Page 85 of The Spark Between Us

Finn coughed “bullshit” into his hand and slapped me on the back.

I pointed to the railings that framed out the deck, running my hand over the smooth wood. “What can I tell you about the materials? Are you thinking redwood?” Anything to shift the conversation someplace else.

Shaking his head, Finn rose to his feet. “I’ve already ordered a cord of maple for my deck, and the design is nearly done. I just wanted to get away from my sisters and the jackasses they’re engaged to so we could talk.”

He started to walk back through the bedroom, but I felt like there was more to say. “Hey. Thanks for being cool about...things. I swear, I didn’t mean to fall for her—"

“Dude, Please. You have my blessing. Just keep on making her happy, and it’s all good.”

* * *

An hour later,the long table Sarah had painstakingly set was a demolished mess of half-full wine glasses, plates with scraps of chicken piccata, and four different kinds of sourdough sliced up for dipping in olive oil.

No one could eat another bite, and even the peonies looked limp and exhausted. But not Sarah’s family. They were primed and ready for a raucous game of running charades.

“Okay, okay, let me explain,” Sarah said, standing at the head of the table. “It’s like regular charades where you have to act out a TV show or movie or book or whatever, except we’re doing it in teams, and each time your team guesses correctly, you have run over to me and get the next word to act out.”

The game fit Sarah’s personality perfectly. She liked control, so she came up with all the word clues, and she didn’t like being the center of attention so she wouldn’t have to act anything out herself.

“So if the movie was Sixteen Candles I might do this.” She mimed blowing out candles on a birthday cake and acted out some other ridiculousness to demonstrate the number sixteen. “Everyone got it?”

And the games began.

The whole thing was a giant clusterfuck because Becca guessed so loudly that the other team could hear her from across the yard and using her guesses to help them. And Finn was such a perfectionist that he kept starting to act something out, and then he’s come up with a better way to do it.

I laughed my ass off for about an hour straight and felt pretty pleased when their mom correctly guessed my charade for Dead Poet’s Society. “That was a hard one,” I admitted, impressed she’d nailed it based on my charade of a dead guy reading a book.

“Braden, but you and I, we’re—” She pointed two fingers at her eyes and then at me.

“Seriously, I thought the movie was Death by Book or something,” Cherry trilled.

Every so often I’d lock eyes with Sarah across the yard and find it impossible not to smile at her.

Where did we stand? I couldn’t have said for certain, but if Finn was right, this was more than temporary. She had to feel it too.

A bit later, things were quieting down, and I started cleaning up the table, taking a few stray glasses into the house. I hadn’t realized Sarah had gone into the kitchen with Isla until I reached the patio door and heard them talking.

“I miss our hikes,” Isla was saying.

“Oh, I need a hike badly,” Sarah said. “We’ll be able to do it soon. When I get back to the real world.”

“Perfect. I’m holding you to it.”

I turned and went back outside, still holding the glasses. I left them on the table and went over to pour some of that Scotch Finn had been drinking. I needed something more potent than wine.

“When I get back to the real world.” She actually said those words. Her time in Carolwood was still a vacation from her real life, a little suspended animation that allowed her to indulge in a fling with a fireman.

While I’d been wringing my hands and sweating over telling Finn the way things were between us, explaining that I wasn’t just messing around, admitting that I was falling in love with her, Sarah was planning to go hiking as soon as she got back from fantasy land.

As it should be.

Sarah dreamed of being a tenured professor. She’d worked for ten years, studying her way through a PhD program and working her tail off on the tenure track. What seemed like a deviation from her path wasn’t a deviation at all—it was proof she deserved to get the tenured position she wanted. Everything she’d done had followed her plan—she’d told me that the first night she was here.

The only thing that didn’t fit into her plan was me.

Of course this was only temporary. Brilliant scientists on the tenure track with plans for how their lives will unfold don’t give up their dreams to live with guys who give them great orgasms.

“Hey, are you okay?” Finn asked, as I took a long sip of the Scotch. I usually didn’t drink this shit, and it burned my throat going down.

---