto Main street.

  “My grandparents lived with us when I was little.”

  “I know.”

  “Well, they were away somewhere and came back home unexpectedly in the middle of the night. Found Da in the kitchen, whipping cream.”

  “Okay?”

  “He had my grandmother’s apron on.”

  “Ok –”

  “And nothing else.”

  I was laughing all the way into Norton.

  “I can’t believe they were having dessert in the middle of the night,” I murmured when we’d reached Jack’s coffee shop.

  His brows went up, and then he started laughing.

  “They weren’t,” he said.

  “But what were –” I blinked and felt a blush creep up my cheeks. “Oh.”

  “Yeah,” Olly said. “Oh.”

  The doorbell chimed when Olly opened the door and held it open for me, still chuckling. They were all there, eating breakfast, and we were met by a resounding silence. I didn't feel like laughing anymore and held Olly’s hand in a firm grip as we walked through the store to reach the seating area.

  “Annie…” Wilder said. “Really? This is you playing hard to get?”

  Jinx was about to say something too, but I raised my hand, and she closed her mouth.

  “You need to understand something about me,” I said softly. “They say that words are cheap, but I don't agree. To someone like me, words are not cheap. They are for free. You can talk and talk, and it won't cost you a thing except the air that slides up your throat.”

  I made a pause and looked around the room.

  “I know you think I’ve forgiven Olly way too easily for some of the shit he said, but you don’t understand. To me, it’s not about what you say, it's what you do. He said some stupid things, but he fixed my bike when he got how much it meant to me. And he'd heard me talk about my family and fixed things with them before coming to me so I wouldn't have to.”

  Olly’s grip om my hand hardened for a second and I squeezed it back.

  “We’ve talked about things and what was said is important to me. And none of it is for your ears. What’s even more important is that my bike is back outside the farm, topped up with gas and cleaner than it’s ever been before, just because he borrowed it without permission,” I said, and when it looked like Wilder would protest, I added, “He didn’t even puke on it. He puked all over our living room, and along Main Street. Probably all over Hawk’s home too, and –”

  Loud laughter echoed, and I heard Olly groan.

  “Okay,” I whispered. “That was oversharing a bit. I get that. But you know what? Olly gets it too. It’s only words, and they don’t matter. What matters is what you do.”

  Olly put his arm around my shoulders and turned me into his side.

  “Babe,” he murmured into my hair. “They get it too.”

  “You don’t deserve her,” Wilder said, aiming a solemn stare at Olly. “You’re one of the best men I know, and you still don’t deserve her.”

  I opened my mouth to protest and felt Olly move next to me but Hawker spoke before either of us could say a word.

  “You’re wrong, Wilder. There isn’t anyone who deserves someone like Annie more,” he said, and I felt my face soften into a smile. He grinned crookedly at me, and added, “You're the lucky one, Annie.”

  I started laughing then.

  “Don’t I know it, Hawk,” I said, and pulled Olly with me to sit down for a second breakfast.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Dating

  It was ridiculous to be nervous.

  I’d chatted with Olly on the net for years, and had watched him on various missions for almost as long. I also lived with his father, in the room he grew up in, and we had spent weeks together at Double H, a lot of that time without clothes. Now he was coming to pick me up for our first date and telling myself all of that didn’t help. I was fidgety, and paced back and forth in the kitchen, looking alternately at the clock on the wall above the door and through the window at the grayish early evening.

  “I’m an idiot,” I muttered to myself.

  Then I sat down and forced myself to relax by optimizing the algorithms in my program which combined words, locations, and activities associated with Cameron Strachlan. I planned to find patterns in the information, and cross-reference it with similar information about myself, hoping I could identify additional patterns which would explain his motives. If I knew what triggered him, I'd understand his movements, and then I'd know more about where we'd find him. At least, theoretically.

  It wasn’t only about his warped desire for me, or the drugs, or the hatred for the group in Norton. Wilder’s step-father had wanted the crystal from the mountains to derive energy from it, but that was for money and Cam would have plenty from his collaboration with the drug lords in the Ophidian cartel. I decided to weigh information about the cups from the swords of the fire dragons higher and see if that gave any result.

  Losing myself in the formulas was easy, and I felt the muscles in my shoulders relax as I filed my ideas and solutions away in my brain. I’d write them down later, but I didn’t need to, not until I was prepared to run the program. If I forgot parts of it, I could always re-create it whenever I needed it.

  The knock on the door was soft, and I got up to open, wondering why Olly would knock on the door to his home.

  “Hey,” he said quietly. “You’re ready?”

  Our eyes met and he smiled crookedly in a way that was so familiar. I smiled back, wondering why I’d been so silly. It was Olly, and I had nothing to be nervous about.

