Tease (Cloverleigh Farms #8)(15)

“My mother didn’t want me.”

Hutton sat back and blinked. “Huh?”

“My mother didn’t want me. My real mom.”

“The one that left?”

I nodded, my heart still pumping with fear.

“How do you know?”

“I heard her say it one night when I was about six.”

He looked uncomfortable, then rubbed the back of his neck. “Fuck.”

“She left about three weeks later. And she never came back.” So it must have been true, I left unspoken.

Hutton didn’t say anything. His eyes dropped to his lap.

“God, what am I doing?” I put my pencil down and covered my face with my hands. “I’m sorry. Forget what I said. I’m sorry.” My entire body burned with embarrassment. “I have no idea why I just dumped that on you.”

“It’s okay.”

Picking up my pencil again, I stared at my page of problems and pretended the numbers weren’t blurry.

After a moment, Hutton went back to his calc problems too—or at least I thought he did. But about five minutes later, he ripped a page out of his notebook, folded it in half, and slid it toward me.

I glanced at him. “What’s this?”

“Open it.”

I unfolded the page and laughed when I saw a message written out in pigpen cipher text. “You wrote me a note I have to decode?”

“You remember how?”

“I think so.” It took me a minute to recall the grid symbolizing the pigpen’s geometric substitution of the alphabet. But a few minutes later, I had it.

“I have been and always shall be your friend,” I read out loud, my throat constricting as I reached the last word.

“It’s from Star Trek.”

“I know,” I said, slightly insulted. But I was really touched. “Thank you. That means a lot.” I blinked away tears once more.

“You okay?”

“Yeah. I think—I think graduation is messing with me. And maybe the fact that we’re going separate ways in the fall. You’ve sort of been the best friend I’ve ever had.” I gave him a tentative smile. “What am I going to do without you?”

“No matter where I am, I’ll always be there when you need me.”

“I’ll use the code like a bat signal,” I said. “Then you’ll know it’s really me.”

He laughed. “I’ll do the same.”

“And let’s make a deal—we can’t ignore the code, okay? If one of us uses it to reach out, we drop everything and come to the rescue.”

“Deal.”

And just like that, my problem was solved.





FOUR





HUTTON





At first, I was totally confused.

The text from Felicity came in just as I was grabbing a beer from my parents’ fridge. But what she’d sent was a photo of something—a sheet of white paper with a bunch of nonsense symbols on it. I was about to text her back and ask if she’d lost her mind when it hit me.

It wasn’t nonsense. It was code—the pigpen cipher.

I smiled—I couldn’t believe it had taken me more than five seconds to recognize it. “Hey Dad,” I called. “Are we starting right this second?”

“Nope,” he called back from the den off the kitchen. “Harvey’s not here yet.”

“Harvey’s always late,” said my mom, pulling a tray of cocktail wieners baked in crescent roll dough from the oven. “He moves so slowly, I’m convinced he was a sloth in his last life.”

I set the beer bottle on the counter unopened and rummaged around in the junk drawer for a pencil.

“Speaking of past lives,” she went on, “I did a reading for the most beautiful woman this afternoon at the store.”

“Did she think she was Cleopatra?” Women always thought they were Cleopatra.

“Yes, but she wasn’t. I’ve met the woman who was Cleopatra, and she lives in Tucson. But she was remarkably lovely, and I think she was latching onto Cleopatra because she’s lonely and looking for love. I invited her to stop by tonight.”

I stopped searching and looked at my mother. “You didn’t.”

“She’s slightly older than you, but—”

“How old?”

“Forty, but she’s a young forty.” For some reason, my mother sort of fluffed up her chest when she said this. “What are you looking for in that drawer?”

“Something to write with—found it.” I pulled out a stubby pencil with a dirty neon yellow eraser top. “I need a piece of paper too.”

She handed me the spiral pad she used for writing her grocery lists. “Here.”

I flipped past her list and quickly sketched the cipher’s substitution grid from memory—and within minutes I was decoding Felicity’s message.

I need you, she’d written.

Immediately, I remembered the night in the library when I’d almost kissed her—the note I’d passed and the promise we’d made.

“Shit,” I said.

“What’s wrong?” My mother glanced over at me as she placed the pigs in a blanket on a serving plate.