Page 8

SEVEN

The Striped Maple was as busy as it had been the last time Bellamy had frequented the pub. Louder though, owing to the live band currently playing a jaunty tune he’d expect to find in a pub in Ireland. It smelled like hoppy beer and onion rings, and it was warm—too warm for the long-sleeved cotton T-shirt he’d opted for, something a little nicer than the hoodie he’d had on last time.

It was standing room only again, and Bellamy was about to head to the dartboard in the back corner when he noticed Jason at the bar.

They locked gazes at the same time. Jason smiled at him, genuine and welcoming, and every thought fled Bellamy’s head.

Nervous energy strummed through Bellamy to the tune of the fiddler’s strings. He hadn’t been nervous playing his first game as a Trailblazer, but one smile from this man and his mouth went dry and his heart flip-flopped.

Shoving his hands in his pockets so he didn’t do something stupid like grab Jason by the front of his T-shirt and haul him close, Bellamy closed the distance between them.

And speaking of Jason’s T-shirt . . .

“Is that the chemical formula for maple syrup?”

Jason looked down at his chest and chuckled. “Good guess, but no. It’s the formula for sucrose, the primary sugar in maple syrup.”

“Here you go, Jase.” The bartender, a green-eyed guy roughly their age, placed two glasses in front of Jason.

“Thanks, Con.” Jason turned to grab them, displaying the maple leaf tattoo on his left biceps. The top quarter was cut off by his T-shirt, but what Bellamy could see of it was beautiful.

The maple leaf was large, roughly the width and height of Bellamy’s hand. The top half was colored in black ink, and in the bottom half was the silhouette of mountains—the Green Mountains, presumably—dotted with trees. The stem of the leaf ended right above Jason’s elbow. The design held a touch of fantasy yet was highly realistic. If Bellamy stared long enough, he could probably count all of the trees—that was how detailed they were.

He was about to comment on it when Jason handed him a pint of black liquid. “Guinness, right?”

“Yeah,” Bellamy said, stunned that Jason remembered. “Thanks.”

“You hungry? I was going to order us something, but we’ll have to eat standing—ooh, a table’s opening up. Grab it, grab it, grab it.” Jason yanked him over to a small table by the window with a scarred wooden tabletop and sturdy chairs. “Guard this table with your life. I’ll go order.”

He disappeared into the crowd before Bellamy had a chance to open his mouth.

He was back within a few seconds. “Any food allergies I need to know about?”

“No,” Bellamy said, draping his coat over the back of the chair. “But if you come back with shrimp or calamari, I’m walking out of this pub and you’ll never see me again.”

Jason left again, laughing, and fuck, was that a good sound.

Bellamy stared at his own blurry reflection in the window and found himself smiling. He didn’t care that Jason had wandered off without asking him what he wanted to eat, and he loved that they were seated alone instead of playing darts with Jason’s friends, who Bellamy had noted by the dartboard when he’d walked in.

Which begged the question—was this a date? Had Jason’s invitation to play darts been a euphemism for something else?

Honestly, the thought was almost too surreal to contemplate.

“Okay,” Jason said when he returned. He slid onto the chair across from Bellamy. “I ordered a bunch of apps: nachos, wings, pot stickers, fried pickles, and fries. They serve food until late though, so you can order an entree after if you want.”

“You think I’ll be hungry after all that?”

“You’re a hockey player. I’ve seen Ryland pack away twice that much, and he wasn’t sharing.” Jason grimaced and tossed him a wan smile. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to bring him up.”

Bellamy rotated his glass on the tabletop, leaving a ring of condensation behind. “Why wouldn’t you? He’s your brother. I don’t expect you to not talk about him.”

“It’s not weird for you?”

“Not really. Is it weird for you?”

Jason shrugged a shoulder. “Kind of. The person he made you out to be doesn’t appear to be the person you are, and...” Another shrug. “I guess I’m trying to reconcile the two.”

“Don’t hurt yourself.”

Jason loosed a bark of a laugh, as though he’d surprised himself with it. “Speaking of hurting yourself...” He jerked a chin at Bellamy. “You’ve got a bruise forming there.”

Bellamy ran a palm over his stubbled jaw. He’d forgotten about the bruise. It only hurt when he touched it. “Took an elbow from Dabbs in practice this morning.”

Jason winced. “Ouch.”

“Didn’t knock any teeth loose, so I count that as a win. Dabbs felt really bad about it, but that’s sports, you know? CC gave me a salve for it. Some small-batch, all-natural stuff that smells like a Christmas tree.”

