Page 150 of A Sanctuary from Shadow
Twenty-Five
“IthoughtIbadeyou not to souse yourself,” Pete groused as I twirled into our hidden camp, still giggling as Sionna rushed me, her wagging tail propelling her hind end in the air.
“I gave it my best shot.” I knelt before the harbinger’s hound and barraged her with smooches. “Those ales you kept buying me were too good not to drink, Pete.”
Pete gave Bob’s backside a firm pat. “I wouldn’t have bought you so many had you simply slowed your pace.”
“Psh!” I grabbed my cloak from the wagon bed, the crisp night chilling me. “You could’ve let me buy my own as we’d planned, but whatever—we got what we needed, didn’t we?”
He grinned in concession, removing Howlite’s purse from his belt. “Want to count our spoils before bed, Shorty?”
“Yah huh!” I skipped to the cart and hopped up to sit beside Pete in the moonlight.
I never knew how it happened—the metamorphosis of moments. That night was no different. One moment, we were co-conspirators, hardcore into tallying what we’d stolen and debating the best uses for our new cache. The next, I could’ve been having a heart-to-heart with Olivia on a snowy Saturday night. Eventually, Pete and I lazed together in the wagon, chuckling about that night’s events.
“Lord, I thought Maggie’s eyes would bug out of her head entirely when she saw me heading up those stairs after you,” Pete chortled, sucking on a leftover riggit bone. His head rested back upon the arm he’d bent behind him. “I wonder if she thinks I joined you.”
I coughed, nearly spitting out the water I’d swigged from Pete’s canteen. He’d told me to drink it all, that he wasn’t in the mood to “meet the harpy you’ll become when you feel like boiled shite.” Un-hungover Amy was headache enough, I supposed.
“Like athreesome?” I squealed once I found my voice.
Pete epitomized my idea of a dark rake. “Is that what it’s called now?”
“Wow.” I shook my still inebriated head down at the water skin. “Only weeks ago, I was a virgin with my own private reading nook at the library. Now people suspect me of banging two guys at once. Jeesh.”
“I take it that’s not something you fancied doing tonight.”
I blew a raspberry. “Not unless you subtracted a guy—and you also replaced Howlite.”
When Pete’s grin spread like warmed butter, I realized my careless verbiage may have admitted I was down for a twosome. With Pete.
“That’s not what that meant. That’s just how I say things sometimes. I say ‘you’ as a general ‘you.’ Doesn’t necessarily always mean the person I’m speaking to. You know?”
“Is that right?” Pete’s eyes did the tango.
“Stop looking at me like that!” I swatted the long leg sprawled beside mine, my heart leaping at my own slip up. “Stop!”
Pete shifted to evade my violence, hollow though it was. “Fret not, Shorty. I’ll take your word for it. When you say ‘you’ in that context, ‘you’ could likely mean anyone.”
“Right!”
“Like your fella, Briar.”
Well, that was an emotional jab to the guts. I winced. “Oh, Goddess, you went there, huh?”
“Straight to it.” Pete wiggled his foot against my hip. Did he even know he was bumping me when he did that?
“Honestly, no,” I admitted to Pete—and to myself. “I wouldn’t mean Briar in that context. Not tonight.”Maybe not ever again.“I don’t know why I’m telling you, of course.”
He shrugged, as easygoing as I’d ever seen him. “Because I asked. And because sometimes it suits to unburden yourself when the moon is high and you’re scuttered enough to do so.”
I smiled, grateful to him. For allowing me the forum to vent. I hadn’t had a proper gab session with a friend in weeks. Since my life had collapsed like a tower of twigs. I needed to get some stuff off my chest. Or as much as I could, given my limitations.
Or could I confess the truth about myself?
Don’t make that call while you’re drunk, you moron. You know hehatesDaddy. Telling him the truth right now will just screw with the pleasant vibes you’ve got going tonight.
“Mother save me, Pete,” I finally breathed a truth I felt safe divulging. “I really don’t want to marry Briar.”
