Trouble (Dogwood Lane 3)

“Yeah,” I say with a giggle. “I do.”

I take out a white pencil. The tip is a plethora of colors, and I can imagine that when you sharpen it, the shavings look like rainbows.

“This is nice.” I hold it up. “Very colorful.”

“Okay. To be honest here, Mia gave me that. But the colors reminded me of paint, and I thought that since you’re an artist, you might like it.”

My heart tugs in my chest. “I do. Thank you.” I reach in and take out the next item. “A multipurpose tool. Smart.”

“Knowing you’re a city girl, I figured you didn’t have one. Every country girl needs a good multitool. Never know when you’re gonna need to fillet a fish or screw something in—like your speaker. Did you ever get that hung?”

I set the tool down. “Let’s not ruin the moment. Moving on . . .”

The next item is a bright-red flyswatter. I hold it up.

“So, that’s for flies by design, but you’ll really need it for mosquitoes in the summer. But it can be used in the bedroom if . . .” He stops when I smack the table in front of him. The grin on his face is priceless.

“Fly- or mosquito-swatter. Got it. I’m sure that will be handy.” I set it down and spy a bright-orange candy wrapper with peanut-butter-filled chocolate cups. “Oh, I love these.”

“I knew you would.”

I laugh. “Did you really?”

“Doesn’t everyone?”

“Not people with peanut allergies,” I point out.

“Do you have allergies?”

“Just to bullshit,” I say, picking up the last item from the box. It’s an expired ticket to a circus. I laugh. “What’s this?”

He turns his head so he’s looking at me out of the corner of his eye. “That is a ticket to the Dogwood Lane Tour.”

“Funny. It says it’s a ticket to the Long Family Circus, expired in 2018.”

“Well, it has multiple purposes.” He turns to face me. “If you want someone to show you around, a tour of the paths less traveled, you can cash that ticket in at any time.”

“No strings attached?”

He rolls his eyes and falls back in his chair. “Why do you think everything comes with a string?”

“Because they do.”

“Like . . . what string would I attach to an expired ticket to a circus? Make me dinner afterward? Although, by the smell in here, I’m not sure I’d want you cooking for me.”

I pick up the flyswatter and smack it at him. He ducks, laughing so freely that I can’t help but join him.

His laugh is addictive. It’s interesting that he doesn’t know how normal it is to have strings attached to everything. He’s almost . . . naive. There’s not a hateful bone in this man’s delectable body. And I like it. I like the easiness of this in the face of the kiss.

It feels good. I didn’t expect it to be like this, and I’m not quite sure what to do now.

Once we’re settled and the room is quiet again, I take a deep breath. I don’t want to go too deep with this and tell him who my mother is or that I grew up with the family known as America’s New Camelot. I don’t want that. I like the way he looks at me now. Like I’m just Avery Perry, hairdresser and painter.

Still, he’s made an attempt at friendship, and I should do the same.

I take a deep breath and prepare to open up to him a little. It only seems fair. Maybe it’ll help him understand where I’m coming from.

“One of the reasons I moved here,” I say carefully, “is because everyone I know wants something from me. Not just me, but from everyone. No one just does anything nice for the sake of being nice. It’s to get a leg up, to move up the ladder.”

He narrows his eyes. “And you were able to move people up the ladder.”

“In some ways, yes,” I say with a gulp. “But I just . . . I don’t trust people. I think people are fake more often than not. Whether they try to be or not is a different question and one I’ve battled with therapists over my whole life. Either way, I’m tired of all that. I just want to relax and be surrounded by people who I know aren’t putting on airs.”

“That must have really sucked.”

That sentence, five simple words, sums up my existence in California to a T. It sucked. It always sucked. It sucked from the day I caught my mom doing cocaine in the bathroom and she bought me a fancy watch in return for never telling my dad. I knew, from that moment on, that nothing was as it seemed. If my own relatives kept secrets with bribery and lies, how much worse would it be outside the family unit? Nowhere felt safe from the manipulation.