According to CC, Billy Honeybun, their teammate, had made it. “Nature’s Honey,” CC had said. “That’s his business. Makes salves and lotions and shit. Practically the entire team uses his products. He sells them online.”

“CC is . . . ?” Jason asked now.

“Colter Clarke. Right-winger.”

“Right, I know the name. Didn’t know about the nickname though. Do you get along with your new teammates?”

Bellamy sat forward, partly so he wouldn’t have to speak so loudly to be heard over the music, mostly for a better view of Jason’s lips around the rim of his pint glass. “Sure. Most of them are easy to get along with.”

Of course, on every team, there were always one or two players he didn’t get along with, but a hockey team was big enough that he didn’t need to be friends with everybody.

“Can I ask what it’s like to be traded?” Jason asked. “Ryland’s been traded a couple of times, and whenever I ask him what it’s like, he just shrugs and tells me it’s part of pro sports.”

Bellamy took a large gulp of his Guinness and debated how he wanted to answer that. Did he tell Jason that getting traded was like being abandoned by his parents all over again?

No. Not right now. He owed Jason in exchange for the information he’d shared about the assholes who’d used him to get to his brother. But explaining how the words you’ve been traded never failed to send him right back to his childhood, to the years his parents had spent so much time antagonizing each other that they’d forgotten to feed him and clothe him and take him to school and generally worry over his wellbeing, wasn’t something he wanted to discuss in their present environment.

“Ryland’s not wrong,” he finally said. “It is part of pro sports. Most players see it coming. Team culture, fit, salary caps, whatever the reason, a player generally has an inkling about what’s coming. For some, it sucks—the team becomes your family, you’ve put down roots, bought a house, your kids go to school there. For others, it’s an opportunity to play somewhere else, possibly on a team that needs your strengths and where you’ll be appreciated for those strengths more than you are on your current team. And then there are players who want to be traded, but only to a specific team. Usually because they know someone on the team and want to play with that person. A brother, best friend, college teammate, whatever. So to answer your question, what it’s like depends on the player.”

Jason leaned forward too, folding his arms on the table, making his T-shirt stretch taut over his shoulders and his tattoo jump as his muscles flexed. “What was it like for you?”

Bellamy couldn’t tell him—not here, not now. But he could give him something. “It’s a bit like being told my family doesn’t want me so I’m being punted to a new one.”

“Shit.” Jason’s shoulders sagged. “That sucks, Bel. Did you even want to come here?”

Bellamy waggled his hand back and forth. “Yes and no. To be honest, I don’t like Vegas much, but I liked the team and the fans, and I would’ve liked to keep playing there. But on the other hand, my grandparents are here, and it’s nice to be nearby for once.”

“You’re close with them?”

“They raised me,” Bellamy answered without thinking.

He could see the questions in Jason’s eyes, but he was saved from them when a server arrived carrying two plates. “Wings and pot stickers?”

“That’s us,” Jason said, leaning back to give her room.

She deposited the plates on the table. “The rest will be out in a minute.”

True to her word, the nachos, fries, and fried pickles followed right behind the first two appetizers, and the server somehow managed to get all five dishes onto their little table without sacrificing their beers.

“Dig in,” Jason said.

Once they’d divvied up the food between them, Bellamy prodded him with a question of his own. “So tell me. What do you do when you’re not working on your family’s farm?”

“I’m working on my master’s.”

Jason said it like it was no big deal, but... his master’s . How many people got into a master’s program? Bellamy didn’t want to be impressed—mostly because this was Ryland’s brother and he didn’t want to be impressed with anything associated with Ryland Zervudachi—but then he decided that was dumb and let himself be impressed. “In what?” he asked.

“Agricultural science. I’m studying the effects of climate change on the maple syrup industry and how collecting sap from different types of trees—non-sugar maple trees—can diversify the industry.”

“What do you do with that sap?”

“Make syrup.”

Bellamy chewed a pot sticker slowly and considered that. “You can make syrup from other trees?”

“Sure. I’ve been experimenting with it for years.”

“Is it any good?”

“Depends on the syrup.” Jason licked wing sauce off his thumb, drawing Bellamy’s gaze to his tongue, his lips, the shininess of both. He had perfect Cupid’s bow-shaped lips, pink and lush, a pop of color against his tanned skin and trimmed dark brown beard.

