STUFFED (The Slate Brothers 2)

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Carson says.

I frown and look over at him. “Really? Then why are we here?”

Carson smirks, the darkness making his face a mask of perfect shadows. “Because I have keys to the garden in the back.” He wraps a hand around my shoulder and pulls me tightly against him, and together we walk toward the iron gate that leads into the house’s back garden. I can see through the scrollwork to a bright white gazebo, rows of flowers, a koi pond with a bridge over it.

The gate gives way and Carson steps aside to allow me to go in first. He clangs the gate shut behind us, then pauses, looking at the expanse of the greenery.

“What do you think?” he asks lowly.

“It’s beautiful. Why do you have a key to this, of all places?”

“Junior year, when I became starting quarterback and my dad was arrested, I needed a place to get away from both football and my family. This was the only place on campus that was guaranteed to have neither. They gave me a key so I could come here and get my head together before games.”

“Did it work?” I ask, looking out at the heaps of jasmine draped over the tall privacy fences.

“Usually. You can never get away from it completely, though, can you?” Carson says thoughtfully.

His words sting. Even now, with me, he hasn’t gotten away from it. I feel a wave of guilt and shame wash over me.

Carson grabs my hand. “Come on— let’s go sit.”

We walk to the gazebo in the center of the garden, glossy white in the darkness. Sitting on the benches that line it, it almost feels like we’re on an island in a sea of flowers. I sigh and cuddle into Carson’s arms, and he responds by pulling me onto his lap, like my idea of closeness wasn’t adequate. He’s right— this place does calm you down.

“Feel better?” he murmurs against the top of my head, running his heavy fingers across my jawbone as he speaks. His thighs are hard and muscular beneath me, and I feel small and protected leaning against his chest.

“Yes,” I say. “Thank you.”

“Of course. Want to tell me what happened, now?” he says.

Not really— but I’m going to, because he deserves to know. “The story I’m writing about you? Devin has sort of taken over.”

“You’re not the one writing it anymore?” Carson asks.

“No, no, I’m still writing it— but Devin is just…he’s insisting that the story focus on you and your father, not you as a player.” I wince as I say this, waiting for him to be angry, to push me off of him. But while Carson does go stiff beneath my cheek, he doesn’t push me away. Instead, he breaths slow, focused, steady.

“Which is why I don’t talk to reporters, you’ll remember,” he says, sounding exhausted by my news.

“I’m so sorry. I really am,” I say, sitting up and meeting his eyes. His face is unreadable, a portrait in stone and skin, and despite the gazebo’s tranquility, I can feel myself gearing up to cry again. Should I tell him everything? How I was a plant, just like he worried? How Devin found out the truth about the alibi?

Yes— to the second. I have to tell him about the alibi.

“There’s more,” I say. “You won’t like it.”

“Okay,” Carson says, voice stern and brows furrowed.

“Devin did some research into the alibi you gave your dad. He found out that most of the restaurants you’d have gone to would have been closed by the time you arrived. There were only two you’d have been able to eat at, and both had crazy stuff happen that night— a lady had a baby at one and the power went out at the other. If you’d eaten there that night, you’d probably have remembered it. So…”

Carson closes his eyes as what I’m saying connects. “So the alibi doesn’t hold up. We didn’t get dinner that night.”

“I don’t think so,” I say.

Carson exhales and lifts me off his lap like I weigh nothing, sliding me down onto the bench beside him. He tilts his head back and stares up at the gazebo roof. “I’m glad to know,” he says, though his voice sounds more than a little flat.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. But I don’t…” Carson swallows, then shakes his head.

“What?” I ask.

“My dad was the one that suggested I tell the police we had dinner together that night. We get dinner in Lithia every so often, so it wasn’t a crazy suggestion. But I don’t know…I don’t know if I’d have said it if he hadn’t brought it up. If he hadn’t convinced me that we’d been together that night,” Carson says, swallowing.

“It’s possible he didn’t really remember either, though—“

“Or it’s possible he knew I’d cover for him. I didn’t take much convincing. It should have been harder— I mean, a woman was murdered, and I basically just nodded and said sure, Dad, if you say we were having dinner, we were having dinner.” Carson looks disgusted with himself, his chest rising and falling in the predatory, animalistic way that it does when he’s on the football field— only now, the opponent is his own past. “I knew something was weird about it. I knew it felt seriously off. But I let myself be manipulated so easily.”