Page 37 of Sunrise Arrows

She’s quiet for a minute and when she does speak, she asks, “Will you come up to the house? I want to see you.”

“I’m on my way.”

Hanging up, I push the phone back into my pocket while Briar says, “That’s what I was going to say. She asked me down here to get you, but I got sidetracked with the shit show over there,” she gestures behind her to the stage.

“Well, come on then,” Ryder says. “My truck’s just over there.”

The main house is where we grew up and where Ryder now raises Ellie. It’s about 200 years old, with live oak trees older than that lining the long drive up to the front. When the canopy of trees open, it’s to a painfully symmetrical three story home made up of columns, a double wrap around porch, pure white siding that growing up we were punished by having to wash in the summers, shutters painted a custom shade of green that matches the lake’s surface, and red brick chimneys coming from the top that match the partially above ground brick basement. Several acres past the back of the house, there’s even a mausoleum where numerous generations of our ancestors are at rest.

Growing up, it never bothered us. They were just there. Tinsley, however, used to joke about being happy I wasn’t the oldest son and thus not the one to inherit the historic home. She said the dead people in the backyard gave her the heebie-jeebies. So much so that when she started staying the night with me and eventually moved in, I moved from my room to a guest room so my windows didn’t overlook the distant dot of the mausoleum because she had nightmares her first night here.

It was something she and our mom had further bonded over—our parents always telling the story about how when Dad proposed, Mom told him she’d only accept if the master bedroom was moved somewhere she wouldn’t see our dead ancestors first thing in the morning.

At the house, things are much more calm, the itch of too many people being around leaving from between my shoulders. On the front porch, two guys who I can admit I wouldn’t want to end up in a fight against are waiting. Several more who weren’t here this morning mill about in matching black t-shirts, jeans, and tactical boots.

Hunter pulls up beside us as we’re getting out. He slams the door to his truck closed and mutters, “Does she think she’s the President or somethin’?” gingerly taking Ellie’s cake out from the floor of his backseat.

Briar makes a disgusted noise, her lip curling. “Photos of where the President is spending his vacation aren’t worth several thousand dollars a piece. And the amount of money a tabloid would be willing to pay for a story about Archer as the man that inspiredSummer Haze,is infinitely more than that. This is for the privacy of your family as much as it is for her protection.

“Now get your hillbilly ass inside with that cake. This humidity will melt the buttercream right off.”

“Oh sweetheart,” Hunter laughs. “My tax bracket is way too high to be a hillbilly. Imma redneck.”

“Call me sweetheart again and see what happens,” she threatens, making Hunter snap his teeth at her with a purring growl.

“Definitely terrified,” Ryder whistles. “Hunter, don’t antagonize her; you ain’t gonna win this one.”

“We’ll see,” he parts, carrying the cake inside. “See ya later, Barbie!”

One of Tinsley’s bodyguards—the one with long hair that’s half tied back like Ryder wears his—grabs Briar by the arms as she starts shouting obscenities and lifts her to stand behind him, telling her, “Easy tiger. After what that prick did to Miss Jacobs’s house, getting his team to not charge her with felony vandalism for his car was easy. Keeping you from a felony assault charge is another story.”

“He has it coming, Mikey; trust me.”

The other one, whose hair is cropped in a close military style cut and I now assume to be John, says to me, “Second floor, left?—”

“Corner,” I murmur as he says it. “It was our room.”

Inside, I take my hat off and hang it on the spur hooks by the door and make my way up the grand staircase in what might possibly be record time. I haven’t seen Tinsley since she came to the ranch and breathed life back into me with that kiss more than a week ago. It’s taken all I’ve had not to get in my truck and drive out to the lake house she’s staying at just to see her. But after she left, I promised myself that if she ever returned, I wouldn’t be so suffocating so as to send her running away from me again.

Needing space was the only thing I could think of that made her flee the way she did, and I didn’t want to risk further pushing her away by reaching out before she was ready. Otherwise, I would’ve gotten my ass on a plane—more realistically in my truck since I have a fear of flying—and followed her across the country. And while navigating the tentative course we’re setting is precarious, the mistakes I made ten years ago will not be the ones I make now.

Before her, my world was black and white, carefully constructed and controlled to mitigate the anxiety and get me through the day acting as normal as I possibly could. Then she blew in and flipped my world upside down in a bright explosion of technicolor. And when she left, that color was slowly leached from my world until nothing remained but gray.

It’s a hollow existence I don’t ever want to return to.

Knowing now, though, that she doesn’t have her own phone and doesn’t drive or even have a valid license, I have to wonder how much the space between us this last week and a half was something she needed or if it was something placed there by the circumstances born of her celebrity. Because if she wants me to chase her, I’ll run and pursue her to the ends of the earth, never stopping even after she’s in my arms again. She deserves nothing less than always to feel wanted.

When I get to our old room on the east corner of the house, the door is partially open. Thinking it an invitation, I don’t knock and push it open the rest of the way, letting myself in.

What greets me is a fucking vision.

Tinsley’s standing in the middle of the room, white little shorts over glittery tights, her hair falling down the swoop of her bare back in that messy way that hints at having had fingers tangled in it for hours prior, and her weight shifting from the tips of her toes on one foot to the other. She softly sings, repeating herself at different tempos and inflections and I know what’s happened since she called. Something sparked in her mind, a new song coming to life, and it has completely stolen her attention.

I’m speechless, standing still and possessed by a single thought: it’s been too long since she’s been mine, and I want to erase every touch she’s felt that wasn’t mine from her memory.

Instead, I do the proper thing and grab a button down shirt that’s tossed on the bed. When I shut the door to afford her more privacy, she startles and turns around.

“Archer!” she squeaks, slapping her arm over her chest, though it only serves to push the fullness of her breasts up, her hand stretching to cover the outer curve instead of her pretty, strawberry pink nipples.

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