What would those lips feel like against his? What would they feel like against the base of his throat? On his sternum? Against his hipbone? On the crevice where his thigh met his pelvis?

The fantasy was so clear in his head, distracting him from whatever Jason was saying about basswood syrup. The two of them tangled in bed, Jason above him, making his way slowly down Bellamy’s body as he kissed and touched and?—

“How’s everything tasting?” the server asked, throwing Bellamy rudely right back into the present.

“It’s great,” Jason told her. “Thanks. Anyway, like I was saying, basswood syrup kind of tastes like toffee or caramel. It’s kind of a pain in the ass to make—or maybe I just haven’t figured out the right temperature to boil it at.” He thought about that for a second, his brows pulling low, then launched into his monologue again. “Plus, the sap tends to run intermittently, which is as annoying as it sounds. Birch syrup, though? It’s becoming more widely used among chefs, mostly in Canada because birch syrup made from sap from the white birch tastes the best, and we don’t have those here. I’ve been experimenting with the sap from the yellow birch, though, and I don’t see why we couldn’t sell that. It tastes good. Same with the beech syrup.”

How much had Bellamy missed when he’d been daydreaming? “Why not stick with maple syrup?”

“Because sugar maples aren’t very resistant to climate change.” Jason dipped a fry in the aioli sauce it had come with. “Warm weather causes the sap chemistry to change and the trees to bud earlier, which leads to a shorter sap-flow season, and thus lower quality syrup. Lower yield too. Other sap-producing species aren’t as affected by climate change. They don’t rely on that freeze-thaw cycle like sugar maples do.”

“So if you diversify, if you produce and sell other types of syrup, your farm won’t be as affected financially if you have a few shitty seasons in a row.”

“Yes! Exactly.” Jason had been animated before, but now he positively glowed, clearly in his element. “It’s an extra revenue stream. How is that a bad thing?”

Bellamy forked fries off the serving dish and gestured at Jason with them. “Don’t you have to spend money to make money though?”

“Not if you already have the equipment.”

“So how come you haven’t made these changes to your farm yet?”

Jason made a face. “Let’s just say my dad is change-averse. If I want him to even consider it, I need to present every spec of research I have, then give him about twelve thousand years to deliberate before he makes a decision.”

Bellamy snorted a laugh. “Will you sell the new syrups in your shop then?”

“The one with the unimaginative ornaments?” Jason asked with an eyebrow raise. “That’s the idea. And we could sell direct to restaurants and at farmers markets too.”

“Okay, I didn’t...” Squaring his shoulders, Bellamy set his fork down and met Jason’s gaze head-on. “I mean, I did , but I didn’t...” Huffing out a breath, he started from the beginning. “I have a childhood friend who still lives in Lebanon. Liam. We lost touch a few years ago, but when I arrived in Burlington, he called me, so we met up. Here, in Maplewood since I was already coming to visit my grandparents and it’s about halfway between Burlington and Lebanon. Liam was always...” Bellamy rolled his shoulders back, thinking of the best way to describe him. “A bit of a dickhead. His family lived next door to my grandparents, and when I moved in, he was the first friend I made. The only one for a long time.”

Going from living with his parents in Atlantic City—or with one of his parents when they couldn’t get along long enough to live together—to moving in with his grandparents in Lebanon had thrown him. New city, new state, new school, new hockey team, new friends. It would be a lot for any ten-year-old.

But more than all of that? It had been the complete change in circumstance that had kept him on his toes for the better part of a year.

When his parents weren’t completely ignoring him, they were using him against each other.

Bellamy scored during his game while he was staying with me.

Bellamy aced his math quiz when he was staying with me.

Look how well-mannered Bellamy is when he stays with me.

But his grandparents just... loved him. They cooked for him, bought him new shoes when he grew out of his old ones, asked if he was making friends, if he was happy, if he liked his new school, if he needed help in his classes, if there were other extracurriculars he wanted to participate in.

For months he waited for the day when his grandparents decided they didn’t want him either and shipped him back off to his parents.

But when his parents reconciled—for good—nearly a year after his grandparents took him in, they still kept him.

And when Bellamy had gone on his first Mom’s Trip with his team a few years ago, he’d taken his grandma. Obviously.

Maybe he’d tell Jason all of that one day. For now, he kept it simple. “Liam showed up at my grandparents’ house the day I moved in and asked me to come out and play soccer with him.” Bellamy smiled at the memory. “There weren’t a lot of kids in the neighborhood; it was mostly empty-nesters and retirees. And then there was Liam. I think I became his friend by default. He’d sit with me at lunch, play with me at recess, and ask me over to his house after school to play video games.”

