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CHAPTER 4
JORDAN
My cell rings. “Tell me you’ll say yes,” my best friend orders me, when I answer.
With any other person in the world, I’d want to find out what I was saying yes to first. But for Ainsley? I’m there, 100%. All in. Always.
“Yes.”
“You’re not going to ask?” she says incredulously into the phone.
I just laugh. “It’s summer! All I’m doing is organizing my office and talking to a few kids who are taking summer school. What do you need, Ains?”
“Um…”
“Oh, wait, you had that thing at the lawyer’s office today, right? How’d it go? Are you okay?”
“Fine,” she says distractedly. “Can you take vacation?”
“Yeah, sure. What are you thinking? Are we flying to Paris to scatter Aunt Nell’s ashes in the most romantic place she could think of?”
Wow, dude. Yeah, bring romance up again, like it’s gonna do you any good.
She doesn’t answer for a second. “Um. Wow. How do you do that?”
“Do what?”
“Channel my great-aunt like that.”
“Really, she wanted you to go to Paris?”
“No, Mountain Ridge Resort. But you nailed the ashes thing.” She sounds bemused. “So can you go?”
I tell her when I have to be back for the traditional continuing-education class before school starts, and we pick two weeks.
My brain starts heading off in a direction that might be dangerous…Ainsley hiking in shorts, those long brown legs of hers strong in hiking boots. Ainsley in a swimsuit, wet in the pool. Ainsley dancing under the stars.
There’s no question of me not going, especially once Ainsley explains that if she takes this holiday a deux like the will states, she’ll inherit enough to make a downpayment on a house like I know she’s longed for as an adult.
But damn, it’s going to be hard—hard, geddit—telling my groin to knock it the hell off and stop fantasizing about my best friend.
“I don’t know why she insisted on me taking someone with me,” Ainsley muses. “Maybe she thought I’d been lonely?”
“You have been lonely,” I point out.
“Nooo,” Ainsley says, drawing out the word like she’s considering the idea. “No. I actually wasn’t all that lonely. I had you,” she says, and my chest nearly explodes with happiness.
I don’t say it, but in the back of my mind, I wonder if Aunt Nell had ulterior motives. I know she didn’t like Jake one bit better than I did, and I know she caught me staring at Ainsley in a not-friend kind of way more than once. I wouldn’t put it past her to try to engineer something.
I liked Aunt Nell a lot. Ainsley’s mom Susan, who was a busy working single mother, was great when she was around, and we always had a lot of fun together. My own family wasn’t that close. My parents argued over everything; when they weren’t arguing, they were ignoring me and each other. The very second I graduated college, they got a divorce, and everybody’s happier now.
I probably wouldn’t have survived my teen years without Ainsley. I was a fat kid, a nerd who loved D&D and Tad Williams’ fantasy novels, a hater of gym class, a Hufflepuff scarf-wearing weirdo who brought his wizard wand (elmwood with a unicorn-hair core, 10” and slightly springy) to show off at middle school. The literal cherry on top? My red hair.
Yep. I might as well have been wandering around with a PLEASE HARASS ME sign taped to my back. Seriously, even Ron Weasley was cooler than me.
But I met Ainsley in the Rivertown East branch of the public library that summer after eighth grade, before I’d gotten my puberty growth, and somehow we became fast friends.
It might have been that my family had just moved to Rivertown, Virginia, in June. It might have been that the girl with dark hair looked familiar to me, as someone I’d seen walking a small hairy mutt around the neighborhood. It might have been that we reached for the brand-new library copy of The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss at the same time, because the simple fact of having the same interests as someone else was new to me. But I think it was more that Ainsley, seeing my disappointment at missing out on what I’d heard was the Next Big Thing in fantasy, as well as my resignation to not reach for what I wanted—to be polite instead—she had smiled and handed the book to me. “Tell me if it’s any good, when you’re done,” she’d said. “You live on McDonald Street, right? Three doors down from me. I’ve seen you raking the lawn after your dad mowed it.”
