Page 19 of Summer's Edge

“You’re just such a gentleman, aren’t you?” she says as she catches up to me. It sounds like an insult.

I grin at her over my shoulder. “When I want to be.”

She huffs and falls in step with me.

“I wish you weren’t,” she mutters, and I can’t help laughing.

Just yesterday morning, while I was still stuck in my tiny cell, I figured I’d probably never laugh again. Hell, for the last ten years, I haven’t laughed fully. But it’s easy to do it with Summer. Probably because this whole situation is just an anomaly, just a stolen little piece of time that will end soon and won’t ever come again. So why not make the best of it? Why not take full advantage?

I should stop thinking that too.

It’s around noon on a weekday so the vast supermarket is blissfully empty. Except for a couple of bored-looking cashiers the place is virtually a ghost town. I grab the first black baseball cap I see—an LA Kings hockey club one, of all things—and put it on, pulling it low over my face.

“Can you even see anything now?” Summer asks in her signature sassy style.

“I see just fine.”

“I could’ve given you a total makeover before we came here… I wish I’d thought of that,” she says. “Then no one would recognize you… unless I made you look like Brad Pitt or something.”

“I’d never let you put makeup on my face.”

She looks put out for real by that. So much so she’s struck speechless.

“Let’s get a move on,” I add.

“I don’t even know what we need,” she says, leaning over the handles of the cart and looking this way and that. “Or where anything is.”

I scoff. “Don’t you women all have like a sixth sense about where stuff is in stores?”

She gives me a shocked look. Maybe I went too far trying to be funny. But the thing is, with every minute that passes in this place I see my stupid tiny prison cell growing closer again.

“I survive on coffee, soda, chips and the occasional frozen something,” she says. “But something tells me you’re not big on that. What with your muscles to upkeep and your two percent body fat and whatnot.”

“Two percent? I wish.”

She narrows her eyes at me, and I wish I hadn’t tried to be funny again.

“All right, I’ll get the meat and the vegetables, and you get the snacks,” I suggest.

“Fine. But just don’t get more than you can carry.” She winks at me and rolls the cart away towards the chips and such aisle.

I make short work of getting some meat to throw on the barbecue, stuff to marinate it in. I also pick up potatoes that will bake nicely in the embers, along with butter and sour cream to go with them, and assorted veggies.

She’s already waiting for me near the cash registers when I’m done, my arms shaking from the weight of everything. The cart is about half full of chips and dips, cookies, a bunch of cokes and way too many cartons of iced coffee.

“You do realize we don’t have a car?” I ask her.

She runs her hand over my right biceps and squeezes, her touch electrifying.

“But you’re as strong as Thor.”

For some reason, and even though I know she’s just teasing me, the compliment feels good.

“Yeah, we’ll see how much I can actually carry,” I say and start emptying the cart onto the cash register belt. “You’re paying, after all.”

She laughs, then stands between me and the cashier lady who looks half asleep as she slides each item over the register.

The stuff we bought fills six shopping bags and the handles start digging into my palms painfully before we even clear the empty parking lot. She takes two of the bags from my hands without saying anything and without taking my protest that I got it seriously.

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