Reclaim - Aly Martinez Page 0,15
bill, wrapped around the handle. Written in black marker across the top of the bill, it read: This is yours. Fair and square.
“Hey,” he said, lurching to his feet when I arrived at the creek.
I shrugged off my tattered backpack and dropped it at my feet. “You’re here early.”
“Yeah. I wasn’t sure what time you came in the mornings, so I left straight after breakfast. I would have been here earlier, but the bait shop doesn’t open until seven.”
“Seven? Jeez, do your grandparents always make you get up that early?”
He shook his head. “They didn’t make me get up. I just thought if you were here, I wanted to be here too.”
My whole body locked up tight. It could be said that I wasn’t the best at understanding or processing feelings, at least not the good ones. Outside of Ramsey and Thea, I didn’t have a lot of experience with that kind of stuff. So I couldn’t be completely sure what happened inside my body in that second. But whatever it was, it made a lump form in my throat.
“I usually get here about nine,” I mumbled.
He nodded without saying anything else and I suddenly feared he knew about the lump in my throat too.
“Nice shorts,” I blurted.
He looked at the blue shorts covered in what I thought were supposed to be cartoon sharks, but the pattern on the fabric had been cut in all the wrong places, making it look like a shark massacre. “All right, all right. Don’t give me crap about these. My grandma made ’em and I was already in the doghouse after… Well…” He cut his gaze over my shoulder. “I didn’t tell them where I was going the other night. I’ve been picking up dog poop in the yard ever since, so no way was I risking more trouble by complaining about these.”
I ignored the urge to ask him where he’d gone and chewed on my bottom lip to stifle a laugh. “You have a dog?”
“Grandma does. It’s a mean little shit that bit me while I was sleeping once.”
“Maybe you were snoring?”
“Maybe it was bred from the devil himself.” He dove toward me, clinking his teeth like he was pretending to bite.
I jumped away laughing and not the kind of laugh I used when I needed to prove to Ramsey that I was okay or give adults a show so they didn’t ask too many questions.
This was real. And genuine. And so incredibly terrifying that I abruptly stopped and just stared at him.
“What?” he said, glancing over his shoulder. “What’s wrong?”
There was nothing wrong. In that second, at the creek, laughing with a kid who had shown up at the crack of dawn just to hang out with me, there was absolutely nothing wrong for the first time in quite possibly my entire life and it made the lump in my throat swell to the size of a watermelon.
The sweetest concern colored his face as he took a step toward me. “Nora, what’s going on? You okay?”
I backed away and desperately tried to compose myself, but my voice came out as a croak as I replied, “It’s just the shorts. They’re really ugly.”
He blew out a loud breath and then barked a laugh. “Jesus. You scared me. I thought you were having another heat stroke or something.”
Nope. Not a stroke, but something was happening inside my body and the jury was still out on whether it was a good something or a bad something.
He bent over and grabbed his bag. “Well, if you can forget about my shorts long enough to hang out, I snagged you some bug spray. I’m not sure if it works on beetles, but it should keep the rest of the ear monsters away.” He exaggerated a shiver and then shot me a smile.
Oh, God, he’d brought me bug spray.
The lump in my throat morphed into a ball of fire, stinging my eyes and my nose as I took the spray bottle from his hand. I’d never even thought to buy myself bug spray.
But Camden had.
“Thanks,” I whispered, not trusting my voice.
He rocked onto his toes and then back down to his heels. “No prob.”
I drew in a deep breath, holding it until my lungs ached, and tried to get myself together. This was ridiculous. It was just bug spray.
“You got the worms?” I asked.
“You know it. Hey, look what else I did.” Grabbing my forearm, he dragged me after him, talking a mile a minute as if he’d