Page 40 of A Vine Mess
“I don’t know if I can,” she whispered.
I croaked out a laugh. “What do you think we’ve been doing this entire trip?”
“I don’t know!” she shouted, seeming to momentarily sober up as she stamped her foot against the hard packed dirt beneath her boots. It would’ve been cute if I wasn’t so goddamn irritated.
“I’m flattered, Wills,” she continued. “Truly. But maybe I’m not ready to accept what you’re offering. And maybe I can’t give you what you deserve in return.”
“Then I’ll wait.”
All the fight seemed to leave her, her shoulders dropping as she deflated. “I can’t ask you to do that.”
I gave her a soft smile as I stepped backward, treading carefully until I reached my tent.
“Don’t worry about me, Wildflower. I’ve been doing it for years.”
With a mock salute, I told her good night and disappeared inside.
The longer I laidthere in the silence, the more my anxiety rose. I had no idea why. Maybe because I was all alone in a new place. Maybe it was Liam’s parting words. Whatever it was, my chest felt painfully tight. Not to mention the fact that my stomach roiled from that beer Corm had given me. I needed to recall the name simply so I could stay the fuck away from it in the future.
And when some sort of animal howled in the distance, I was throwing open the door to the van before I could think better of it, wrapping my sleeping bag around me, and shuffling across the dirt between there and Liam’s tent.
Without a door to knock on, I scratched at the fabric and whispered, “Liam?”
“Ella?” His response was instantaneous, and after some rustling, the zipper on the tent lifted to reveal him.
Holy fuck.
The man shouldneverwear a shirt.
With only the light of the moon to guide me, my gaze raked over his exposed torso and the tattoos there that I’d never been privy to before.
The massive floral piece on his left shoulder which trailed into a skeleton hand holding a long-stemmed rose on his left pec, the petals floating off of it and morphing into the feathers of a bird in a cage on the opposite one.
I didn’t have a hope of inspecting them all tonight, not when my eyes finally returned to his, their blue depths seeming to glow in the moonlight.
“Are you okay?” he asked, standing and meeting me outside. Clad in only a pair of boxers, revealing more tattoos on his thick thighs, he had to be freezing, but he didn’t seem to notice.
He only cared about me, and when his hands came up to grip my upper arms, I shivered.
“I heard howling,” I said lamely.
“They’re not going to hurt you.”
“You don’t know that!” I protested, a little too loudly, and he shushed me with a finger over my lips.
Liam nodded, as if coming to a realization. “So you get paranoid when you’re high,” he mused. “Good to know.”
“What? No! I’m not high. What would make you say such a thing?”
Although, I had been feeling a little off since the campfire earlier. Had our new friends laced the smoke with something?
“Ella,” Liam said gently. “You ate a brownie.”
“And?”
“And those were Gertie’sspecialbrownies.”
I clapped a hand over my mouth. “Oh my god! I’ve beendrugged!”
