Page 16 of Veiled in Brick

“Can the laundry wait an hour? Maybe two?”

I ushered him, “For…”

“Giving these flowers a better fate than becoming trash.”

I shriveled up my nose. “That sounds—”

“Fun?” he finished my sentence with a word that I hadn’t intended on using. “It will be. Promise.”

His tone was genuine, and I exhaled softly.

“If it’s not, you owe me.”

“Owe you what?” His smile stretched wide.

I returned, “To be determined.”

“Fine,” James replied. “Grab a coat; it’s cold.”

James instructed me—no, ordered me—to trust him in the process as he drove me just outside of Salem’s city lines and into the goddamn forest.

I sat on a boulder.

A damp boulder.

I was wet. And not in the way that I wanted to be when I was in his presence.

A mist hung low across the water of the small lake that we had arrived at, and I watched James as he piled wood on top of rock, criss-crossing the pieces this way and that. The breaths that left my mouth instantly condensated in front of me, lingering in the air and sticking to my face. The unseasonably cold weather that had come in overnight had me praying silently for the thick cloud cover to dissipate, but my prayers were, unfortunately, unanswered. When I blinked and the cold humidity that had gathered on my lashes flecked off and smattered my cheeks, I stood.

“James!”

“Patience is a virtue, Zoey—”

“I’m fuckin’ cold!”

I witnessed his shoulders sag with a heavy sigh beneath his black puffer jacket. He dropped the few sticks that he held in his arms and stomped over to me, yanking the grey beanie off of his head as he walked, leaving his hair wild. He ran a hand through it, tucking it behind both of his ears, and halted his steps in front of me. His hands touched either side of my face as he gruffly tugged the hat onto my head.

A hint of annoyance in his light eyes, he asked, “Better?”

“You understand that I hate both the cold and the wet, right?” I grumbled, “What’s the plan here?”

James glanced over his shoulder, held up a single finger, and walked back to the wood pile he had been creating. He knelt down, blew a few large breaths at the bottom of the stack that had begun to smoke, and soon enough a small fire was crackling before him. He looked back to me with his eyebrows raised and waved me over. When I didn’t move, he whined:

“What, now you’re comfortable where you are?”

I rolled my eyes, moved to stand by his side, held my hands out to the fire to warm my palms, and exhaled through my nostrils pointedly.

“What’s the deal with the fire, Jay?”

“So much for tryin’ to be fuckin’ cute; you question everything.”

“Jay.”

“Gah, fine.”

James walked to his car that was parked approximately fifteen feet behind us, opened the back door, and retrieved the flowers. He pulled them from the vase, dumped the water out onto the ground, and set the glass vessel back in his car carefully. When he approached me again, grabbed a single stem with his right hand, and handed it to me, I took a step back.

“Oh, no,” I grumbled, shaking my head. “This was a bad idea—”

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