Pranked (60 page)

I
hadn’t intended
on throwing any punches in front of Sarah. At least, not yet. But this fucking asshole was pushing his luck.

Not only had the fat bastard called me out, he’d brought my reputation into question. I was Reid-fucking-Brody. I didn’t need to cheat at anything; I was just that good.

He
really
pushed my buttons. He also
really
distracted me from keeping an eye on Sarah like I should’ve been. This part, right here, is the story of how I almost lost her.

The first time, anyway.

I’d just pulled the trigger and knocked down another duck when I heard what almost sounded like a cry for help just over the noise of the people surrounding us, all of them cheering us on. We’d made something of a spectacle of ourselves and truth be told, I didn’t mind the attention. I liked it when people stopped and stared and stroked my ego with their awestruck gazes. Especially since I’d been called out in front of everyone by this drunk piece of shit who probably couldn’t shoot straight sober, let alone three sheets to the wind.

All I wanted to do was show him up. To prove to anyone and everyone watching what a sorry fuck he was. To uphold my reputation and put the final nail in the coffin where this accusation of cheating was concerned.

But that sound…

I turned just enough to look over my shoulder. Through the mass of bodies, I saw Sarah. She was toward the back of the crowd, her eyes wide and pleading, and she was yelling something that was lost in the noise of everyone around us. Someone tall and ugly had their hand wrapped tight around her tiny waist as they dragged her backwards, away from the crowd. Away from
me
.

I don’t even remember putting the gun down. I don’t remember turning and charging after her. All I remember is the moment my hand came into contact with hers—how cold her skin was. I wrapped my fingers around her wrist and felt her frantic pulse.

My other hand slammed into her aggressor’s chest, hard enough to send him stumbling backward. “What the fuck?” I demanded, pulling Sarah behind me. “Get your fucking hands off her!”

“Don’t, Reid,” Sarah began, but her voice sounded so small and far away from me that it was easy to ignore. I was
pissed.
Who the fuck was this guy?

He held up his hands. “Just a misunderstanding.”

“Bullshit!” I pushed him again, this time nearly slamming him against one of the other booths. “You some kind of pervert? A creep? You just go around grabbing girls, huh? Fuck no. You picked the wrong target tonight.”

“Reid…” Sarah was saying again. She sounded closer now. Through the red veil draped over my thoughts, I felt the brush of her fingers at my elbow. “Come on, let’s go.”

I yanked my arm away from her. “I want to know who you are,” I insisted, taking in the stranger before me—the stranger who had put his hands on Sarah. “Come on, motherfucker. Who are you?”

“It doesn’t matter. Please, Reid, don’t do this. I don’t want you to hurt him!”

Finally, I whirled on Sarah. “What? Why the hell not?”

A split second. That’s how long my attention was divided. Long enough for me to make eye contact with Sarah, to see the fear and concern on her face. There was something else there, too. Something that ran just a little deeper. Something that looked an awful lot like disgust.

It was enough to distract me. I never saw the punch coming until it landed.

Sarah shrieked and moved out of the way as I stumbled backward, a series of brilliant nebulas collapsing in front of my eyes. I was hurtling through the darkness of space, gravity a thing of the past as I struggled to maintain my footing on solid ground. Bastard had got me right in the jaw, right where that nerve is that’ll knock your lights out. But I wasn’t about to let myself collapse in front of Sarah, never mind this crowd. I wasn’t about to go down on account of some cheap-ass sucker punch.

While I breathed through the urge to faint, the crowd closed in around us. I could feel Sarah’s breath against my ear, soft and sweet as she whispered, “Reid? Reid, are you okay?”

I steadied myself and raised up, blinking away the last of the flashing lights. Doucheface was gone.

“Fucking hell,” I muttered. I hadn’t felt the pain quite yet, but I could tell my jaw was swelling. The words came out a little rough, a little slurred. My heart was pounding in my ears and the adrenaline in my veins made my hands shaky. My eyes darted over the crowd, but I couldn’t find that piece of shit who’d put his hands on Sarah. Either he’d high-tailed it out of the fairgrounds completely, or he knew how to blend in. Asshole.

Beside me, Sarah flinched. Gingerly, she brushed her fingertips over my face. “That looks bad…”

I pulled away from her. “What’d you expect? I had everything under control, Sarah. Right up until you started defending the jackass who tried to…” My anger waned just a little, replaced by confusion. “What the hell was he trying to do to you?”

“I… I don’t know,” she admitted, looking way more shaken than she’d been just a minute ago. She’d been ready to get between us before I’d gotten hit, but that bravery had departed once she’d seen what a well-placed punch could do. “He grabbed me around my waist, and…”

“Do you think he was trying to cop a feel?” I asked, still surreptitiously looking for any sign of her assailant. “Looked kinda like he was trying to drag you away.”