  We went to one of the small restaurants in Norton, and the woman who seated us was hysterically friendly in a way I found hilarious. Olly muttered something and shook his head.

  “What?”

  “It’s as if I never took a date here before,” he said, realized what he'd said, and backtracked, “A long, long time ago, Annie.”

  I held back laughter and looked serenely at him. He squirmed, so I tilted my head a little to the side.

  “They were ugly,” he muttered.

  I started laughing.

  “Seriously, Olly?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I dated too,” I informed him. “You all act as if I was locked up in an ivory tower somewhere, but it wasn't like that. It took some planning, but I dated, surely you know that?”

  He grunted something I thought was affirmative and studied the menu as if it was the book of secrets when i
t contained only four items, whereof three were variations of burgers and fries.

  “But my dates were ugly too,” I smirked.

  “Shut up,” he said and put the menu down.

  Then we had burgers, Olly with bacon and me with blue cheese and caramelized onion. The waitress didn’t take her eyes away from us the whole evening, and I thought her face would split in the middle from her wide smile. An older man came out from the kitchen three times to ask us if the burgers were to our liking. When he was on his way the fourth time, Olly pulled out two throwing knives and put them calmly next to his plate, which made the man disappear quickly.

  “Norton is a small town,” Olly said with a grin. “People are curious. It’ll get better.”

  He kissed me outside the front door and murmured that he'd be around the next day. Then he nudged me through the door and closed it softly. I went upstairs to his bed and wondered why he hadn’t kissed me more thoroughly.

  In the weeks that followed, we met almost every day, but I started to wonder if staying in Norton was such a great idea because it felt as if my life had reverted to my teenage years. I was living with someone who was remarkably like my grandfather, and my boyfriend came to take me on dates. It was incredibly sweet of Olly to show me respect, or whatever it was he tried to do, but I found it a little bit silly. And frustrating, so when Olly drove up to the farm, I was not in a good mood.

  “Feel like going down to Carson’s tonight?” Olly asked as we got into his car.

  “Totally,” I said, hoping that getting out of the small village would take away some of my irritation.

  We were greeted by a smiling Carson who shared that Bo would be home later and he'd send him out to us. Then he waved the spatula toward the back door, indicating that we could sit wherever we wanted, and we found a small table in the corner. The sky was clear, and it was cold, but Carson had lit fire pits and turned on electrical heaters, so the porch was more than half full of people, and the mood was cheerful and relaxed. It still felt oddly formal as we sat opposite each other, talking about neutral things over Carson's fantastic food.

  “What’s wrong, Olly?” I asked when it felt like we’d discussed the weather long enough. “Is it me?”

  He didn’t even pretend to not understand what I meant.

  “It’s not you,” he said.

  “What is it then?”

  He was silent for so long I’d started to wonder if he’d answer my question when he suddenly sighed.

  “I don’t know how to do this.”

  “Do what?”

  “Date.”

  “What?”

  “I did, you know,” he went on as if he hadn’t heard me. “Not a lot, but I dated.”

  “Okay.”

  “Didn’t mean anything. It was just to –” He cut himself off and grinned wryly. “You know.”

  I knew what he meant, and did in no way want to discuss the details around why he would have dated casually.

  “So, yeah. Suddenly it’s important, and I want to do it the right way,” he added.

  I blinked.

  “Your version of doing things the right way is to treat me as if I’m old as dirt and uglier than Medusa?”

  It was his turn to blink.

  “Med –”

  “Greek mythology. Monstrous woman with snakes in her hair,” I snapped.

  “I know who Med –”

  “Because I never asked for this,” I said.

  “Asked for what?”

  “This Olly,” I explained and waved my hand in his face. “The polite Olly who talks about the damned weather and never even tries to put his hands under my tee.” I put the piece of bread I’d been tearing into small pieces down and glanced at him. “You haven’t dropped the f-bomb once, and I didn’t ask for that Olly.”

  “I messed up, and –”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” I snapped. “Flogging isn’t necessary, Olly. It’s also not attractive. You messed up, I messed up, you apologized, I tried to apologize.”

  He watched me in silence for a while. Then he got to his feet and moved the chair around, so he was sitting next to me.

  “Okay,” he murmured.

  “Okay, what?” I asked.

  “You’re right.”

  “About what?”

  “I won’t ever mention the weather again, babe.” His hand suddenly slid up my side, and when his rough fingertips moved over my neck, I shivered. “And I might just put my hands up your tee,” he murmured.

  “Okay,” I breathed.

