“No.” I eye him suspiciously.
“Change into some old clothes. I’ll be back over in ten minutes.” He glances at my bare feet. I’m still in my sleep shorts and a tank. “You have tennis shoes?”
“Um…yeah. Sure.” I need my head examined by a professional. There has to be a medical term for this.
Yes, it’s insanity. That’s it.
“Wear them.” He hops up from his seat and leaves me staring after him.
True to his word, he returns for me in ten minutes wearing a ballcap and carrying a backpack over one shoulder. I lock up and follow him outside. “Are you going to tell me what you want me to do?”
“I will.” He squints into the sun. “Get in.”
Leo opens the door of his car and runs around to get in. Once inside, he finds a pair of sunglasses in the console. “Here. Wear them.”
“Am I incognito?” I smirk. It’s going to be tough to be grumpy when he’s so cheerful.
He leans forward and slides them onto my face. His fingers casually touch my skin and the contact sears me as if he’s touched some forbidden part of me.
My gasp must’ve been audible, or maybe I flinched. I’m not sure, but the air in the car changes and he looks away.
“We need to hit the road.” He starts the engine and we head out.
I spend my time watching the metro area change to residential and then to country. We drive in silence. No radio. No conversation. Just the sounds of the outside world telling me that life goes on. I imagine it saying that I’ll be okay. Hundreds of people we’ve passed have experienced far worse than I and they are all okay.
We drive underneath a canopy of trees. Horses run in a pasture, edging parallel to a white, board fence that reminds me of a movie scene.
Leo makes right turn onto a private road which only allows one car. From the corner of my eye, he glances over at me. I force myself to look straight ahead.
“Almost there,” he says.
“What is this place?”
“You’ll see.”
“Is there a reason you won’t tell me? Let me guess. This is a body farm.”
“What?” His tone is curious laced with amused. “What are you talking about?”
“I saw it on television and then read a book about it. This is my punishment for not telling the truth. You’re sentencing me to hard labor at The Body Farm. You know. That place where they study how corpses rot.”
He laughs, the sound all deep and throaty, tickling along my ears. “There are no dead bodies here. That place isn’t in Nashville. It’s in Knoxville.”
I smile to myself. The joy in making him laugh is enough to fuel my happiness for a week. I’m pathetic.
We turn down another one-car lane and a lake appears out of nowhere. The bright sun glints off the water. “Hey. What’s this?” I bounce in my seat and the belt strains against my body. I haven’t been to a lake since going out with my dad as a kid.
“This is a secret.” Leo pulls off to the side of the road. “We’ll have to walk the rest.”
There’s no path, but Leo seems to know where he’s going. Someone has bush-hogged the grass so it’s not high and I’m glad I wore tennis shoes. I haven’t really done much outside since walking the dogs at Le Frou Frou’s.
I inhale and put my face up to the heavens. “Okay. Even if this is a body farm, I’m in. It’s great out here.”
The sunlight warms my skin and soul.
“Keep up.” Leo walks around a cluster of bushes and I follow obediently.
Like a desert mirage, a dock and boathouse appear. There are a couple of small fishing boats in a slip at one end. The boathouse is old and worn.
“Who owns this?” I step onto the wooden dock and follow Leo.
“Gunner’s neighbor.”
“We’re trespassing?” The question comes out as more of a squeak than I intended.
“No. The guy doesn’t stick around much and asked my friend Gunner to keep an eye on things. Gun takes care of the horses for him. The guy told Gunner he could fish anytime he wants. He said we could use the fishing supplies.”
Leo leads the way into the unlocked boathouse. Inside, he grabs two fishing rods and a tackle box. There’s a refrigerator in the corner and he opens it and grabs a white Styrofoam container. “Ready?”
I nod and go with him out onto the dock. He places his backpack in the shade of the building, sits at the end of the wooden planks, and takes off his shoes and socks. “Have a seat.” He pats a spot next to him.
The wood dock is at least eight feet wide, plenty of room to sit on opposite ends. Still, it’s silly to sit so far apart that I can’t reach the tackle. I sit a foot from Leo.
“We’re going to fish?” I take my shoes off and let my feet dangle close to the water. I can almost touch it.
Leo opens the tackle box and begins threading a bobber onto the translucent line. “Um hm.”
“Oh.”
He flips the lid of the Styrofoam container up and pulls out a long worm. “Bait your own hook or do I need to do it?”
“I can.” I take the rod and worm from him. “So, what’s this favor?”
He shrugs and gives me a patient look. “I needed a fishing partner.”
“And Gunner or Dane couldn’t?”
“I didn’t ask either of them. I wanted to fish with you.”
I stop breathing for a second and concentrate on the worm’s wiggly body. I cruelly spear him onto the hook. I feel your pain, Mr. Worm. I’m a worm on a hook. He’s baited me.
“Plus,” he says. “I heard it’s your birthday and thought it would be fun.”
“Ah.” I lift my gaze to his, my pulse picking up speed. A lump forms in my throat as his thoughtfulness. “Did Josie tell you?”
He nods and finishes preparing his own rod. “She mentioned it.”
“Well, you didn’t have to do this. I know you have work to do at home. We don’t have to stay.”
“You wouldn’t answer your door last night. You only answered this morning under threats that I’d get a key. And believe me. I would have. Can we at least call a truce for today?”
I shrug and put my thumb on the release button of the reel. I flick the rod back and forward, releasing the button at the perfect time. The line casts out in a beautiful arc and plops into the water.
“Have you ever been horrified and terribly excited at the same time?”
I glance over at him, confused. “No. I don’t know.”
“I’m excited that you actually know how to fish and horrified because I wanted to be better at it than you.”
I giggle. I hate gigglers, for the most part. Giggling isn’t pretty unless it’s done by a five-year-old girl or a ninety-year-old woman. Still, I can’t help myself with Leo. “I’ll teach you how.”
He clucks his tongue. “Over-confident much? Let’s see who catches more fish by lunchtime. We have to release them, but we should keep count.”
“You’re on.” I grin lazily.
“Who taught you to fish?”
“My daddy. It’s been a long time though.”
Leo doesn’t have a bobber on his line. He reels in slowly and finally the fishing lure appears, spinning hypnotically. “My dad taught me to fish, too.”
“And Josie?”
“Oh yeah. She followed me and the guys around everywhere. She didn’t know she was a girl until we graduated high school.”
“Then what happened?”
“I don’t know. We went to different colleges. She figured it out then, I think. Or at least she decided to have a boyfriend during that time.”
“Oh.” I watch my bobber sit on the top of the water. “I wanted to go to college once. I thought I’d make a good nurse.”
“So why didn’t you?” He stops reeling in his line and looks at me.
“I told you. I met Wesley and got married and that was that.”
“Married people attend college.”
I give him an exasperated look. “Some do, I’m sure. Wesley liked for me to stay at home.”
“And you did what Wesley wanted.”
My temper threatens to poke its prairie dog head above ground. “Yes. I lived too far from town and didn’t have a car or a job.”