Page 12 of The Fall Risk

“Ha! That is the quintessential Reddit experience.”

“A time-honored tradition, really.”

“And look at you, refusing to abandon him to a hotel room with an exit. That is admirable.”

“Couldn’t leave him behind to starve. He needs to eat twice a day,” he said.

“You could have put him in a smaller tank and taken him with you.”

“I promised him he’d never live in a cup again. I keep my promises.”

I smiled. I liked that.

“To promises.” I held up my coffee.

“Promises.”

We clinked glasses.

Seth Chapter 3

So, why was there a sock on the baseball bat?” I asked.

We’d been sitting on our little outdoor veranda for the last hour, talking.

She was great. More than great, actually. She was smart, funny. She liked to hear about trees.

I kept getting a hint of her perfume every time a small breeze blew through. Made me hate the cypresses I loved just an hour ago for blocking the wind.

I wasn’t lying when I said I was nervous, but it had nothing to do with the bear spray. It had been a really long time since I’d been attracted to someone. I was beginning to think the feature had been turned off. This was an interesting development, for sure.

“So the sock,” she said. “If you swing a baseball bat at someone, they sometimes try to take it from you. So if you have a sock on there, the sock slides off when they grab the bat, it puts them off balance, and you get a second swing to break their skull.” She sipped innocently on her drink.

“You are slightly terrifying,” I said.

“Am I?” She grinned. “Thank you.”

“So why bear spray?” I asked. “I mean, instead of pepper spray. Isn’t it illegal to use on humans?”

“It is, but I don’t really care. Bear spray has better accuracy. It’s got a forty-foot range. Pepper spray only has ten.”

“Huh. And you have a gun.”

“Guns,” she corrected.

“How many weapons do you own?” I asked.

“We just met,” she said.

“So big numbers then.”

She poked at her ice with her straw. “Huge.”

I laughed.

Then her smile fell a little. “I have to protect myself,” she said.

“From what?”