AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Your sister went home,” Tim said to Valerie.
“Oh?”
“Mm-hmm.” He kept reading.
She enjoyed herself. That’s all I can say. Oh. Maybe I wouldn’t be stepping out of bounds by saying she might come back in two weeks.
“Clay says she might go back in two weeks.”
Valerie groaned.
“Hey, maybe you could take another little trip with me.”
“No promises, Tim.”
“I’m not asking for one. I’m just extending the invitation. I’ll take you anywhere you want to go, whether it’s by boat, plane, or gas-guzzling pickup truck.”
She pulled her bottom lip between her teeth and looked toward him, but notathim. She seemed to be thinking as she shifted the end of her sandwich from one hand to the other.
He looked down at his tablet again and was trying to find his place when she said, “Anywhere?”
“Yeah. Give me a few days’ notice, and I’ll make it happen.” He’d set fire to his schedule and pretend it was no concern to him if he had to.
Ask me for something, Valerie. Anything.
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
“I hope you’ll do more than that. I hope you’ll take me up on it. It’d make me happy.”
“Why?”
“I like spending time with you.”
He wouldn’t have believed it if he hadn’t seen it before for himself, but he’d somehow managed to make a thirty-one-year-old woman blush. He wanted to kiss the red right off her cheeks.
“I’m sure there are a lot of folks you could take on a trip and who’d be appreciative of it, Tim.”
“Sure.” He could take Kevin—hell, he’dtriedto take Kevin out with him on numerous occasions. He’d even resorted to offering bribes to the kid and that hadn’t worked. Either Kevin just didn’t want to spend time with his dad or whatever bullshit trouble he got into at home was more important to him than seizing the opportunity to see the world…or at the very least a slice of America larger than eastern North Carolina.
“The fact of the matter is,” Tim said, “you get to know a lot about folks when you take them out of their element, and I’d like to see how you’d open up to me thousands of miles from home.”
“If there’s something specific you want to know, you could just ask.”
“I don’t know what I want to know. This isn’t a job interview. There’s no prescribed list of questions I feel like I should ask. And I don’t want to just hear you talk, but I want to see you respond. I want to see youact.”
“I don’t think I’m as interesting as you seem to believe.”
“I think you’re probably more interesting than you seem to believe, and I’ll prove it. Here’s a random question. Don’t think, just answer. “If you were abducted by aliens and were offered your choice of a superhero power in exchange for providing a bit of your DNA for them to study, what would you pick?”
“I—” She shook her head slightly and looked down at her sandwich.
“No thinking. Quick. Tell me.”
She shook with obvious nervousness. Apparently, being taken off guard wasn’t one of her good things. “I’d…I’d want to be able to split myself when I need to be in more than one place at once.”
“Spreading yourself too thin?”
“No, I just don’t want to miss anything. I wish there was a way to have it all when you want it, and not a little bit up front and the rest years later.”
