Page 52 of Little Bird
“I can,” she answers. “He knows a good idea when he hears it.”
“Not when it comes from me,” I note.
She laughs. “He can’t hear it when it comes from you. He needs a woman to point out when he’s wrong. You two have been on your own for too long. You’ve gone feral.”
I’m immediately offended. “Well, that’s a stretch.”
I can feel her stare on my face like she’s pointing a fucking laser beam at me. “Is it? How often do you do laundry? Speak to each other? When’s the last time you two had dinner together before I arrived, Gabe?”
My will to argue with her wilts at every question, because I know I don’t have a good answer for any of that. My father and I haven’t had a decent conversation in years, and until last night, when he suddenly told me to go upstairs and get in shower to warm up, I would have told you he didn’t care if I lived or died.
Maybe she’s right, and we have gone feral.
And I didn’t even realize it until she pointed it out.
We have the almost unbelievable luck of finding two pine trees down in the same meadow, both of them having fallen with the weight of the snow in their branches, and my father and I get to work immediately, trimming the branches off to expose the trunks while Taryn sits in the ATV and gives us helpful advice.
“Don’t you think you should work from the bottom?” she asks.
As we start at the top.
I swing my axe, grinning as it goes clean through the first branch. I glance up at her, stupidly hoping she saw it, and immediately feel like some sort of puppy when I see her lifted brow.
“What?” I ask, pretending I don’t know why she’s looking at me like that.
She lifts her other brow, her expression suddenly all innocence, and I bark out a laugh.
“What?” she asks sweetly.
This girl.
“We start from the top because it gives us the best vision of what the tree is,” my father cuts in. “Which Gabe would have told you if he wasn’t so busy flirting with you.”
I swing the axe again, cutting neatly through another branch, and rest it in the snow, throwing my shoulders back and turning my chest in Taryn’s general direction. “Flirting? Looks like I’m already through two branches, whereas you’ve only done one.”
He scoffs and cuts through the next branch, then throws some side eye in my direction.
I don’t miss the way his eyes turn to Taryn, though. Or the twitch of his lips when he sees her looking.
I hide my own grin, thinking privately that Taryn might be right about my dad needing a woman to order him around. I’ve seen him smile more today than I’ve seen in the last four years.
Not that I can say that out loud. He’d probably murder me where I stand.
Instead, I go back to chopping, taking off branch after branch as Taryn watches, shouting out encouragement and opinions.
“Remind me why we brought you again?” I ask, after one comment about my form.
“Because I’m the one who brings the fun,” she says cheerfully.
“Fun because you’re sitting there not having to do anything,” my father huffs.
“Who says I’m not doing anything?” she retorts.
We both have our backs to her at this point, which means we don’t have any warning when she launches the first snowball. It hits my father squarely in the back of the head, and he roars with surprise. I double over in laughter at the sight of him with snow plastered through his hair and nearly go to my knees at the sight.
Then another snowball hits me in the face, and I stop laughing.
I whirl to see that Taryn’s been busy since we stopped watching her. She has an entire wall of snowballs in front of the ATV and is ducking below them, giggling like a maniac. It’s impossible to get to her, but when she pops up to throw another projectile at us, I see what her plan is.
