Page 19 of My Grumpy Sweetheart
“The activities?” I asked, my head swirling from all the information. I’d been gone for maybe five minutes. To me, that didn’t seem to be enough time to even cover that much of someone’s life story. But apparently, there’d been other topics, too.
“Oh yeah. Right. There’s breakfast — duh. Then at ten, we meet to go to one of the old apple meadows — like the newer meadows have the apple trees planted in neat rows, but the really, really old ones are more meadow than trees. There, we’ll have like an hour or two to pick as many apples as we want, and then at noon, there’s an apple pie making class where we can use part of our apples to make pie. Oh… and I think we’re making apple butter and apple sauce and or jam is this afternoon… so we need, like, a lot of apples.”
Yeah. It sounded like it.
* * *
If I’d been alone and not accompanied by a guy who’d bought me for the weekend as well as about ten other couples who’d signed up for the orchard experience, I’d have probably enjoyed wandering through the seemingly endless apple meadows, listening to the buzzing of bees and wasps, enjoying the sun on my face and the light breeze in my hair.
But alas, they were here with me. As was our guide.
Sean.
The guy who’d disclosed his whole life story to Bailey yesterday. The guy who kept stealing glances at Bailey who was walking along beside me, his arm occasionally brushing against mine. The guy who tried throwing flirty smiles in the direction of the one he had to believe was my date.
How fucking rude.
Rolling my eyes, I glared extra hard at him, trying to kill him with a single look. Needless to say, it didn’t work. But after I caught him staring at Bailey for the fourth time, he got the message and kept his sleazy eyes to himself.
God. What was it with the tiny ray of fucking sunshine next to me that the whole world seemed to think it was appropriate to harass him? First, the comments under his videos, now the slimy sleazeball of an apple orchard tour guide.
“Are you okay?” Bailey asked quietly, hesitating a second before laying his hand on my forearm.
“Why wouldn’t I be?” I was fine. Peachy.
“You look like you really don’t want to be here,” he mumbled, cocking his head in that cute way that showed his piercing blue eyes, which were often hidden beneath his blond locks. “You know this is supposed to be a fun date, right? So if you hate the idea of apple picking, we can totally skip it and just do our own thing. I want you to have fun here, and I’m down for basically anything.”
Don’t go there, I told my mind, but that fucker didn’t listen, coming up with different scenarios in which Bailey might’ve muttered the exact same sentence.I’m down for basically anything.
I didn’t need to think about him that way. He’d thought it was appropriate tobuyme for fucks sake!
“It’s fine. I just… didn’t sleep well.”
An utter and complete lie.
“Oh…” Bailey pouted for a second, then grinned at me deviously. “At least you weren’t woken up by someone literally shoving you out the bed.” A giggle bubbled up from his chest again. “Not that anything would’ve happened if I’d tried shoving you. I mean… look at you. And then look at me.” He waved his hand up and down his slim body.
And look I did. At his blue eyes and rosy cheeks, at the little dimple in his pointy chin and the slim, snub nose. At his wavy blond hair that reflected the sunlight, making it look like gleaming, woven gold. At the oversized hoodie he was sporting that was so big on him, I wouldn’t be surprised if it actually fit me.
Not for the first time, I thought that he looked so much younger than he had to be for the position he had. He looked younger, while I probably looked older than my thirty-two years of age. Or maybe it was my beard. Or the frown. My grandma had always told me to stop frowning so much or one day it’d stick. Guess she was right.
Suddenly, the ground beneath my right foot gave way, and I was rudely pulled out of my thoughts by the fast-approaching grass.
“Oh fuck,” I grunted just as my body hit the ground and the air got punched out of my lungs.
“Are you okay?” Bailey kneeled beside me, his eyes wide with worry.
I coughed. “Yeah, I’m fine.” The good part about falling on a meadow was that the ground was soft. There might be a me-shaped dent now, but at least I didn’t feel more than a dull ache.
“That’s good,” Bailey said, offering me his hand to help me get back on my feet. A sweet gesture I almost declined because compared to me, he was just so small and almost fragile. But when I took his hand, his grip was surprisingly firm, as was his pull. After I was standing upright again, his eyes searched my body like he was expecting a bone to randomly stick out somewhere. “You know,” he began after making sure I really was okay, his smile turning a little devious, “I know I said nothing would happen if I shoved you, but I didn’t mean you had to avenge me by knocking yourself to the ground. You can’t be the perpetrator and the knight in shining armor at the same time.”
I snorted involuntarily. Really, I didn’t want him to be funny. Unfortunately, he was. “Would you consider yourself a damsel in distress?” I asked with a raised brow.
Bailey huffed, puffing up his cheeks, putting his hands on his hips while attempting to reply with what I knew was going to be a lot of snark and a little indignity — at least if his facial expression were anything to go by — but Sean deemed this the perfect moment to go over the boring ass rules for the apple picking contest. Because yeah, apparently it was a contest, and apparently you could pick apples the wrong way.
It wouldn’t even have occurred to me to pick obviously not ripe apples since Bailey said we’d use them later, and trying to hide branches in your basket to make it appear fuller was just low.
The other couples or contestants spread out quickly, running towards the nearest trees, frantically searching for apples, while I was standing there, mouth agape.