Sarah’s gaze grew distant. She refocused on the ground and lifted her shoulders in a shrug. “I don’t know, Reid. I was scared. I didn’t know what he was going to do to me.”

I watched her wring her hands. Something about this didn’t seem right to me, but it also looked like Sarah had no idea what the hell was going on. A naïve little Amish chick like her wouldn’t have had enough life experience to cultivate a poker face good enough to fool me. That bewildered look was genuine. Huffing out air through my nose, I said, “That’s exactly why you shouldn’t have stopped me. Who knows what he would’ve done to you if I hadn’t pushed him away? Assholes like that only understand one language: violence. You gotta beat the bad out of them.”

“That’s not how things work, where I’m from,” she whispered softly. “The Amish… we don’t do things like that.”

I snorted. “Like what? Try to molest people, drag them off to a white panel van?”

Sarah nodded. “Yes. And we don’t strike one another, either.”

I shook my head at her and turned away. Christ, it was like she thought she was better than me. Like her whole “community” was. She didn’t understand how dangerous it was out here, how sometimes words weren’t enough. It was dog-eat-dog in the real world. That “turn the other cheek” shit didn’t play.

I was about to tell her so when I noticed her eyes were gleaming. They were wet—she hadn’t started crying yet, but if I didn’t do or say something to stop her, she would be soon. And just like that, all the anger in me faded away, and I realized that maybe Sarah wasn’t trying to pull some holier-than-thou shit. Maybe she was just trying to explain to me how new this all was. How fucking terrifying.

“Hey,” I said gently, laying my hand on her shoulder. She trembled, but did not pull away. “You wanna get out of here? I mean, not the fairgrounds, but… away from the noise? These people?”

Slowly, Sarah raised her head to look up at me. When our gazes met, I could see the relief dancing in her beautiful eyes. She didn’t answer me—not with words—but I knew instantly what she wanted: a break from all this excitement.

“Come on,” I told her, grabbing the penguin she’d wanted from the vendor. “I know just the place we can go to be alone.” And I held her hand, guiding her to the Ferris wheel as she clutched that penguin so tight her knuckles turned pale.

W
hen I was a little girl
, I used to climb some of the big oak trees that grew on our property, and on our neighbors’ lots. All the children did, really. I wasn’t anything special. Except that, though I could hoist myself higher up than any other child dared, I wasn’t especially good at getting down. Father had to retrieve me on almost every occasion. It was one of the reasons I’d stopped climbing trees altogether, the other being that at a certain age, it became inappropriate for girls to go sitting in trees wearing skirts.

I could remember, so vividly, that sensation of fear and apprehension as I would lift myself higher and higher into the ancient, gnarled boughs of those trees, my heart swelling with pride at how far I was willing to go, how I could leave everyone behind me so easily. I was brave, I told myself. I was strong. An adventurer. An example.

That was how I’d felt trying to stop Reid Brody from assaulting the man who’d assaulted me. I’d felt, in those moments, I’d climbed to the very top of the tallest tree and everyone else was beneath me, looking up. I had to set an example.

But then that man had hit him, and Reid had gotten hurt—because of me—and all at once, I remembered that fatal flaw of mine. The girl who climbed, but could not get down.

I felt a little like that again as Reid took me to the Ferris wheel, an enormous, metal behemoth that sat square in the middle of the fairgrounds. We were surrounded on all sides by the hustle and bustle of the evening, cicadas singing from the fields, laughter and shouting and other noises all too human, all too much. Even this far away, I could still make out the ringing and dinging of the game booths, and each twinkling sound reminded me of the bruise along Reid’s jaw and how I had contributed to it.

But I’d done the right thing, hadn’t I? Risen above temptation—encouraged others to do the same? If I was going to spend time in the English world, shouldn’t I be trying to make it a better place? A more Godly place?

And how Godly was it for Reid to be harmed instead of that man? The latter had done something terribly wrong, the particulars of which I still couldn’t deduce. The former had only leapt to my defense. And yet, in my attempt to broker peace between them, I’d punished my defender and let the sinner get away. That wasn’t justice, Biblical or otherwise, and I felt like a fool.

My awareness of my mistake only intensified as Reid boarded one of the Ferris wheel cars with me and lowered the lap bar. I clung to it tightly as the attendant next to us pulled a lever and up we went, into the clouds. I held my breath on our ascent, the rickety car swinging like a cradle over the carnival below. People began to look like ants, and I too began to feel very small.

