Page 56 of Wild Thorns

He didn’t answer. Just looked at me, his gaze dropping to my mouth, then back up to my eyes. A question. An invitation.

A child ran past us, shrieking with laughter, chased by another. The spell broke.

Jasper stepped back, releasing me. His smile was back, but it was different now—softer, more private. “Later,” he said. “When there’s less chaos.”

“Later,” I agreed, though I wasn’t entirely sure what I was agreeing to.

* * *

The fireworks started at nine.

We found a spot on the grass, sitting close enough that our shoulders touched. The first explosion lit the sky in showers of gold, and everyone around us tilted their heads back, faces painted in colored light.

I found myself scanning the crowd for Callum.

He was there, of course he was there, standing at the edge of the crowd with his arms crossed. Not watching the fireworks. Watching me.

Our eyes met across the crowd. Red light burst above us, then blue, then white. In the flickering glow, his face was a study in shadows and angles, his expression unreadable. But his eyes, his eyes were hungry.

I should have looked away. It felt like trespassing, somehow, holding his gaze while I sat next to his brother. But I couldn’t.

The finale exploded overhead, a rapid cascade of colors, one after another, filling the sky with light. The crowd gasped and cheered.

When the smoke cleared, Callum was gone.

* * *

The walk back started as a group, Jasper and me, a few people from town heading the same direction. But the crowd thinned as we got further from the square, and soon it was just the two of us on the dark road, the preserve stretching out to our left.

Something moved in the trees.

I stopped walking, my body going alert before my mind caught up. A shape, low to the ground, moving through the underbrush with fluid grace. Too big for a dog. Too quiet for a deer.

“Jasper,” I said. “What was that?”

He followed my gaze. If I hadn’t been watching him closely, I would have missed it, the slight tension in his shoulders, the way his nostrils flared, the almost imperceptible tilt of his head toward the woods.

“Probably a deer,” he said. “They’re all over the preserve.”

“That wasn’t a deer.”

He looked at me, something shifting behind his eyes. For a moment, I thought he was going to say something real. Something true. But then his easy smile was back, and the moment passed.

“Come on,” he said, taking my hand again. “It’s getting late.”

I let him pull me forward, but I didn’t stop watching the treeline. The shape didn’t reappear. But I could swear I felt eyes on us the rest of the way home; watching, following, keeping pace.

And Jasper didn’t seem fazed by it at all.

We reached the house and stopped at the bottom of my stairs.

The main house was lit up; warm light spilling from the kitchen windows, voices murmuring inside. Out here, in the darkness between the magnolia tree and my apartment, it felt like we were alone in the world.

“I had a good time,” I said. “Tonight.”

“With me specifically?” His voice was teasing, but his eyes were serious. “Or with the general festival experience?”

“With you, specifically.”