Page 85 of Cherry Picking

“What? Ate dinner with your friends?”

“Brought someone along to meet them.”

“I’ll be on my best behavior. I won’t even talk that much about neo-Marxism or the anarchy of Phil’s ordering system.”

He snorts. “It’s not that. I want you to be exactly who you are. I’m much more worried about them.”

“Why? Do they not know how to talk to a woman who’s touched a lot of corpses? Because I can tone that down. I have a whole small-talk mode.”

He gives me a deadpan look. “How about a serious mode?”

“Sorry, doing that now.” I give a firm nod, pursing my lips. “What are you really concerned about here?”

“I just want you to like them,” he admits, a furrow in his brow. “I want you to like it here, wherever I am.”

I should say something light. Deflect, defuse, keep the ground under us level. But the sentence lodges somewhere under my ribs. He’s leaving doors open again, and I’m the one who has to decide whether to walk through or shut them.

“You’re getting ahead of yourself, Maxwell.”

I press a slow, lingering kiss to his mouth across the center console, my fingers finding the notch of his open collar. After what we did an hour ago, the gentleness feels like a secret handed over—a quiet admission that the man who just took me apart can still be this pliable in my hands.

This is the weekend experiment, I tell myself. A couple of days of chasing every impulse without the weight of expectations. The problem is I’m already grieving the end of the trial run.

He leans in to press his forehead against mine for a heartbeat, his breath warm on my skin, before he pulls away and finally kills the ignition.

“Right, then. Let’s go perform for the public for a few hours.”

Sam Hartwell answers the door with a dish towel draped over his shoulder and a two-year-old clamped to his leg like a very cute barnacle. He’s built like what he is—a veteran defenseman, broad and a little battered, gray coming in early at the temples.

“Maxie’s finally here!” He spots me, and his entire expression softens. “And you must be Evie. I’ve been thoroughly briefed by two different old men, so I feel like we’re already acquainted.”

“Is that right?”

“Our fathers like to gossip.” He jerks his chin toward Briggs. “It’s a whole ecosystem. Come in.”

I hand over the bottle of wine I forced Briggs to stop for. “I have no idea if this is drinkable. The man at the shop seemed very confident.”

Sam reads the label, raising a brow. “This is a vintage Sancerre.”

“Good,” Briggs replies. “It was two hundred dollars.”

Inside the big brick house, it’s warm and vibrantly loud. There’s a fire crackling and a playlist heavy on nineties R&B. Somebody says “Maxie” from the direction of the couch, and three guys lift their chins at Briggs without getting up, which apparently counts as an introduction because nobody offers me a name.

A woman emerges from the kitchen, wiping her hands—she’s gorgeous, East Asian with long dark hair and wispy bangs.

“Lily,” she says, taking both my hands with an earnest warmth. “Sam’s my husband. Come away from these men; they’ll only bore you with talk about neutral zone traps.”

I give Briggs a wide-eyed smile, and that’s the last I see of him for a while.

Lily takes me down a hall lined with canvases—big, textural abstracts in oxblood and gold—into a converted sunroom that smells like linseed oil. I make a noise I’m not proud of.

“Did you paint these?”

“Guilty. I sell a few; mostly, I just make Sam hang them.” She clears brushes off a stool for me. “I heard you studied art in college.”

“A lifetime ago at UNLV.” I touch the edge of a canvas without meaning to. “I don’t really—I don’t make much anymore.”

“Why not?”