Page 37 of Finders Keepers
She points downward. “Beneath the stairs.”
“Thank you.”
My heart pounds even harder than it already was as I hurry back down. I pause on the landing, peeking around the banister to make sure Gladys is still occupied. Quentin has very smartly arranged them so that her back is to me. His eyes briefly meet mine over Gladys’s short gray hair, just long enough for me to give him a subtle headshake. He returns his attention to the woman in front of him, who is gesturing widely and with enthusiasm.
“Oh, hey, there you are,” Quentin says, making more direct eye contact with me now that I’m down the stairs and in the foyer.
“I had to run to the bathroom,” I volunteer—perhaps unnecessarily.
His eyebrows rise as if they’re speaking a language of their own, attempting to communicate something to me. “I was just talking to Ms. Gladys about the wedding.”
“The wedding?”
His eyebrows jump farther up, emphasizing his original intended message. “Yes. Our wedding.”
It takes me a full two seconds to register what he has said and why he has said it. “Right, yes!Ourwedding.” I draw the words out strangely, emphasizing the wrong syllables.
Quentin holds a business card between two of his fingers.“She very kindly gave me the event coordinator’s information so we can set up a time to come back and check out the place more thoroughly.” It must be my imagination that he stresses the last word, because Gladys doesn’t seem to notice.
“Oh, great. That’s…great. Thanks…lovemuffin.” Lovemuffin? What the actual fuck? I’m pretty sure I’ve never even thought that combination of words in my life, so why did I just say them?
Quentin smiles to conceal his urge to laugh, then schools his features expertly as he responds, “My pleasure, cookiepuss.”
“Oh, aren’t you cute together!” Gladys exclaims.
“Some might say too cute,” I mutter under my breath. Quentin must hear, though, because the side of his shoe makes not-exactly-soft contact with mine.
“Ms. Gladys told me that they usually hold ceremonies outside. Do you want to go check out the gardens while we’re here, since the weather’s nice?”
“Definitely,” I say, grateful for the excuse to get the hell out of here.
We thank Gladys again for the tour, make a show of putting another ten-dollar bill into the suggested donation box on the front table, and reemerge into the rising mid-June heat.
I assumed we’d actually head to the parking lot, but Quentin was apparently serious about lingering in the gardens. His hand comes to my lower back and he steers me toward the brick path leading around the side of the Castle. I want to be annoyed about it, but it’s a difficult feeling to muster when liquid warmth is seeping through the entire lower half of my body in response to his touch.
“In case she’s watching,” he explains. I sort of doubt Gladys is peeking out of a second-story window to make sure we’re goingwhere we said we would and acting properly in love on the way there. But whatever.
I don’t feel like meandering around, the humidity making the temperature feel about ten degrees hotter. So I settle on the bench inside the shade of the mushroom folly, the concrete cool against the backs of my thighs. “So we’re engaged now?”
“Yep,” Quentin says. He doesn’t sit beside me, choosing instead to lean against one of the bulbous support pillars that hold up the mushroom’s cap. “Hope you don’t mind too much.”
“Perhaps you can explain to me how that came to be, then I can decide how much I mind.”
“I figured it wouldn’t hurt to have a backup plan in case you were unsuccessful with your sneaking. Which I assume you were, considering how quickly you came back down. What happened?”
“Ran into a cleaning lady, so I had to pretend I was looking for the bathroom. Got out of there as fast as I could.”
“Ah. Well, then it’s lucky I realized us being a couple interested in Sprangbur as a potential wedding venue gives us a chance to contact their event coordinator for a tour. Aprivatetour.”
“You don’t think the event coordinator might be even more eagle-eyed than Gladys, considering we’ll be the only people they’ll need to keep track of?”
“Probably. But don’t worry. I have a plan.”
I groan. “Oh god.” Now I’m extra worried. “Quentin, your plans have historically not been particularly successful.”
There was the time he tried to catch a local cryptid called the snallygaster when we were eight and he wound up stuck inside a net suspended from the tree in his backyard for three hours. Or the time when he constructed an elaborate plan to sneakcandy after bedtime only to fall down the stairs and knock out one of his teeth. Once, in eighth grade, he was convinced that if he kept talking nonstop about a fake huge snowstorm coming at the end of the week, he could trick the district into closing school preemptively. (It obviously did not work.)
“That isn’t even—” He stops himself, thinking for a moment. “Okay, that may have been true. But my plans are much better these days, I promise.”
