Page 57 of Six of Hearts
Ronan agreed to watch Hazel for me, and I was going to enjoy a couple of days of having Aria’s attention totally on me.
Arriving at my cabin was a pit stop at best. Aria was clamoring to get outside, and even though I had no intentionsof actually hunting (that wasn’t a very romantic activity), I knew it was the height of hunting season, so there would be tons of games to view, and it was just approaching sunset, and the scenery would be perfect.
I got her out on the trails, and she was blissed by the number of deer, pheasant, and rabbits we saw, and I explained to her the specifics of hunting deer versus small game.
We even got lucky, and I was able to show her my most favourite animal to hunt, the javelina. It was rare to find them outside of Texas as far as the United States went, and even there, they were uncommon and damn difficult to hunt. We had a bit of fun attempting to track one, and Aria thought it was hilarious how fast they were.
As the sun began to set, I took her out to one of the hills that overlooked the Decatur fields. I pulled out the picnic I’d packed for us to eat dinner, and set out a blanket, and she curled into me while we ate and watched the sunset.
“How often do you come here?” she asked.
“It was more before Hazel was born,” I told her. “Kids change everything.”
“I know, I recently had seven of them,” she responded, and I giggled.
“It was therapy for me to be able to come here while everything was happening with her mother. If I didn’t have this place to just come and sit and relax and get away from it for a little bit, I don’t know what I would have done,” I explained.
“I would scream. I would cry. Anything to just get it out.”
“Have you ever brought her here? Hazel, I mean,” Aria asked.
I shook my head.
“No. I don’t know that I’m ready to expose her to the world of hunting, or just death in general. It was hard enough discussing with her what it meant that her mother was moving across the country and she’d get to see her once a year moving forward if she was lucky.”
“I can relate to Hazel,” Aria said in a softer, sadder tone, and I looked over at her. She was staring out over the horizon, watching the land, but her mind was somewhere else.
“My family fell apart when I was her age.”
“Seriously?” I asked. How serendipitous that we would get a nanny who could actually relate to our children. It didn’t make me happy that she’d been through any pain, but it was just something else that was there for us to love about her.
“Yeah,” she said. “
My dad left us, really abruptly. According to my mum, they were great. He just up and left one day. It was so unexpected that she actually thought something bad had happened to him, but then a few weeks later, she got divorce papers in the mail.
I was an only child, so it was a bit easier for my mum to raise me on her own, but they had me young, so it was a struggle all the way around. She didn’t have a ton of money, and my grandparents wanted her to abort me, so they weren’t very helpful or invested.”
“Wow,” I responded. I couldn’t fathom what I would do if Hazel didn’t even have her grandparents.
“I’m sorry.” Aria shrugged.
“I turned out okay. My mum taught me the most important thing in the world: how to survive. For a while, I wondered why my dad didn’t love me enough to stay, or even stay involved, but my mum told me every day that I was special and that he didn’tsee it because he was stupid. I know now that she’s right.” She looked up at me.
“The parents who stick around are the ones I respect above anything.” My heart exploded. Suddenly, I didn’t just need to consider how Aria felt about me; I had to consider how I felt about Aria.
“I know that you feel like you’re falling in love with us,” I told her, not expecting the words to come out of my mouth. I wasn’t sure what my plan was with saying it to her.
“Yeah?” she replied. “How do you feel about that?”
“I feel that I wish I’d followed my instincts and kissed you back when you first came to my office.” Again, I wasn’t expecting to say what I was saying.
Aria’s eyes shimmered with happiness, and I knew why. Based on the way I’d said what I said, didn’t it sound like I was saying I was in love with her too? Was I?
I was just leaning in to kiss her when, out of nowhere, a downpour of rain started to drench us and our picnic.
We jumped up, I grabbed the blanket and we went running back up the trail towards my cabin, laughing the whole way.
When we got into the cabin, Aria started to peel off her drenched clothes, but I stepped up to her and pulled her hands away. I pushed her jacket off her shoulders and let it drop to the floor, then I slid my arms up her sides and took her shirt off as I moved.
