Page 86 of Rule the Night

I had no idea what errand Bram had to run, but he navigated the Hummer out of town and continued along the side streets leading to the base of the mountains, an area of rolling fields and farmland not far from the barn where we did our dirty work.

Sunflowers stretched into the distance, gold under the September sun, and horses grazed in fields that would be brown in just a few weeks.

The windows were cracked, and as fucked as everything felt, I could think of worse things than riding in the backseat with Maeve, the autumn wind blowing through the car while we soared down a quiet country road.

It wasn’t our scene, not really, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t nice.

I was encouraged when I put my hand on Maeve’s knee and she didn’t slap it away.

We were about five miles out of town when Bram pulled into a roadside market.

Maeve sat up to look out the windshield. “What’s this?”

“My errand.” Bram opened the driver’s side door. “I’ll be back.”

“What the fuck?” she muttered.

Remy put on one of his playlists while we waited. I tried sliding my hand further up Maeve’s thigh, but she threw me a withering glance and I put it back where I'd started.

Two steps forward, one step back.

Bram emerged from the roadside market carrying a brown paper bag. He stuck it in the back of the Hummer and got back into the car.

“I could have been to the farmers market and back by now if I’d gone myself,” Maeve grumbled.

“Yeah, but what fun would that be?” Remy asked over the music.

Bram pulled back onto the main road and we continued for another two miles before he turned onto a smaller one, then onto an even smaller one, this one unpaved.

We bumped over the uneven ground, past a sign that readHurd’s U-Pickand up a sloped drive that ended in a red barn. Two school buses were parked outside, kids and a handful of adults milling around a series of wooden displays erected for picture taking, the kind you put your head through to pretend you were a farmer or a milkmaid, a pig or a cow.

Bram pulled into an empty parking spot and got out of the car without a word.

The rest of us got out too, and Maeve looked at the orchard, the kids running around while their teachers and chaperones tried to keep track of them.

“This isn’t the farmers market,” she said.

“You said you needed apples.” His eyes were still hidden behind his sunglasses.

“You’re bringing me apple picking?” she asked.

“You got something against apples from a tree?” he asked.

“No, it’s just…” She looked around.

“What?” Remy asked.

“It doesn’t really seem like your scene,” Maeve said.

“What do you mean?” Remy asked, offended. “We can do fall shit.”

Her skepticism was written in the lift of her eyebrows. “If you say so.”

Bram went to the back of the Hummer and put the brown paper bag from the farm market into one of our duffel bags. Then he closed the hatch and started walking.

“Let’s go pick some fucking apples.”

A woman walking a little boy past us to the parking lot glared at Bram.