  Then he kissed me, with lots of tongue and I didn't care that there were people all around us. This went on for a while, and I was pretty sure I looked dazed when he straightened because that's how I felt.

  “But, babe. I never asked for you to be anything but you,” he said.

  “What?”

  “I never asked for the Annie who tries so hard to be mature, and collected… Who tries so hard to be normal.”

  Had I done that?

  “I can’t very well blurt out anything that pops into my mind, can I?”

  “Why not?” he countered.

  “Because I sound like an idiot.”

  “Sometimes, yeah,” he snorted. “You aren’t one, though, and we both know it.”

  Oh.

  “You like it when I’m bizarre?” I asked, wanting to make sure I hadn’t misunderstood.

  “Babe, you’re not bizarre,” he protested, laughing openly. “You’re quirky.”

  “That’s just another word for weird.”

  A couple of dragonflies came flying, and I heard them giggle.

  “Quirky!” “Quirkily-perkily!”

  A few more joined us, and they chirped and laughed, spreading warmth and happiness.

  “You have to leave,” I murmured and looked around, hoping the other guests wouldn’t react to the creatures being there out of season.

  They kept giggling, but most of them did what I asked. The last one sat down right on top of Olly’s head, and chirped, “Coolio.”

  I didn’t even know what that meant, and since Olly looked ridiculous with a dragonfly perched on his bald head, I tried to slap it away. I ended up hitting his neck instead.

  “Oh, God,” I whispered. “I’m sorry.”

  The dragonfly was laughing so hard I thought it would fall off Olly’s head, and left, giggling something about a dummy which I strongly suspected was me. I slid my hand softly over the side of Olly’s head and down to his cheek.

  “What’s your hair color?” I asked, hoping he’d let me change the subject.

  “Babe,” he snorted. “You’ve seen it, and I certainly did not enhance the color of it like you did.”

  It took me a stunned second to realize what he meant, and I felt my cheeks heat up a little.

  “Black?” I asked and tried to bluster through my embarrassment by adding, “Wasn’t sure if you’d gone gray like the Keeghans.”

  “Nope.”

  “Not even on your head?”

  “Don’t have any hair on my head.”

  What? My hand fell off his cheek, and into my lap and I gaped. I’d thought he shaved his head.

  “When did it fall off?”

  He chuckled and clarified, “Never had any hair on my head.”

  “Never?”

  He shook his head.

  “Ever?”

  The smile in his eyes spread across his face, and he shook his head again.

  “You parents must have spent a fortune on hats,” I blurted out and could have kicked myself because that was stupid and a little bit rude.

  He started laughing loudly and leaned forward toward me.

  “That’s the Annie I want,” he murmured.

  There was suddenly a glint in his eyes that I recognized. He liked quirky, apparently, and I liked the look of him when he liked something. He’d held back in the last couple of weeks, but there it was, right in his eyes. />
  “Right now, I really want to crawl into your lap and kiss you silly,” I whispered and watched his eyes darken. “Except, Carson might mind.”

  Two cups were put on our table with a thud, and an amused voice said, “He won't mind at all, but the other guests might.”

  I looked up into Carson's laughing eyes. Bo was next to him, and he giggled like a little girl.

  “I'm so glad you're here,” Bo said and lowered his voice to an exaggerated whisper, “I saw my little friends, the dragonflies.”

  “Has the tattoo healed yet?” I asked.

  He had refused to let us see it that day at the spa, and it hadn't mattered how much we nagged him to show it. We would see it when it had healed, he'd stated, and I was curious.

  “Yes!” he boomed. “Do you want to see?”

  “Totally,” I squealed.

  Bo turned until his back was toward us, hiked up his blouse and put both his thumbs in his pants. Then he pushed downward until a stunning black and gray tattoo was visible. I had absolutely no clue what to say because the artwork was fantastic, but it was placed on the lower end of the lower part of his back. The swirls stretched out toward his hips, and the dragonfly's tail disappeared between his butt cheeks.

  “You got a tramp stamp,” Olly said, finally.

  “I know!” Bozo grinned and pulled his pants up again.

  “I love it,” I told him, and I did.

  The tat was a piece of art that was truly unique, just as Bo himself was; hilariously cheeky and beautiful at the same time.

  “Mary drew it,” Bo said.

  “I know.”

  “No,” he clarified. “She drew the dragonfly, but also an outline of me. Where it should be.”

  Oh. I suddenly got why Bo had looked so sweetly at Mary. Only someone who understood him, and loved him for who he was would have come up with a design like that.

  “She’s talented,” I said.

  “Yeah,” Carson said with great satisfaction.

  “Hey, Boz!” a man who looked like an elderly professor called from the other end of the porch. “I want to see the tattoo too.”