Page 58 of Rosie and the Beast Next Door

“Mmmhmm,” Rosie said distractedly as she snapped a few photos with her phone and then looked at them with a frown. I tried not to be offended.

“What?” I started to lower my arm, but her yelp of protest had me freezing in place. The muscles in my arm were starting to burn. I was accustomed to a variety of different workouts, but holding a paintbrush at a photo-friendly anglewhiletwisting mybody toward Rosiewhileflexing and “smiling as if I might be their friend” and “not squinting like I’m a movie cop from the nineteen-eighties” was an entirely different type of exercise.

“The sun is being weird.” She held up her phone again.

“Pretty sure the sun is constant.”

“Do you want to look like a red lollipop with caverns for eyes?” She moved to the right and took a few more pictures, directing me to “harden my jaw” while still looking approachable and friendly, and to “look less shadowed.”

But she was so dang cute, it was impossible to be irritated with her. The way my jersey skimmed the tops of her thighs as she stood on her tiptoes to find the right angle. The way she bit her bottom lip when she was concentrating, then her dimple deepened as she asked me to do impossible things made me want to attempt the impossible thing. Like using my thumb to tug that bottom lip away from her teeth and replacing it with my lips.

I let out a long, slow breath. Notthatimpossible thing, Dyl.

“Don’t move. That’s perfect!”

I stood for a million more pictures where I didn’t move a single inch. “Don’t you have a game this afternoon?” I asked.

She grumbled a yes, slipped the jersey off (to my dismay), stuck it and her phone in her backpack, and grabbed a roller. Her Icy Asps softball T-shirt was a faded orange and pilled from lots of washes. It was also splattered with every color of paint imaginable.

We’d been at the library for nearly an hour, and not much painting had gotten done.

“I thought you liked painting.”

She looked pointedly at the white paint on our rollers and gave me aget reallook that made me laugh.

“You don’t laugh enough,” she said. “I like when you do.”

I hadn’t had much to laugh about in a long time, but lightness spread through me. Being in Winterhaven was everything I hated and dreaded.

It was also everything I loved and longed for. Or, at least it used to be.

An entire innocent childhood of running around with my best friend in paradise, neither of us having any clue what the future had in store for us.

She dragged a line of white paint down the wooden siding, and I couldn’t tear my gaze away. This effect Rosie had on me—it was almost magic.

“So, a broken chair incident, huh?”

She leveled me with aI know what you’re trying to doglare. “Your dad has an exceptional talent for being in the wrong place at the wrong time when it comes to me.”

“Like dancing the Wobble to save some otters?”

She gasped and whirled toward me, paint splattering on me as she did. I grinned without remorse. “Who told you?”

“My dad.”

“What about HIPPA? My fifth-amendment rights? Pinkie promise code?” With every question, more paint splattered onto the plastic we’d laid down before starting. At this rate, we were going to look like we had a white-spot disease.

“You made my dad pinkie promise?” I snorted, imagining my dad’s huge, work-worn pinkie engulfing her dainty one.

“No, but I should have,” she mumbled.

As she furiously painted the wall in a haphazard way, she grumbled something I couldn’t hear, but might have been a string of swear words, followed by, “Anyone could have mistaken that broken chair for a toilet, even Mr. High and Mighty Sheriff Savage.”

“Wait. What?”

The intense painting paused. “He didn’t tell you that part?”

“Nope.” Did I sound way too happy as I popped that p? Well, that was subjective. I think I was the exact right amount of happy for this information.

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