I glanced at Reid then. Purple splotches were beginning to spread beneath his beard, only partially hidden by the thickness of his facial hair. Every time I caught a glimpse, I felt awful. And yet somehow, beyond any reasoning I could conjure, that bruise made him even more attractive. Perhaps it reminded me that Reid was brave, too, and not in a childish way—in the way only a man like him could be.

I found myself admiring him, lost in these thoughts as the stars grew closer and the Earth faded away. I was just beginning to forget how incredibly high up we were when there was a metallic screech that rang through every spoke of the wheel and made our car shudder to a halt at the very top.

Instinctively, I seized Reid’s arm. He laughed and looked over at me, his grin lopsided, but warm. “Easy, easy. Just some technical difficulties, I’m sure. That’s all.”

“I don’t know what that means,” I breathed, remembering quite urgently that I’d been holding my breath. My face felt much too warm, especially at this height with the cool breeze stinging my cheeks. “But you don’t seem worried, so I suppose I shouldn’t be.”

“Don’t look down there,” Reid told me, reaching over with his free hand to tilt my chin up. I let him. His hand was so warm. “Look up. At the stars.”

Though my chest was tightening and I was only just beating back the panicked tide rising inside me, I obeyed Reid’s command and turned my gaze upward. The night was so black above us, like an unfathomably large ink stain that never began and never ended. There were a few wispy stretches of clouds lazily rolling by, tinged a bluish-purple, but they did nothing to conceal the vibrancy of the stars. They shone like crystals and seemed much larger and brighter than I’d ever seen them before. Then again, none of the oak trees back home were quite this high.

The pressure in my chest faded. The tension in my shoulders abated too, and I let out a little sigh. Beside me, I heard Reid chuckle. “Boy, you Amish girls really don’t take any risks, do you?”

It felt like an insult, but I couldn’t be sure. Reid often spoke in a semi-mocking tone, though everything that came out of his mouth that had to do with my people seemed derogatory, at best. Pursing my lips, I told him, “We just don’t see the value in senselessly exposing ourselves to danger. That’s all.”

As usual, I’d failed to strike a nerve in Reid the way he did with me. He just laughed. “What, you mean like this?”

Before I could realize what he was doing, Reid had lifted the lap bar and was standing on top of his seat, very carefully balancing with his arms out to his sides. A pit opened in my stomach and I gaped at him, eyes wide as he bent his knees and began rocking the car.

“Reid! Stop!”

“Stop?” He gave me an incredulous stare, then threw his arms open even wider. “But I’m king of the world!”

I wanted to grab him, but what if it knocked him off balance? What if Reid plunged to his death because I was so frantic to stop him from doing just that? He wasn’t listening to my pleas, though, so words wouldn’t do. I put my hands over my face instead. If I couldn’t see him, maybe it wouldn’t be so bad. “Lord God, you are going to get us killed…”

“Hasn’t happened yet,” Reid replied, and I hugged my knees to my chest. As soon as I did, I felt him stop and slowly, cautiously sit back down. A moment later, the lap bar was encroaching on my space and I sat up straight, letting him lower it back into place before me. “Hey, come on, Sarah. I was just…”

“Fooling around. I know.” I looked away from him, admiring the city’s skyline. Bright Falls was modest, as far as cities go—or so I’d heard tell from Hannah—but I had no real basis for comparison, so it all looked huge and sprawling to me. We must have been overlooking downtown, because the buildings were high—higher than us, even!—and towered over their surrounding small businesses and homes. Office buildings, surely, where people dressed in sharp suits so they could sit at a desk all day, banging away at a machine. Just thinking of it made me sad and claustrophobic. People weren’t meant to spend all their time indoors. How did they ever find time to bask in the sunshine, in the warm rays of God’s love?

“I don’t understand this place,” I said after a moment, so softly I wasn’t certain, at first, if I’d said it at all. “Or the people in it. Everything here is so… foreign to me. It seems like ages since my life was simple. You know, I never could have conceived of something like this. Not ever. But here I am riding it, looking up at the stars, so close to them I wonder if I might be able to reach out and touch…” I dug my teeth into my lower lip. “Everything is so much more different than I thought it would be. I knew the English world would be alien, but still…”

“You’re feeling homesick,” Reid said, as if he understood. But how could he? He was already home. I nodded, and he continued, “Why don’t you tell me about it, then? Home. If you think it’ll help.”

I hesitated for a moment. Could I really expect Reid to understand? Was it worth sharing details about my life with him, or would he just roll his eyes and laugh like he had thus far? We were so different, he and I, right down to the worlds we came from. What could he possibly hope to get out of this? For that matter, what kind of hope of making a connection did I have?

