Page 27 of A Bear's Secret

“What’d the startup do?” asked Austin. Now he was tearing one of the giant sandwiches apart as carefully as possible, trying not to let the roast beef and tomato and lettuce fly everywhere.

“It was for an app that helped people find parking in Seattle,” she said. “Well, in theory. We could never get it to work. I thought we still had a couple months left of venture capital funding, but I guess that went into the custom espresso machine, the video game room, and the ball pit.”

Austin and Trevor looked at each other.

“You had a ball pit?” Trevor asked. He still had half a biscuit in his hand, and was just staring at Sloane.

“I know,” she said. “It was a dumb thing to spend money on.”

“Seattle sounds weird,” Austin volunteered.

“Why, we don’t spend our days roping cows?” Sloane teased.

“Yesterday I fixed a fence and spent a while using Quickbooks, thank you very much,” Austin said.

“I made pancakes this morning,” Trevor said. “I haven’t roped a cow in weeks.”

“Well, I haven’t been in a ball pit in weeks,” Sloane said. “So there.”

She stuck her tongue out at Austin and Trevor, and they both laughed. Trevor could hear someone coming up the trail, still pretty far away. They were talking loudly, but for once, he didn’t care.

Let some hikers see the three of them together. What did it matter? For the first time in ages, he got to spend time with his mate — real time, not just sex in the cabin in the middle of the night — and it felt perfect.

“I was actually training to do part of the PCT anyway,” she said. “I was going to take time off work and hike from Washington to Oregon, so when I got let go, I just sort of... expanded that plan.”

Trevor nodded. Then he reached over and grabbed the other half of the sandwich that Austin was eating, his hand brushing Austin’s leg, not caring if Sloane saw.

It’s so strange that such a little thing can feel so liberating, he thought.

One of the voices on the trail up to the overlook was shouting, and he and Austin exchanged an annoyed glance.

Why do people have to ruin such nice places like that?He wondered.

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