Now that Bellamy was remembering, Liam’s dad had been a dickhead too, which was no doubt where Liam had learned it.

Jason touched the back of Bellamy’s hand with the pads of his fingers, gently drawing him out of his melancholy. “Liam sounds like he would’ve been a good person to have in your corner as a kid.”

“He was. And when we met up the other day...” Shaking his head, Bellamy let out a sad noise he tried to pass off as a chuckle. “I think we defaulted to who we’d always been with each other.”

Which meant he owed Liam another chance. He shouldn’t have written him off so quickly—he’d just been so embarrassed at his own actions that he hadn’t wanted a repeat, and he’d figured never seeing Liam again would solve that problem.

But change started from within, didn’t it? Cutting Liam off wouldn’t necessarily change anything.

“It felt like, in order to fit back into his life, I had to be who I was when I knew him,” he admitted. “And I wanted to fit back into his life—desperately. Because he was the only familiar face here. There’s my grandparents, obviously, but aside from having met a few of my teammates at tournaments or games over the years, I didn’t know any of them, and I felt adrift here. Liam was familiarity.”

He’d been there the last time Bellamy had felt adrift, and he’d been there again when he’d been traded.

Fuck. Bellamy was an asshole for assuming the worst of him. He deserved the benefit of the doubt.

“Anyway,” Bellamy said with a short laugh. “That’s a long-winded explanation to say that I don’t think your farm, your shop, or anything else about you is unimaginative. In fact, I bought one of those little maple syrup-bottle ornaments for my grandpa.”

Jason braced his elbows on the table, beer glass—virtually empty—dangling from one hand. “You did? That day? I was working the register. You didn’t come through my line.”

Jason had been there that day? Well, obviously, if he’d heard Bellamy’s comment about the ornaments being unimaginative. Bellamy hadn’t noticed him, not even when he’d paid—and the registers were right next to each other.

Liam had been talking his ear off about his plans for that evening though, so he’d been distracted.

“Guess I paid at the other one,” he said. “The lady who was there the other day was working. Sheila?”

Jason grunted. “My stepmom.”

“It was busy,” Bellamy said, remembering how packed the shop had been. “Is it always that busy on the weekends?”

“During Maple Syrup Festival season, yeah.”

“How does that work, anyway? You take out the Jenga game and the climbing wall and the bowling and everything else on Friday night and put it away again on Monday? For four weeks?”

Jason nodded. “We take it out Saturday morning and put it away Sunday evening, but yes. Most of it, anyway. What can stay outside, we just cover with tarps. After the last weekend of the festival, it all goes into storage.”

“Must be a pretty hectic time of year for you guys.”

“Sure.” Jason drained his beer. Bellamy watched his throat work, because he couldn’t not. “But the festival’s been a staple at Moon Meadows Maple Farm for years. Come back next month—there’ll be a different festival. There’s one for every month in this town. Last month, there was a Valentine festival—and a sort of anti-Valentine festival—and next month we have the Honey Bee Jubilee.”

“Huh.” Bellamy popped the last fry in his mouth, stone cold by now, and asked the question that’d been on his mind since he’d first visited Jason’s farm. “Why is it called Moon Meadows? Do you have any meadows on your land? I assumed it’d be all forest.”

A smile kicked up one corner of Jason’s mouth, teasing and soft at the same time, tugging at something in the center of Bellamy’s chest. “If you’re up for a field trip, I can show you.”

“Welcome to Moon Meadows.” Jason gestured grandly and inhaled the scent of wet earth and snow. “Well, it’s not officially called Moon Meadows. It’s just what we call it.”

The meadow, on the northwestern edge of the farm, was easily as large as twenty NHL-sized hockey rinks. Surrounded by trees—mostly sugar maples with a few other species—that were shadows against an inky sky peppered with stars, it was its own world away from the farm. Maplewood, being tucked in a valley, was surrounded by hills, and the mountains rose beyond the trees, imposing yet comforting. Steady. It was Jason’s favorite place in the entire world—it was his thinking spot, his reflection spot, his get-away-from-the-world-and-breathe spot. He used to come here with Brie and Ryland to play when they were kids. Now it mostly sat empty, and he had to wonder if the trees were sentient enough to miss the sound of children’s laughter.

