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The dark-haired pipsqueak looks up at me, his brown eyes peering through a set of dark-framed glasses. He’s a tiny guy, easily half a head shorter than the rest of the boys in his age group, and is reserved and soft-spoken to match.
“Just a bit. You both are good at pretending for the most part, though.”
I smirk, already really liking this kid, along with his lack of filter.
We’ve spoken a couple times over the past week, but nothing more than him asking for help getting his canoe to push off from the dock or grabbing the hammock carabiners from the top shelf since he couldn’t reach.
All in all, not a whole lot to go off. And definitely not enough to be fulfilling this so-called favor with his uncle.
“How do you spend all this time with someone you don’t like?” he asks suddenly, cutting through my thoughts.
“Now, hang on. Who ever said I don’t like him?”
Elijah gives me one of those give me a break looks, eyebrows basically pulled up into his hairline. Which is hilarious with those glasses on. “You asked if it was obvious. And it is.”
I let out a sharp laugh as I glance ahead up the trail. Kaleb’s still at the front, leading the pack toward our destination. He’s easily a head taller than everyone else, so it’s not hard to spot the National Park snapback sitting backward on his head.
“I don’t not like him. We just…” My sentence falls off at the end, not entirely sure how I feel about him. All this mountain air is fucking with my sanity, making me see him in a completely different light than I was even a week ago.
“You just don’t get along all the time,” he supplies.
His way of circling back makes me crack a grin. “Exactly. We have to work together, so we need to be civil despite our history.”
“History?”
My teeth scrape over my bottom lip and I debate how much of this story to divulge. But if I’m really going to take Colin’s advice to heart and build some sort of relationship with the kid, I’ve gotta start somewhere. Might as well be with what landed me in his life to begin with.
“We played baseball together in college. Until he got me kicked out about a month ago.”
I glance over at him just in time to catch his eyes widen into saucers. “He got you kicked out, and you can still stand to look at him every day?”
“Well…it’s more like I did something to get myself kicked out, but I wouldn’t have unless he told someone about what I’d done.”
“So he’s a snitch.”
That gets a chuckle out of me. “At first, that’s kinda how I felt. But what I did was wrong, so I can’t blame him for snitching.”
His nose scrunches up as looks at me. “If you know it was wrong, then why’d you do it?”
The question is one I’ve been asked plenty of times before now, seeing as it’s so obvious, but this is the first time I find myself actually willing to answer it. “Because I was hurt and angry, so I wanted to hurt that person back. But it turns out hurting them back didn’t even make me feel better. Instead, it made everything worse.”
He nods, his brows still knit together as he processes. But one of the gears in his brain must hit a snag, and his head snaps up again.
“You didn’t like…commit murder or anything, did you?”
I burst out laughing before deciding I really like this kid. I don’t think getting to know him over the next couple months will be much of a hardship at all. “Nothing illegal, I promise.”
A sharp, dramatic breath leaves him. “That’s good.”
The subject changes after that, and I’m quick to realize he’s a quirky, curious and extremely observant kid. With a major emphasis on observant, because right around mile two, he notices the gap between us and the next kid has more than tripled in size.
“What’s wrong?” Elijah asks before looking down at my feet. Then he stops mid-step and starts giggling uncontrollably. “Kal was right. You really do look more ready to go on a yacht than you do to go hiking.”
The jab only sends a slight twinge of annoyance through me, but I’m willing to chalk it up to the searing pain shooting through my heels and pinky toes with every step.
“Yeah, yeah. Everyone’s a critic today,” I mutter, still giving him a faint smile through the burn. “C’mon, kid. Pick up the pace. The last thing we want is to be left behind.”
6
