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I grinned. “It’s silly.”
“There’s a lot of silly goin’ on right now,” he challenged.
Fighting the urge to stick my tongue out, I reached into my pocket and pulled out a small box. It was smaller than the one I kept in my bag for daily use, and it rattled as I held it between us.
“What’s this?” he asked, eyeing the box.
I hesitated, and he plucked it out of my hand before I could change my mind and put it back in my pocket.
“Are these…” he stared at the contents of the box. “Are these Skittles?”
“Sure are.”
He closed the box, examining it. “Is this one of those old pill boxes? I think my grandmother had one just like it.”
I snatched the box, holding it against my heart. “It is. And my grandma gave it to me before she died.”
My tone had been light, so he smiled. “And why do you keep it in your pocket, full of Skittles?”
“Because my brother and I do this thing—started it when we were kids. If we were nervous, we’d eat an orange one. For good luck, green. If we were mad, red.”
“And blue?” he asked, clearly catching on.
“Happy.”
His smile grew. Then he ran a hand over his jaw again. “And to think, I named you after the angry Skittle.”
“Yeah, well, it’s probably for the best.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s not just when we’re mad. It’s also frustrated, annoyed, ready to throw somethin’.”
The masked man chuckled. “Okay, and that’s better, how?”
“Because,Blue,those are all the things you’d feel if we tried to make this last longer than tonight. Trust me. My first love is my work, and I don’t do well with balance. You’d wind up feelin’ all those things thanks to me eventually.”
He hummed, then leaned in for a kiss, which I returned even though I was surprised he’d want to after all that.
But then he leaned back, mischief shining in his eyes.
“What?” I asked.
“Which one do you eat when you’re scared?”
14/
paisley
I walked back to the B&B, exhausted after a long day on the phone. For some reason, even when nothing devastating happened within our city limits, being on the phone took a lot more out of me than working the info or main channel. It was like twelve hours of listening to problems and doing my best to fix them even though my job ended the second they were off the line. Unlike with the channels, where I didn’t have to hear the issues firsthand.
It was a lot less draining for me to put a puzzle together using the pieces before me rather than simply reading the instructions and not being able to take action. Phones were often about info gathering so someone else could save the day, whereas the channels felt a lot more like collaborating on the fix. That was where I thrived. But this sometimes involved doing one or the other, so I had to take the bad with the good.
It was fine, though. Tomorrow was another day, and hopefully, I’d get to do more channel work. For tonight, I wanted nothing more than to change into something a little more casual before walking off the pent-up energy from sitting all day. My destination would be the Wilson house for a home-cooked meal, which would absolutely be the icing on the cake. It wasn’t aSunday night, but Riley would be performing at the festival this weekend, so the family had moved their weekly supper to a Thursday night instead.
The Coles had me over for supper on most nights of the week since they hated the idea of me taking all of my meals with strangers at the B&B. I liked those meals a lot more than the big Cole-Wilson suppers. It was a smaller group, usually just Dakota and her parents. Laney and Everett would sometimes come, but they usually ate at their own house unless it was a special thing. And Aubree and Riley would come here and there, but while it used to be that Aubree was always gone as a flight attendant, now if she was MIA it was because she liked to hole up in the custom library her husband had built her in their new home.
It wasn’t that I didn’t like the Wilsons, or didn’t view them as family. I did. They’d been just as welcoming as the Coles when I’d first come onto the scene as Laney’s manager and best friend. It was just… harder. Maybe it wouldn’t be if that awful New Year’s party had never happened. Maybe everything else would have gone down the exact same way, only I’d be a heck of a lot more comfortable spending time in his childhood home.