Jason liked to believe they were.

“In the spring and summer, this place is covered with wildflowers,” Jason said, his boots crunching in snow. “And it’s called Moon Meadows because if you time your visit right, you get that.” He pointed up at the bright waning half moon, as comforting and steady as the mountains.

“Wow,” Bellamy breathed, and the reverence in his voice had Jason’s back straightening with pride. “This place is magic.”

Jason was about to agree, but then he turned and caught sight of Bellamy, and the breath caught in his throat.

Bellamy looked like an angel. The moon turned his hair white, and the glow of the stars gave his skin a dewy glimmer. He gazed up at the night sky, his coat open over his long-sleeved T-shirt and exposing the long line of his throat.

Jason wanted to kiss him, right there between his collarbones. Place a palm on his chest and feel his heart jump. Hear him inhale a sharp breath.

“Do you use this place for anything?” Bellamy asked softly, as though he didn’t want to disturb the magic of this place.

“We used to picnic here in the summer when we were kids,” Jason said, his voice hoarse with the fantasy that lingered under the whimsical setting. “But we haven’t done that in years. Dad and Sheila got married here when I was twelve.”

Talk about magic. Jason still remembered the flower arch they’d said their vows under, the gentle breeze that had made Sheila’s dress sway, their radiant smiles under the summer sun, and the fold-out chairs he, Brie, and Ryland had decorated with giant fabric bows.

Jason had always envisioned something similar for his own wedding, if he were lucky enough to find his life partner.

He side-eyed Bellamy. He was nowhere near thinking of him as a life partner, but he couldn’t deny there was something there. An energy that crackled between them. A potential for more that was like lightning zinging along Jason’s spine.

It was why he’d stolen the table at The Striped Maple out from another guest’s nose. He hadn’t wanted to share Bellamy with his friends, not tonight. He’d said as much to Hayworth when Hayworth had found him ordering at the bar, and Hayworth must’ve relayed that to the others, because none of them had bothered them while they’d eaten.

“Where’s your mom?” Bellamy asked.

“Oh, my parents divorced when we were kids.”

Bellamy looped their pinkies together, and a thunderbolt crashed into Jason’s heart. “I’m sorry,” Bellamy said.

“No, it’s okay. It was hard at first, but as I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized that my parents are much happier with their current partners than they ever were with each other. My mom married a Frenchman when I was eighteen. They live in Lyon.”

Bellamy whistled lowly. “France. Not exactly nearby.”

“No, but we talk all the time, and with the advent of video calling, we get to actually see each other. I don’t feel like we’re missing out on each other’s lives just because we live so far apart.”

“Do you have stepsiblings?”

“Two. I don’t know them very well. Laurent is quite a bit older than my mom, so his kids were already out of the house and making careers for themselves in Paris when they married. Do you have any siblings?”

Bellamy shook his head. “It’s just me.”

“Was that lonely?”

“I can’t really say. I don’t have anything to compare it to. I was often lonely, but I don’t think it had anything to do with being an only child.” Bellamy whirled away, ducking behind the nearest tree. “Did you ever play hide and seek out here?”

The swift change in subject jarred Jason for a moment, but if Bellamy didn’t want to talk about his childhood, he wasn’t going to push. “All the time. Ryland was terrible at it.” He popped behind a tree as Bellamy stuck his head around the one he hid behind, his heartbeat kicking up at the game. “He’d giggle uncontrollably, and we’d find him instantly.”

“Ryland terrible at something?” Bellamy’s voice came from somewhere on Jason’s left now. “Never thought I’d see the day.”

Grinning, blood pumping, Jason ducked low and hustled behind a different tree, making his way toward Bellamy—or where he thought Bellamy might be. “Brie was sneaky. She never stayed in one place.” He snuck behind a new tree. “She went from tree to tree, her steps somehow silent on the forest floor.”

“And what about you?” Bellamy asked, closer now. Jason heard snow crunch as he changed trees.

“I usually got distracted by the bugs I found in the bushes.”

Bellamy’s laugh was even closer now. “Somehow that doesn’t surprise me.”

“Like, did you know there’s an invasive earthworm in Vermont called the jumping worm?” Jason inched behind a nearby tree. “They thrash around when disturbed. Ask me how I know.”

“I can guess,” Bellamy said, voice filled with amusement that made Jason grin. “I take it Brie won every game?”

“She usually got bored. She said Ryland was too easy to find and I was too hard to find, so she’d give up and go home.” Jason burst around another tree?—

Crashing right into Bellamy.

