Page 116 of Where You're Planted

They returned to the parking lot, which was nearly empty now. Except for Marianne’s Jetta.

“I thought you left already,” Tansy called.

Marianne was pulling something from her back seat. She froze, half turned away from them. And although Tansy couldn’t see the item in her arms, the familiar chirps of birds gave it away.

“No,” she said immediately.

Marianne hoisted the bird cage with Peanut Butter and Jelly inside against her hip. “Now that we’re back to full operations, I thought I could bring back our branch pets.”

“Marianne, no,” she said again. But she couldn’t hold in her laugh at the defeated look on her friend’s face.

“Please,” Marianne begged with surprising force. “Don’t tell Kai, but the cats have nearly killed them more times than I can count. I can’t have their blood on my hands. It’s too stressful. Also, I think I’m actually allergic to them. I’ve low-key had hives for eighteen months.”

“Oh my God.” Tansy laughed into Jack’s shoulder. He wrapped his arm around her, chuckling, too. “Fine,” she relented. “But we’re establishing a protocol for hurricane retrieval.”

They watched Marianne struggle to carry the cage into the new building. Then, Briar and Tansy climbed into Jack’s truck. When he slid into the driver’s seat, he didn’t start theengine right away. He took her hand between them, kissed her palm, and then smiled into it.

“What?” she asked.

“Just thinking about that day. Meeting you.”

She nodded. She supposed those birds had been good for something after all.

“I hadplantsin the back of my truck that day. And now…” He reached into the back seat and playfully ruffled Briar’s unruly curls until she giggled.

Then he turned over Tansy’s hand and kissed it again, mumbling thickly into her skin, “You’re the best damn thing that ever happened to me. Both of you.”

His hazel eyes caught the golden-hour glow through the window, the sun making its way down behind the thick pine trees, those amber freckles in his irises lighting up. Something else sparked in them, too.

She’d spent the last year cataloguing Jack’s looks. There were his flirty, flickering looks. His crash-over-your-head, unmistakable firework looks that told her they needed to find a restricted area to duck intonow. And there were his slow-burning, smoldering looks when he was in no rush, turning her on from anticipation alone.

But this one, this look was maybe her favorite. It was something like a wish whispered in the dark, written with sparkler smoke.Keep me forever.

And that was exactly what she planned to do.