Page 22 of The False Flat

He looked down and smiled at the bird. “Good as new.”

“You’re done?”

“Yep. And everything’s covered.” He stepped over to me, the animal tucked firmly under his arm. “Just an ornery chicken.”

I stood, then stepped closer to Grant and the bird, squinting so I wouldn’t accidentally see the injury. I calmed at the sight of sweet little beady eyes and ran a shaking hand over soft feathers.

Grant looked down the empty road. “Heartless jerks. At least you stayed. Thanks for your . . . help.”

“Does it count if I was wishing the whole time that I’d left with them?”

He laughed. His laugh was nice. “It counts.”

He gestured toward the farmhouse and told me he was going to take the bird home.

He blinked. I blinked. The chicken blinked.

“I’ll come with you.” Why was I drawn to a situation that also repulsed me? The sun reflected off a golden fleck in his eye. “I don’t know how to get to our next stop anyway.” That was why I was following him. Right?

“Marcy Jo’s? You keep going straight. Run right into it.”

As we moved forward, a teenage boy wearing a white T-shirt and jeans materialized beside us. He took the chicken and, after listening to what had happened, thanked Grant, all while rubbing his face against the bird’s feathers and whispering, “You know better, wild Gloria.” The boy tipped his head. “We’ll get her seen to.” He bellowed another “thank you” as he backed away and then ran up the hill.

Disappointment curled in my stomach. I ignored it, passing it off as a side effect from helping the chicken and not from my realization that we weren’t going to be walking up to the farmhouse alone together.

Grant put his hand on the fence next to us. “William’s a cheat. We had an unofficial bet going on, first to Marcy Jo’s.”

“Racing?” I needed to be back on my bicycle. There was too much about this man, this ride, that chicken.

“Yeah, William was behind me before—”

He cut himself off as I ran over to my bicycle, hopped on, and took off, a little plume of dust spitting out from the back of my tires as I bumped onto the asphalt.

“I thought you said you didn’t know how to get there!” he shouted.

I called out over my shoulder, “You keep going straight. Can’t miss it.”

The split rail fence at Marcy Jo’s Mealhouse supported twelve bicycles. I was the thirteenth. The last. The loser because Grant had caught up to and passed me.

A smiling woman in a lightweight blue sweater and jeans greeted me when I walked through the very red door, said her name was Marcy, and gestured animatedly toward two mismatched tables that were so scratched up they were charming and had been pushed together to accommodate the large cycling party.

Grant was at the other end of the table, and as soon as our eyes met, my stomach twitched for some ridiculous reason, and I stuck out my tongue at him like a child.

He grinned.

I ordered—biscuits and gravy, even though I wasn’t hungry—then sat beside Dani, who immediately started talking like I’d been there the whole time. I inhaled, turned everyone into agreeable numbers, and nodded like I was fascinated by the fact that Dani’s daughter had perfect pitch.

Despite my effort to ignore the men at the other end of the table, my ears, and eyes, had other ideas, damn them.

“I don’t know anyone in their forties that can put food away like you can and still look like a beanpole,” Grant said.

William pushed a healthy bite into his mouth. “Not forty yet.”

Grant dusted his mouth off in an effort to hint at the jam on William’s face. “Your table manners are obscene.”

“Someone didn’t throw a chicken at you.”

“You’re lucky you didn’t kill her.”