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As I shut off the touchless faucet and looked for a towel, I caught movement in the backyard through the kitchen window. I leaned out of the kitchen to look through the long, wide windows in the sunroom at the back of the house. The swing rocked back and forth, arcing at an unnatural angle.
Like someone had brushed past it.
I froze, water dripping down my elbow and my heart churning to life. The wind didn’t do that. And Zev’s yard was well fenced, so the only logical conclusion…
Fear strangled me, squeezing off my air supply and stealing my voice. My clothing…
Someone had been in the back yard. And they’d undressed me. I did a quick rundown of possibilities, of people who would do such a bizarre thing, and only one explanation made logical sense. It had to be the paparazzi, and if they’d gotten pictures of me with my clothing off and lying unconscious in Zev’s back yard… Jesus, what would they even do with a picture like that? I suddenly decided I wasn’t willing to find out. Not today. Not when it would ruin both our lives, most likely.
The smart thing would have been to hide and let Zev take care of it. But if they already had pictures of me, then I couldn’t let them get away with them. I marched across the sunroom, threw open the sliding glass door, and stormed out into the warm spring air with vengeance in my blood.
A gasp to my left caught my attention, and I found a reporter who didn’t look much older than me crouched under the kitchen window. She had a camera with a long lens gripped in one hand and her phone in the other, and she looked at me with wide-eyed shock behind her thick-rimmed glasses. Her short, brown bob bounced as she stood suddenly. The indecision in her eye-bounce to the side told me she probably didn’t do this very often.
I swiped up a fan rake that had been placed against the white siding and held it in front of me. “Give me your SD card,” I demanded. Like my crazed gardener threat was going to make her wet her pants or something. Why couldn’t Zev keep scary things like axes hanging around?
She swallowed hard, lifted the camera, and took a picture.
“You—” I stuttered with rage. “Stop that. You’re trespassing.”
“How long have you and Zev Brady been sleeping together?” she asked boldly, stepping back and taking rapid-fire pictures. “Why did you release a press statement about dating? Is it to hide a pregnancy?”
Rage clouded my vision. I lifted the rake, and appropriately interpreting what I planned to do, the reporter turned and bolted. The back yard had been built up a hill, with ascending levels of landscaping that had been bordered by white vinyl fencing all the way around. The reporter ran for one of the levels, and I realized she planned to hop from the higher levels down to the lower edge of the fence, and then to the other side.
I couldn’t keep up with her physically, but I didn’t need to. As she paused to climb the concrete block wall, I gave my body a strong push forward, and reaching with the rake, I swiped for her camera strap. The flexible tangs hooked onto the black strap, immediately tangling through the flimsy metal, and I gave a hard tug backward. I managed to wrench the camera from the reporter’s grasp, and she looked over her shoulder with a gasp as I carried through with my momentum and sent it flying across the yard.
I heard the camera smash against the tree with a satisfying crack just as the rake handle scraped across my face and poked me right in the eye. “Ow, fuck,” I shouted. I slapped a hand over my eye and doubled over as it immediately teared up, burning in sync with the cut on my arm.
“Bitch!” the reporter screeched. She must have decided that retreat was the better part of valor, because I vaguely made out her stumbling form as it retreated over the wall.
I wiped my tear-soaked eye with a shaking hand. Smooth, Isla. You really showed that reporter.
I stumbled to the side, partially blinded, and then my head collided with something solid that swung with the movement. “What the fuck?” I shouted at no one in general. The universe, maybe. What else could possibly go wrong?
It turned out, I could get my hair stuck in a hanging bird feeder. That was what.
It twisted on its cable, tangling my hair with every rotation and forcing a garbled shriek from my lips as I staggered against it and groped around to try and free my messy bun from it. Seeds and feed granules cascaded over my shoulder and down the front of my short jumper. I yowled angrily and ripped at the stupid feeder, frantically trying to free my hair. But it was a hopeless cause, I realized after several frustrated, tear-blurred moments. My bun was tangled up in the metal of the rotating mechanism on the feeder meant to keep squirrels out of the food.
Apparently, they were for catching airhead college students, too. Dual purpose.
I gave up finally, letting my arms fall uselessly to my sides and standing there like an absolute moron with my head cocked awkwardly to the side and my arm bleeding. And I’d decided to put on mascara that morning, of course. I probably looked like a drunk sorority girl who got dumped at the bar.
The sound of a car pulling into the garage sliced through my self-pity. “No,” I breathed. I lifted my arms and scrabbled at my caught hair frantically. “Please, he can’t be home. Oh my God,” I moaned. The door to the garage opened and shut. “Fuck my life,” I muttered, letting my hands drop again.
“Isla?”
This was becoming a disturbing pattern for me. Have an idea, be an idiot about it, tangle myself in a mess, and then let Zev find me in my ignominious predicament. It was the universe’s way of telling me to stop having a crush on him. See what a mess you are, Isla? Quit fooling around.
"Isla?” Zev asked again, his voice more insistent and tinged with worry.
Maybe if I didn’t say anything he would think I had left. Then I could tear all my hair out by the roots, find a wig shop, and cover my newly bald scalp so he wouldn’t noti—
“Isla?” he asked again, this time with concerned surprise. He strode through the open sliding door. Then he saw the state of me, and his mouth opened.
“Hey,” I offered weakly.
He ate the distance between us with a look like he didn’t know whether to laugh or be worried. Wearing a navy vest, light blue button-down, and maroon tie, Zev looked perfectly put-together and indecently handsome. And as he reached me, I realized how very not that I looked. His gaze roved over me as his hands cupped my shoulders. “Isla what in the world…?”
“I attacked a paparazzi with a rake, but when I fished out the camera, the rake scratched my eye, and then this bird feeder attacked me.”
