AllFreeNovel
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Yeah. The snow isn’t your real problem.
Because then he thought of her. And his whole body went tight.
Yes. Maybe she was the problem. And that kiss.
He hadn’t been able to help himself. She had been there and she had just looked so... She was beautiful. Which seemed insipid, actually. He kept thinking it. Over and over again. But it didn’t capture what he felt when he looked at her. Which was something beyond appreciating her beauty.
Something that went right down deep. Something visceral and primal and...
Now there was snow in his boot. Dammit. That really pissed him off.
He growled and started to walk over to the woodpile. “Hey Brody.”
He turned around, and there was a kid. Walking... Literally in his footsteps. Literally in his footsteps in the snow. And if anything had ever terrified him in his life, it was what he was looking at right now.
If anything could have drawn a bigger line underneath what a mistake his kissing Elizabeth was, he couldn’t think of what it might be.
“Kid,” he said. “How you doing?”
“Good. It’s snowing.” As if he would obviously be good because of the snow. Kids, man.
“Yeah, you would like snow.”
“Huh?”
“It’s a fact. Kids like snow,” he said.
“Yeah. Because snow is good.”
Spoken like a little beast who didn’t have to be outside longer than he wanted to, and who had a mom waiting back in the house to make him cocoa.
“What’s good about it, then?” he asked. “Can you tell me?”
Benny looked at him like he was an idiot. “It’s fun to play in.”
“Maybe that’s the problem,” Brody said. “I have to work in it.”
“What work are you doing?”
“I’m about to go chop some wood. For my place, and I figured that you and your mom might need some too.”
“Can I help?”
He thought about what Elizabeth’s face would do if she was standing there and heard him agree to let her son help him with a task that involved an axe.
He had a feeling that what followed would involve parts of his body and an axe, and he wasn’t into that.
“Sure,” he said, carefully. “I’ll find something for you to do. Come with me.”
The kid kept on walking, taking big leaps to plant each one of his footsteps into Brody’s.
Brody had to turn away.
“Does your mom know where you are?” Brody asked.
“She told me to go outside and play because I was driving her crazy.”
“Did she?” He wondered if Elizabeth was as foul tempered as he was. He was pretty mad at himself.
