Reclaim - Aly Martinez Page 0,13
off on his fingers only to give up when he reached ten. “A lot of people, okay? And none of them are allowed to use the bait shop anymore. So over coffee this morning—”
“You had coffee with Mr. Leonard?” I asked rudely, which I was learning was the only tone I had when it came to Camden Cole.
He scoffed. “No. He had coffee and I helped myself to the hard candies from his wife’s crystal bowl.” He paused. “By the way, I still have a few of those left in my backpack if you want one. But warning, only the nasty butterscotch are left.”
Drats. Butterscotch was my favorite, but I feared, if he got distracted with getting me candy from his bag during this story, I’d never find out what the heck he was talking about.
“Thanks. I’m good.”
He shrugged. “So anyway, I asked Mr. Leonard his limit. He said around five hundred a week because whatever his family didn’t use he was going to set up shop down by his driveway and sell them to Lewis’s customers, even if he had to take a loss.”
Wow. Otis Leonard was a savage.
Camden continued. “I’ll buy ’em for ten bucks. Sell ’em to him for twenty, and I’ll show up here every day, pretend I’m collecting ’em, and get to avoid my grandpa for eight hours. Win. Win.”
Okay, so maybe he wasn’t the worst storyteller after all. That covered the majority of my questions, but not the majority of my jealousy.
“He’s never going to believe you find a hundred worms every day.”
“I know, which is why it’s good that he hired you too. The two of us could easily get fifty worms in a day. All I ask is that you give me half back so I can buy more worms.”
I once again clamped my mouth shut. Math was not my strong suit, but I was no dummy, either. If he was buying ten dollars a day in worms, that would have left ten dollars in profit. And he was going to split that with me? A girl he didn’t know, who yelled at him a lot. Guaranteeing me five dollars a day? Twenty-five dollars a week?
One hundred dollars a month?
All without having to touch one single worm?
“Why would you do that?” I asked suspiciously. “You didn’t even have to tell me, ya know? You could have just turned in your fifty worms every day and made five dollars. I’d have been clueless.”
The frustration faded from his boyish face. “And let the other five dollars go to waste?”
“Sure. Why not? You don’t know me.”
He turned his gaze to the ground, his nearly constant smile slipping away with the uncomfortable shuffle of his feet. “I might know you better than you think, Nora.”
A wave of unease skated down my back. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
He shook his head and looked back up. “I know you don’t like hunting worms. I saw you gagging as I walked up yesterday. I know you’re the kind of person who returns ten bucks even when they need the money. And while I don’t know if you would have included me in your plans if you’d thought of it first, I believe maybe once we became friends you would have.”
I wouldn’t have. I would have been scared that he would have told on me and that I would have gotten in trouble and lost my job no matter how much I hated it.
I looked down at my muddy sneakers, doing anything to escape the guilt churning in my gut. Outside of Ramsey and Thea, I didn’t get a lot of sweet in my life. And coming from a friendly boy with pretty blue eyes, who had absolutely no reason to give it to me after the way I’d treated him, the weight of that guilt became suffocating.
“But above and beyond that,” he said, “I thought it might be nice to have someone out here with me every day. Like a partner in crime or something. This could be our little secret, but if you’re not interested—”
My head popped up. “I’m interested.”
“Yeah?” The way he smiled slow and shy, like I’d given him a gift, only made my guilt multiply.
“Yeah. It’d be a win-win for me too if I got to spend the day away from my house. My dad screams a lot. I might have gotten it from him.”
His eyes flashed wide, and for a blink, I swear his face paled. He quickly covered it with a grin. “Soooo,