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“You seem…” Brendan almost literally bit his tongue, regretting starting the sentence because now Nicole was looking at him expectantly. He just didn’t know if she’d appreciate him poking his nose into her business, not when she was just starting to let her guard down.
“What?” she asked dryly, and Brendan knew he was going to have to finish his observation.
“You seem sad,” he said with a sigh, watching her reaction carefully. She didn’t say anything, but she didn’t throw a boot at him either so he figured it might be safe to tiptoe a little further and try to figure this woman out.
“You…” God, he really needed to phrase this right. “You seem like there’s this wall around you and it’s about the strongest wall anyone’s ever built, but sometimes there’s a little crack in it when you don’t notice, and when I look through it you just… you just seem so sad.”
Brendan scratched at the back of his neck, prickling with sweat under the sun, and braced himself for a boot to the face. When he didn’t feel any sort of impact, he peeked down at Nicole, her face blank and that wall of hers firmly in place.
“I wanna show you something,” she said, and turned on her heel for her ATV.
“Where are we going?” he asked, following and jumping onto his own four-wheeler, not sure if he trusted the square set of her shoulders just now.
“Out through the back fields,” she replied, turning on the engine. He hadn’t been out that far yet; he really hadn’t had the time to go exploring when he was learning everything from scratch.
“Is this where you murder me and hide the body in an empty log or something?” he asked.
“Guess you’ll find out,” she said, driving off and expecting him to follow. But he had won a small smirk from her, so maybe those walls weren’t impossible to penetrate after all.
It took a while to get wherever it was that she was taking him. The ground was saturated after the storm earlier that week and the paths and tracks were muddy and half hidden with fallen branches or overgrown grass. But eventually, the sun now well and truly turning the day hot, she stopped right on the boundary of the farm. A copse of enormous oak trees stood abandoned and wild, seemingly plonked down in the middle of nowhere, dense as a miniature forest. Nicole swung off her ATV and walked straight into the shadows of them and disappeared.
Brendan, meanwhile, stood at the edge of them, looking in with arms crossed.
“So this is where you murder me, huh?” he called out.
“I’m not going to murder you!” Nicole shouted from within, voice only slightly muffled.
“That’s what a murderer would say!”
“Do you want me to keep being nice to you or not?!”
Well, dammit. That was one hell of a carrot to wave at him, one he couldn’t resist, even if he was about to get murdered by a very small, very angry farmer. Brendan walked in through the trees along the almost nonexistent path in the cool of the shade. It was just a few yards, though, before they thinned out and revealed what Nicole had brought him all this way to see.
There was a giant oak, who knew how old, standing in front of him with one massive branch stuck out to the side like a hitchhiker’s thumb. From it hung a rope swing that was less like a child’s plaything and more like some sort of army training exercise — and on the plank of wood that made the seat sat Nicole.
“What do you think?” she asked, feet barely brushing the leaf-strewn ground beneath her as she swayed back and forth.
“So are you secretly a fairy or a goblin or something? Because this is some fantasy novel sort of stuff.”
She let herself smile, just a little. “Gnome, actually.”
“Ah,” nodded Brendan sagely. “Makes much more sense.”
He looked around and really, he’d only been half-joking about it looking like a fantasy setting. Dappled sunlight was coming through the leaves, and the only sound out here was the rustle of wind and the creak of the heavy rope swing against the branch.
“That’s not going to fray and send you crashing down to earth is it?” he asked, still only half-joking.
“You’re very safety-conscious, helmet man.”
“Can you blame me?”
“No,” she said, “I don’t blame you at all. Don’t worry; I’ve replaced the rope a couple times now. I can be safety-conscious too.”
Her voice was dancing around that serious edge again, like she so desperately wanted to let him peek through that wall of hers but didn’t know where to start. Brendan leaned back against the trunk of the tree opposite her, hands in his pockets.
“It’s peaceful in here,” he said.
“Yeah, that’s why I like it. It’s always quiet.”
