Page 23 of DFF: Delicate Freakin' Flower

Since the legendary standoff with the raccoon army, our wildlife run-ins had been mercifully tame. A hawk had soared overhead earlier, majestic and uninterested. Then there’d been the squirrels—two of them locked in a vicious territorial dispute that sounded like someone was trying to stuff a chainsaw into a lunchbox. Still, both of those were manageable.

But then came the next interaction, right as I placed my foot on the ground.

It wasn’t a croak. It wasn’t a chirp. What erupted from the bushes beside me was a sound so ungodly, so high-pitched and enraged, it could’ve been Satan auditioning for a boy band with a kazoo lodged in his throat.

Webb hadn’t been exaggerating when he’d warned me about them. At the time, I’d rolled my eyes when he'd told me that they screamed. Now, I stood corrected—and mildly traumatized.

Naturally, being the brave, unflinching badass that I was, I screamed back. The noise that came out of me was loud, reflexive, and a mix of primal terror and deeply offended disbelief. It wasn’t just a scream—it was a full-throttle emotional response aimed directly at Mother Nature and her amphibian horror shows. Silence followed it, and the frog shut up.

My body was still frozen with my hands up in front of my face as I turned to Webb, and my chest was heaving as my heart rattled like a caged animal. He stared at me, one eyebrow arched in what I could only describe as amused disbelief.

“Did you just… out-scream a frog?” he asked.

I nodded solemnly, like a woman who’d just faced war and won.

“I think,” I rasped, voice still shaky, “we reached an understanding.”

By nightfall,we were sitting around a small campfire Webb had built with practiced ease, the flames crackling in the humid air. It was still too hot for a fire, and I felt like I was back in the firepits of hell, only this time I’d volunteered for it.

But we were roasting wieners for dinner, and apparently, that required sacrifice.

“This better be the best hot dog I’ve ever had,” I mumbled, sweating from my eyebrows as the heat stung my still recovering sunburn.

“You’re in luck,” Webb reassured, rotating his over the flame. “They’re nitrate-rich and shame-free.”

I’d attempted to make eggs again earlier, but somehow, I'd managed to set them on fire. Again. That was the final straw—I'd officially called a truce with the stove and put myself on cooking probation. Indefinitely.

“Next time I get too confident,” I told him, thinking about the culinary messes I'd made, “just throw a spatula at me.”

“Deal.”

We sat together in a comfortable silence—the kind that didn’t need to be filled, only felt. Above us, the sky deepened, shifting from soft violet to rich navy as stars began to pierce through the fading light.

Then, out of nowhere, Webb said, “I’m not the golden child.”

I blinked at the randomness of the statement. “Okay?”

He kept his eyes on the fire, face unreadable in the flickering light. “I mean, in my family. There’s a spotlight on the Townsends, always has been. It skips around from cousin to cousin, wedding to wedding, baby to baby, but I’m not interested in being the one who shines.”

I didn’t say anything. I just listened, understanding that this had been playing on his mind.

“I’d rather be the one holding the line,” he added. “The one who keeps things from falling apart. The protector and the fixer. I’m not built for attention, Gabby. I’m built for damage control.”

I watched the way the flames danced in his eyes. How he looked more relaxed in that moment than I’d ever seen him at any family gathering.

“What’s it like?” I asked softly. “Having a family that... big and loud? And just a little bit crazy?”

He cracked the faintest smile. “Eventful, but never boring.”

I smiled, too, because somehow, despite the spiders, the bucket baths, the flaming eggs, and the rogue raccoons, this—sittingbeside Webb Townsend-Rossi in the middle of nowhere, sweat-sticky and smelling faintly like firewood and hot dogs—this wasn’t boring either.

The fire popped, sending a little shower of sparks upward like they were trying to join the stars. Webb didn’t say anything else after that—about his place in the family, about being the fixer—but it hung there, weighty and unspoken like something between us had shifted. And for the first time in days, maybe longer, I didn’t feel like I was running.

I glanced at him sideways. “You know, I always thought you were kind of intimidating.”

That pulled his gaze from the flames. “Yeah?”

I shrugged. “Not in a scary way. Well, aside from the gauges in your ears and excessive artwork on your body." He snorted at my description of him. "More like, you’re the guy who doesn’t say much, but when you do, people listen. There’s weight behind it. It’s like, if the world’s on fire, you’re the one everyone wants holding the hose.”

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