Page 4 of Dove
I breathe out slowly and start walking again.
My gate. I need to get to my gate and get on the plane home. Back to the US. Back to New York.
And from there, back to Hawke's Wood, and the kids I deserted four years ago.
The kids I don't even know if I can call my own.
Not anymore.
Cameron
"They're playing tricks on us," she says suddenly, her voice brimming with intensity. "Can't sit still long enough for us to get a read on anything."
"Who?" I ask, confused. "What?"
She turns and pokes me in the ribs, giggling. "What do you mean 'who'? Haven't you been paying attention? Are you daydreaming again?"
I squirm away from her, laughter caught in my throat, and try to get words out around a tongue suddenly too thick to speak. "Iampaying attention! You need to stop jumping across subjects like they're fucking lily pads in your way!"
She scoffs at that, as usual, and goes right back to what she was talking about–or maybe a new subject?–as if I hadn't spoken at all.
"As I was saying," she huffs. "I don't see why he has to come home at all. And if he does, how he thinks it's okay to suddenly think he's in charge. Think he can play dad, like it's a pair of boots he just puts on any old time. He's been gone for three years and now he just shows up again? Throwing his dick around, acting like he owns the place."
Oh, right.
She's talking about Bear. And maybe I'd have known that if she didn't jump from thought to thought without completing any of them.
Then again, she wouldn't be Samantha Price if she didn't go through life like it was a race she was trying to win, with the finish line just around the bend, there for the taking if she could just make her feet move a little faster.
I glance at her now, a grin caught in the corner of my mouth, and take in the tousled black curls and rounded cheeks of her. That rose bud mouth, pushed out in an angry pout, and the long, dark lashes that show me she's got her eyes closed–the better to visualize her revenge, no doubt.
The girl loves speed like any good adrenaline junkie. But not as much as she loves a prank. Bonus if that prank is played on one Barrett Hawke, and includes revenge for him having deserted us years ago and showing up again last week, home from his career in the Marines and acting like he never left–and that he has rights up here on the mountain.
Rights that he gave up a long time ago.
The thing is, he's my dad, by blood, but he's no relation to Sammy herself. It's a long and convoluted story, starting with my mother and him being in love and crossing over my mother's escape, Sammy's mother being in need of a husband, me being shoved into the Price household, Sammy's mother dying, and a certain Aunt Sue, but the whole thing is capped off by this: Bear is my father but not Sammy's, and when he comes home and pretends like he has any authority over her...
Well, today it's ended up with us in our favorite clearing, laying on our backs and plotting his death.
Personally I don't think there's much we can do, but Sammy's scheming like a school girl–which she is–at the thought of what we might do, and I'm too smart to ever tell her no.
"So what's the plan?" I ask, turning away from her and looking up at the clouds before she can catch me staring. "Because I assume you've already got one."
She cuts off mid-huff. "Of course I do. And this is a good one."
Of course it is.
Every time she comes up with a plan, she tells me it's better than the last.
News flash: It almost never is. Each plan is more dangerous, more far-fetched, more This Would Only Work in a Book-coded.
And I always go along with it anyhow. Because when you're attached to a girl like Sammy, you don't tell her no. You bite your lip, grab her hand, and go along for the ride, praying with your entire soul that she doesn't realize she'd carry it off better without you and your stupid straight man caution.
You wish on every wishbone, every set of angel numbers, that she never, ever decides to leave you behind.
"Well, tell me then," I say, both resigned and breathless with excitement.
Hey, I don't look at me that way. I'm straight as an arrow and I would never come up with these pranks on my own. But getting to hear the way her mind works is one of my favorite things in the entire world.
