Page 126 of Just (Fake) Married
Camping was literally the last thing I wanted to do today, but I woke up to three large men standing at the edge of my bed before dawn. I might have been alarmed if they hadn’t been showing me a phone screen with Seth’s goofy smile.
“Get your shit together,” Carter told me, stone faced.
“Cause they are gonna kick the shit out of you!” Seth crowed on a fuzzy FaceTime call. “Damn, I wish I was there to see it.”
Diablo was finally done pissing and was in no hurry to catch up with everyone. Instead, ignoring me, he sidled up to a fallen tree at the side of the trail and rubbed up against it. Squeezing my leg between the tree and his body.
“Knock it off,” I said, pulling the reins in the opposite direction.
“Having trouble with my horse?” Tag asked.
“You did this on purpose.” I hadn’t been on a horse in years and I’d never felt so much like a city slicker. Ever.
“Might have.”
“If this is about Harmony, you should know she left me!”
Tag shook his head and turned the horse he was riding away from me. Diablo, obviously over me, tried to turn around and go back to the barn.
Finally, we got to the bend in Sugar Creek where we always camped. And the sight of it hit me in the chest like a two by four.
This. This place had been the source of all my happiness growing up. Because my mother left the raising of her boys to her husband and her husband didn’t understand I wasn’t exactly like him. But here, it was my brothers who knew me and loved me and I could be myself here.
There was a grove of trees and a sandy spot at the river where we could stand and fish.
By the time Diablo and I showed up, Mac was submerging a bottle of whiskey in a patch of lingering snow drift by the creek bed. Tag was building the fire and Carter was already tying a hook on his fishing line.
“Don’t worry everybody, I made it here just fine,” I said to them.
No response.
“It’s bullshit you brought me out here if you’re not even going to talk to me,” I said.
“We’ll talk when we’re ready,” Carter said. “You can set up the tent.”
Setting up the tent was a bullshit job. The job we always made Mac or Eli, when he was able to join us, as the youngest do.
Mac grinned at me over by the creek. “I think it’s missing some poles,” he said. “Good luck.”
“Come on!” I cried. “If you’re going to yell at me, just do it.”
“Nothing to yell about,” Carter said, dropping his line in the stream. The trout here were always biting and in almost no time he pulled out his first fish.
“She left me,” I said. “Not the other way around.”
“What did you say to her?” Tag asked. And frankly, the fact that Tag thought he might know something about the rich, internal life of women was hilarious to me. As far as I knew, he hadn’t dated anyone seriously since high school.
“Nothing!” I said, and a cold chill went down my spine.
“Yeah?” Carter said, eyeing me. “And what did she say to you?”
That she loved me.
We both know you’ll get the job.
This was about Phoenix.
“I have a job interview in Arizona the day after the festival,” I confessed. Stunned, the boys stared at me before swearing the air blue.
