Chase Me If You Can(37)
I expect him to be annoyed. Wes just laughs before he agrees, “Yeah, that works.” Then he turns the camera around, and though I’m expecting it to still be on the mud shots, he’s got one of the daisy photos pulled up. It’s framed to give the illusion of the flowers sitting at the base of the rainbow where a pot of gold should be. “You have a great eye. This is really beautiful.”
I shrug, shutting my camera off and carefully putting it down on the seat next to me before reaching for my drink. “It’s not bad, but it’s not good enough for the contest.”
“Give yourself more credit. I know we talk shit, but you’re talented, Sloane.”
The dangerously soft tone of his voice has me fidgeting in my seat. “I’m not the one with my stuff already published by Nature Shots,” I say, hoping to deflect the conversation away from me.
“Not yet,” Wes says firmly. His eyes lock on mine and hold me in place with an intense stare. “You could win this cover contest just as easily as I could.”
It’s nothing I haven’t told myself, but coming from him, the praise sits awkwardly in my stomach. “Or they just invited me, Tracy, and a couple other female photographers so the optics weren’t overtly sexist.”
A muscle twitches in his jaw, but before Wes can say whatever is about to come out of his mouth, I flash a tight smile. “I’m going to run to the bathroom. Watch my camera?”
“Yeah, of course,” he says, the frustration lingering in his voice at odds with the easy words.
A splash of cold water on my face helps. The three guys standing in my way when I head back toward the table, not so much.
“Hey, can I get by?”
They’re somewhere around my age, maybe a year or two older. One gives me a not-at-all subtle up and down. “You’re the chick with Talbot this season?”
“Wes is chasing with me for now.” I’m sure the distinction is lost on him, but it makes me feel a little better. I start to slide around them, but then another one steps into my path.
“I wouldn’t let my girl out of the house in leggings like that. Surprised Talbot is okay with it.”
I don’t bother explaining that Wes has absolutely no say over my wardrobe or that we’re not even together in the way this asshole is implying. It won’t do any good. There’s only one language a guy like this understands.
“Your wife must not like leggings,” I say with a shrug.
He scoffs. “I’m not married.”
I turn my voice syrupy sweet. “I can’t imagine why that is.”
He starts to sputter, anger darkening his expression. I’ve surprised him enough that I manage to dart around the three of them and slide back into the booth. Wes raises one brow and nods toward the group. They look away as soon as they realize he’s staring.
“What did they say to you?”
“Nothing important.” I take a long sip of my margarita to stall for time. More collected, I manage a smile that must look genuine enough for him to back off. “They’re fans of yours. I told them you were in a bad mood tonight so they’d leave us alone.”
Doubt etched into the line between his brows, Wes looks at me for a long time without saying a word.
Chapter Nine
The active weather pattern blurs one day into the next over the following two weeks. Wake up in Kansas, go to bed in Texas, drive north to Oklahoma, snatch a few hours of sleep, and then a mad dash back south into New Mexico before a long race to Nebraska. Aside from my mother’s extremely passive-aggressive texts—You can call me sometime so I know you’re not dead in a ditch—I don’t hear from my family, which I’m counting as a win.
I’m also much too busy obsessing over the weird shift between me and Wes to linger long on anything else.
Some things are exactly the same as every other year. I’m not exactly surprised when he changes the name of my playlist to “Sloane Michaels and the Horrible, Awful, No-Good Playlist” while I’m inside a gas station—he’s complained more than once about the sheer chaos of multiple genres all randomly shoved together without any order—nor is it a shock that he mocks my bad aim when we’re killing an hour tossing pebbles at a fence post.
The nightly report on each hotel’s shower height, complete with photographic evidence, is decidedly new. And there are the little moments where he keeps surprising me with unexpected kindness. Both toward me—I have been well supplied with coffee—but also to complete strangers.
Yesterday’s lunch was yet another foray into the gas station convenience store taqueria that has a stranglehold on this part of the country. It’s always a gamble ordering tacos from a gas station, but most of the time we luck out. What I didn’t expect was that when the cashier struggled with her English, Wes effortlessly dropped into Spanish with a kind smile.
As surprised as I am to discover he speaks Spanish, the fact that he likes to mock Mother Nature like a kid slinging playground taunts isn’t much of a shock at all.
“What the hell are you doing?” I demand, certain I must not have heard him right.
Wes ignores me and shouts at the sky, “Get it together! My grandma is more impressive!”
“Are you seriously taunting the weather?” I glance around, checking for an audience. Some chase days, it’s us and our fifty closest friends in a conga line from hell crowding country roads. Today is one of the rare days we’ve claimed a spot without another soul in sight.