And was that what I wanted—to get closer to Reid? It was certainly what Hannah had pushed me into. Sure, I was curious. Reid was unlike anyone I’d ever met. But was that enough of a reason to go telling him my life story?

He didn’t press the issue, regardless of how long I stayed silent, though he did slip an arm behind my shoulders while I was debating. I sighed and leaned back against him. This was improper, surely, but it felt good to know he was there—that he was holding onto me, ensuring I came to no harm. Just like he had back when that man had grabbed me… and I’d come off so ungrateful…

Slowly, I said, “Home is… different from here. Very different.” Before Reid could say something snarky in reply, I added, “There’s a lot more space, for one thing. Fields and meadows, devoid of man’s touch. Farmland, too, though. And of course, we do have the village itself. But we know when to leave land well enough alone. Not everything was meant for us. Some things are meant to stay as God created them. We do our best to figure out what’s what.”

“Meanwhile, we turn every available scrap of land into a Starbucks or a parking lot,” Reid said with a low chuckle that made me look at him. He was shaking his head. “I can see how that’d be kind of a culture shock for you. But I’m sure there’s more.”

I nodded. “Yes. Much more. Like what happened down there, before—with that man.” I looked away again. I couldn’t bear to behold that bruise. “Reid… I’m sorry. I am grateful to you for trying to protect me. I was just… startled. And scared. Things like that don’t happen where I’m from. And I can’t condone violence of any kind, but given how things seem to work in the English world, I… accept that you felt you had no other choice. And considering what he did to you… you were obviously right.”

Reid let his fingers trail over my shoulder softly. His touch was feather-light, not at all how I’d imagined it, and goosebumps rose in the wake of his ministrations. I could feel my cheeks heating up again and I tried to look away, but he just swept his arm tighter around me and tugged until my head was nearly on his shoulder.

“Tell me more,” he said. “About how things work back home.”

I laughed nervously. “Well, this certainly wouldn’t be tolerated. Courtships aren’t very… physical affairs. That doesn’t come until after marriage.”

Reid laughed. I tried not to take offense to it. “How the hell can you know if you wanna marry someone if you don’t get to test drive them?”

I looked up at him, brows furrowed in confusion. The way Reid was grinning at me told me all I needed to know about that particular insinuation.

“Oh—you mean…” I bit my lip and came away with a thin layer of skin. “Well, you just… do. That’s not the most important part of being married, anyway.”

“Probably not,” Reid agreed. “But it sure as hell is up there on the top ten list. Hell—top five.” He considered this for a moment. “So, you don’t do anything physical while you’re dating? You don’t even… y’know… kiss?”

A faint smile curled my lips. “Kissing isn’t so forbidden. It’s frowned upon, and in the wrong context, you could get shunned for it. But it’s been known to happen…”

My sly grin must have tipped Reid off, because he drew away from me with a disbelieving, but good-natured, look on his face. “Sarah Miller—you mean to tell me
you’ve
kissed somebody?”

I couldn’t help it. This time, I was the one who laughed. “Yes. I mean—kind of. It didn’t mean anything. Well, at the time I felt pretty brave and grown-up, but now I realize it was… silly. Just kid stuff.” I pushed a few strands of hair behind my ear, torn free by the wind. “His name was Gregory. We were ten. And it was, more or less, a dare. It happened under my favorite oak tree, and I remember thinking at the time how special it was, how I’d remember that day forever. It was the tail end of sunset and the fireflies were out—very romantic—and we bumped teeth and knocked our heads together when we did it. But I
was
right. I didn’t forget it.”

Reid’s smile turned a little softer. There was something in his dark eyes I didn’t recognize—at least, not from him. A tenderness that hadn’t existed before, and a longing, and… something else. A low flame of desire that made my breath come faster and the flesh between my legs spark, ready to ignite.

He wet his lips. “So, you’ve kissed a boy.” He raked his gaze over me very slowly from head to toe, and back to my face again. I noticed he’d leaned closer, though he’d done it so subtly the realization made me gasp. “But have you kissed a man?”

My heart beat so loud I was sure he could hear it. “N-no.”

That cocky smirk began to grace Reid’s lips again, and I just barely stopped myself from whimpering when he asked, “Do you want to?”

He lifted his free hand to my cheek and I closed my eyes, leaning into his palm. A good Amish girl would have said “no,” would have turned Reid and his temptation away, would have remained strong in the face of sin, Rumspringa or not. But at that moment, all I knew for sure was that when he touched me, I wanted more. His scent, thick and masculine, was overwhelming. He enveloped me in every sense of the word, and yet my lips ached to be engulfed at last, to commune with his desires and allow myself to entertain my own.

I opened my eyes again, slowly, and drew in a shaky breath. “Maybe,” I whispered. “Maybe I do.”