Page 25 of Cherry Picked
“Well…” I cleared my throat and lifted my chin. “In retrospect, maybe I should have.”
“Uh-huh. Since I wasn’t planning to post a profile onOKSerialKillers, I think I’ll be okay.”
“I just think you could forget the apps and find a nice guy in town. Someone you know. Someone who would—”
“Bup bup bup! You know what? I’m instituting a new friendship rule, Jack: you and I don’t talk about this anymore. I tried finding a nice guy in town, but he turned me down.” He gave me a significant look. “Twice. And now he doesn’t get to have an opinion about my dating life.”
“But that’s not—”
“—up for discussion,” Hawk finished. “River of salt, remember? Change the subject.”
His voice held a warning I’d be a fool to ignore, but I was still tempted. I didn’t want there to be a whole area of his life he wouldn’t share with me, and the idea of Hawk on a date with a stranger made my palms sweat.
But now was not the time to push that issue either. The whole point of this hike had been to get things on track, and I was driving Hawk further away.
“Fine,” I agreed, mentally adding afor now.
He nodded once. “Thank you.”
I gave him a sidelong glance, gauging his mood, searching my brain for a distraction. “Would now be a bad time to tell you there was a Jane Austen trivia question at Singles’ Trivia last night?”
He whipped his head in my direction. “You were at Singles’ Trivia Night?”
“What? Dude. You know I wasn’t. Katey messaged to say she’d be coming in late tomorrow because she has a date tonight, and she mentioned one of the questions was about the early reference to baseball inNorthanger Abbey. You know Katey’s a pitcher for the Hollow Swingers, right? So she asked if I knew how Jane Austen would have known about baseball in the 1600s when she wrote her books—”
“1600s?” he moaned. “Please tell me you—?”
“Set her right?” I nodded. “Pfft. Obviously. Loyalty to you compelled me to. I told her that was hundreds of years before Jane’s time. But I told her she had to ask you if she wanted to know the answer to her question.”
“InNorthanger Abbey, it’s spelled as two words, and it refers to the game ofrounders, which is a cousin of what we now know as baseball. Some people have tried to credit her with the name of the game, but that’s been debunked. But the really salient point here…”
Hawk fell into a monologue about popular misconceptions of the Regency era, just as I’d hoped he would, and I could practically see the tension bleed out of him as we climbed to the peak.
I wanted to believe that he’d purged all of his anger and frustration, that we could go back to being Jack and Hawk in perfect harmony, that the hard part of the hike was over.
But as we sat at the top of the trail, admiring the 360-degree views of Little Pippin Hollow and the surrounding countryside while eating the cherry oatmeal cookies I’d brought, I realized I was wrong.
“We can’t lose this, Jack,” Hawk murmured as he chewed. “I can’t lose it. All of my most special moments have been on this mountain. This place… it’s part of who I am. We need to protect it by stopping the development. I wish you believed that—”
“If anyone can make it happen, you can,” I agreed carefully. “That I believe.”
“But you don’t want me to try, do you?” he said flatly. “When all is said and done, despite everything I’ve said to you on the subject, despite everything at stake, you want the Aerie Resort to go forward as planned.”
I opened my mouth to brush him off with my usual disclaimers, but this time, I stopped myself. Hawk felt like I was listening to him but notreallylistening to him? Well, maybe part of that was because I’d been holding back so I wouldn’t upset him.
My feelings about the development were as complex as my feelings for Hawk himself. I loved this mountain. There were a million hidden worlds in every shady glen, under every fallen log, around every bend in the trail, and Hawk had pointed most of them out to me over the years. I never felt more free than when I visited here. And I wanted the place to remain untouched forever, for Hawk’s sake.
But it wasn’t just about what I wanted or what Hawk wanted either.
When I weighed that against the responsibility I owed to my employees who needed regular paychecks, or to my mom, who deserved to enjoy her semi-retirement in the Hollow after decades of debt and struggle back in Portland, or to the rest of the town, which badly needed new infrastructure…
“I don’t want to fight with you about it, that’s for sure,” I hedged.
Hawk shot me a look, and I sighed. Hawk had given me honesty; the least I could do was return it.
“Yeah. I think it would be a mistake not to let the development move forward. With proper oversight, obviously.”
“Because money is more important than this?” He swept a hand out over the vista.
