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“I think there’s something there, but I’m not a hundred percent sure,” he admitted.
I didn’t bother opening my eyes.
What would be the point?
I had the eyesight of a possum—I mean, I could see. I just couldn’t see well. I needed glasses, but I hadn’t gotten them yet because I was too stubborn to admit defeat. Consequently, I squinted at everything and hoped that it wasn’t as bad as I thought it might be.
“Look at this meme,” he said, juggling me with his shoulder.
I opened my eyes to see his bright as hell phone in front of me, holding it out so I could see it.
I blinked a few times, clearing my sleepy vision, and read it.
I started to laugh almost immediately, which began to shake the deer stand. In turn, I started to laugh harder, which only made the deer stand start to rock so hard that I feared it might tip over with my exuberance.
“That’s. So. True,” I whispered—loudly—in between laughs. “I need to go to Target. I’m not sure what for, but I’ll find out when I get there.”
“You scare that buck away from the deer feeder with your laughing, I’ll find a way to make sure I bring you on every hunt I ever go on from now on,” he growled.
I laughed for a few more long seconds before I finally managed to get myself under control.
“I don’t mind going deer hunting with you,” I admitted, my eyes closing once again and my knees pulling up off the bar to curl over Zee’s closest one.
“That’s because you’re using me as a space heater and going back to bed,” he drawled.
But his actions didn’t match his perturbed words as he wrapped his arm around me and pulled me in close.
“You have roughly fifteen minutes until shooting time,” he said into my ear. “When you wake up, I’m going to shoot this buck. Then we’ll have to clean it and take it to the butcher.”
“I thought you used to make your own sausage and stuff like that,” I said sleepily.
I wasn’t intending to go to sleep. I enjoyed talking to him, even if it was in whispers that I could barely hear.
“I do.” He paused. “When I’m home in Bear Bottom. That’s where all my stuff is that I’d use to do it. Since I’m here, I don’t have any and I don’t really want to buy any. Dad stopped processing his own deer about ten years ago. He found a butcher that he really likes, and intends to use him until he dies.”
I snickered.
“You mean he’s gotten lazy in his old age,” I guessed.
“That, too.”
Our silence waned for the next ten minutes or so.
I dozed in and out of sleep, and he stayed quiet, I assumed, because it was getting lighter and he really wanted to get whatever deer he could see at the deer feeder that I couldn’t.
Hell, at this point I was fairly sure it was only a figment of his imagination.
“Wake up,” he jostled me.
I blinked open my eyes, surprised to see that it was quite bright—well, brighter than it had been when I’d closed my eyes fifteen minutes before—and there was, in fact, a deer at the deer feeder eating the hell out of the corn that was pelting him in the back as it was released from the feeder.
I sat up abruptly, causing the entire stand to shift with me.
Zee’s arm tightened around me in warning, and I froze, staring at the deer who’d lifted his giant head to stare in our direction.
We sat like that, for what felt like ten minutes, until he finally dropped his head back down.
When he did, Zee reached for his rifle.
My heart started to pound in anticipation, then the man had to go and hand the gun over to me.
“What are you doing?” I asked, pushing it away.
“Shoot it,” he mouthed.
I shook my head.
I didn’t want to shoot it.
That buck was a goddamn eleven pointer, and the biggest deer I’d seen in real life and not on a game camera.
If I missed, I’d cry.
At least if Zee missed, I could say I hadn’t been the one to shoot at it.
He held the gun up to me again, and I realized that he wouldn’t budge. He wanted me to shoot it.
I bit my lip and took the rifle, dread filling me.
I didn’t want to miss it.
Because holy shit, that was a big goddamn deer.
He waited for me to get the rifle up to my shoulder and my eye lined up with the scope before he silently clicked the safety off.
I lined my eyes up with the sight, took a deep breath, and pulled the trigger.
Nothing happened except for a sharp click as the hammer fell, but no bullet came through.
Zee cursed silently, then reached around me to rack a bullet into the chamber.