They clung to each other to regain their balance.

They didn’t let go once they’d found it.

“Something tells me you didn’t mind being left out here by yourself,” Bellamy said softly. He was in shadow, the moonlight straining to reach them through bare tree branches.

“Out here by myself was always my favorite place to be,” Jason confirmed. “Ryland hated it, though. He’d panic and chase after Brie until she took pity on him and slowed until he could catch up.”

Jason’s eyes had adjusted to the dark, so he noticed when Bellamy’s gaze dropped to his lips, and his heart lurched against his ribs.

“Would Ryland be angry if I kissed you right now?”

“No doubt,” Jason said gruffly. “But he doesn’t get a say.”

Bellamy’s gaze drifted back up to his as he stepped closer, eliminating the oxygen between them. “Would you be upset if I kissed you?”

“Quite the opposite.”

Bellamy smiled, a small one that spoke of tenderness and hope. It gave Jason a moment of doubt, of wondering what he was getting himself into—and why . Hadn’t he learned anything from the last two guys he’d dated?

But he was powerless against a Bellamy who was anything but what Ryland had described him as. He had layers upon layers; Jason wanted to peel them all back.

Later.

Bellamy’s lips were cold and slightly chapped when they met his. They warmed quickly, and Jason clung to his waist as the world spun.

He groaned when Bellamy’s tongue swept into his mouth, pressing himself closer. He couldn’t feel much of Bellamy through their winter coats, and he briefly wished they were doing this somewhere that required less clothing.

But right here in his favorite place that he was sharing with Bellamy for the first time was somehow fitting.

Bellamy cupped the back of his head, holding him in place.

As if Jason had any intention of going anywhere.

Bellamy tasted a little bit like beer but mostly like something unique and oddly Bellamy-like. Jason wanted more of him, all of him, and he inwardly cheered when Bellamy let out a breathy moan. Jason broke the kiss to suck in a much-needed breath, then fell back onto Bellamy with a muttered “More” that had Bellamy meeting his lips again with a low groan that made Jason’s balls tingle.

Jason had had first kisses that had knocked his socks off, and he’d had first kisses that had been sloppy and uncoordinated.

This was neither. This was a key slotting into a lock, solving a Rubik’s cube, and a peanut butter and jelly sandwich all rolled into one.

They somehow fit , even though they shouldn’t.

“Christ,” Bellamy muttered. “I can’t get enough of—” His head jerked up, eyes going a little wild. “What the hell was that?”

Mind foggy, Jason looked around. “What was what?”

“That. There it is again.”

That turned out to be a squirrel that darted from the underbrush and up a tree. Jason swallowed a laugh.

Bellamy sagged against the tree. “Jesus. And here I thought we had to worry about wolves.”

“There haven’t been wolves in Vermont in more than a century. Well, there have ,” Jason amended, adding, “but not established populations,” when Bellamy’s eyes widened. “Sometimes they drift in from Canada, but I’ve never seen one. The scariest thing you have to worry about in these woods is Mabel.”

“Mabel is... the Zervudachi family ghost?” Bellamy guessed.

Jason chuckled. “No. She’s the Maplewood Monster—our local cryptid.”

Bellamy made a face. “Your what now?”

“Cryptid. She’s been part of local lore forever. She’s a forest creature—tall and leafy. There’s been plenty of sightings of her over the years.”

“So she’s Maplewood’s Bigfoot,” Bellamy said slowly, clearly trying to wrap his head around this.

“That’s one way to put it.”

“You don’t actually believe she’s real... do you?”

“Sure. I saw her when I was...” Jason scrunched up his face, thinking. “Seven? Eight? She was over there, on the other side of the meadow.” He gestured vaguely toward it.

Bellamy looked in that direction, but they were too deep in the trees to see the meadow. “And you’re sure you didn’t just see a tall leafy tree?”

“Obviously.”

“Obviously,” Bellamy repeated, but he looked around anyway. “You don’t think she’s out here right now, do you?”

Jason shrugged. “She could be anywhere.” He pointed behind Bellamy. “Including right there.”

Bellamy whirled with a muffled shout, then cursed when Jason started laughing. “You’re going to pay for that.”

“Only if you can catch me!” Jason took off running, grinning like a fool when Bellamy ran after him. And when Bellamy caught him a minute later and proclaimed that payback would include lots of kissing, Jason couldn’t argue with the punishment.