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I covered my mouth, fighting hard not to laugh at how serious she sounded. “Fair enough.” Warmth prickled along my spine and when I looked back, Blaze wasn’t laughing; his focus solely on me.
“Do bees like shells?” Paisley went on, picking up a tiny conch from the sand and holding it out to me.
I pretended to think about it. “They probably would. Especially certain kinds of bees that don’t always live in hives.” I took the shell from her fingers and turned it over, exposing the hollow entrance.
“There are bees that don’t live in hives?”
Now it was my turn for my brows to lift. I’d taught her so much about bees—about honeybees, I was surprised and then not surprised that I hadn’t taught her this.
“Actually, most bees are solitary bees. The queen will find something like this, like a shell, and create her home inside it for her bee babies.”
She took the shell back from me. “So, it’s just one bee and her babies.”
“Yeah,” I said, uncertain if I’d just upset her with the truth. “Honeybees are special. How they live. How they work together. Their happiness in a hive.”
She didn’t seem to be hearing me, her attention locked on the shell.
“Do you want to take it back with us?” I wondered. “This way if there are any other bees hanging out by the hives, they can move into a new home.”
Paisley thought for a second and then bobbed her head. “Yeah,” she said and then asked. “Can we take more than one?”
“Sure. Why don’t you go find the best shell homes and we’ll bring them back.”
As she started off on her quest, I reached for my phone that just started buzzing in my back pocket.
“Hey, are you okay?” I answered Nox’s call.
“Yeah. Sorry about earlier. My alarm didn’t go off.”
“Oh. I thought maybe your phone died.”
“No, just couldn’t wake up.”
“You sure you’re okay?” I asked. It wasn’t out of character for Nox to oversleep or sleep in, but it was when it meant missing out on a commitment to one of us. Especially me.
“Yeah, I’m fine,” he replied, and not for the first time since he’d returned from Italy did he sound different than who he’d been before he left. “Sounded like you ended up with a more popular replacement anyway.”
I glanced over my shoulder, and Blaze’s eyes which had been following Paisley, snapped to mine for a beat before I looked away.
“Yeah, it all worked out,” I said a little quieter and inched toward the water.
“All right, well I gotta go. Just wanted to call and apologize.”
“Thanks. Talk to you later. Love you.”
“Love you, too,” Nox returned.
When I ended the call, I noticed the bright-red bubble with the obscene number of notifications on my social media. Wide-eyed, I opened the app and scrolled through photo after photo of Blaze and me at the farmers’ market. Then I saw that in the last five hours, my business had gained a thousand new followers. I started scrolling through the posts, realizing this was technically Blaze’s first appearance in public that wasn’t an off-guard moment stolen by the paparazzi. A wave of guilt ebbed through my chest. He was trying to stay out of the spotlight for Paisley, and because of me, he’d been drawn back in.
A photo from earlier caught my attention. Across the top someone had edited it with a text overlay that read ‘I wonder what honey brought Blaze a-buzzing.’ My stomach dropped and I scanned the image. In it, I was handing a bag and a receipt to one of my customers, and Blaze was watching me. Intensely.
I pulled my bottom lip between my teeth. We weren’t touching. We weren’t even really standing that close. But the way he looked at me, I saw exactly what the person on the other side of the camera did: a man who’d found something he wanted.
“Everything okay?”
I started, almost dropping my phone in the sand. “Yeah,” I said, my voice carrying an annoying squeak. “It’s just…the pictures from this morning are spreading, and…um…some rumors along with them.”
I showed him my phone. Better he knew what was being said now in case…well, I wasn’t sure. I guess in case he wanted to publicly denounce any kind of relationship between us.
