Well Met(24)

He made a show of looking behind me, even leaning a little to his right. Then he straightened up and trained those laser-like eyes on me. “I don’t see Stacey.”

“No, well, she went up front to help the others. I’m going to head up there too, I just . . . wanted to get a little more of a feel for the place.” The more I talked, the more annoyed I got, which seemed to be a trend whenever I had a conversation with Simon. Why should I feel defensive that I was walking around the site instead of helping up front? After all, he was walking around out here too. I couldn’t shake the feeling he’d caught me doing something I shouldn’t, and that irritated me even more. Simon was a vicious circle of annoyance.

He sniffed again and shifted from one foot to the other. He glanced over his shoulder the way he’d come, and then it clicked: It wasn’t that he’d caught me. I’d caught him. Now I leaned to my right, an echo of his previous movement. “What’s down there?”

“Nothing,” he said quickly. But he glanced over his shoulder again.

“Nothing?” I crossed my arms over my chest. “So why’s there a path going that way?”

“A lane.”

I blinked. “What?”

“A lane,” he repeated. “They’re called lanes at a Faire.”

“Oh. Okay.” Was he trying to distract me or was he being his normal nitpicky self? So hard to tell with Simon. “Then why’s there a lane going that way if there’s nothing there?”

“Well, there’s nothing down there now.” His sigh was short and exasperated. “It’s where some vendors are going to be set up. It’s nothing you need to worry about.”

“Okay . . .” I had no idea why he was trying to keep me from going down that side path—sorry, lane—but he sure as hell wasn’t going to confide in me. Maybe it was where all of his drug deals went down. It was always the quiet, clean-cut ones. The ones you didn’t expect to be kingpins.

“So you’re going back up to the front? Where Stacey is now?” His voice didn’t sound friendly, but he didn’t quite sound like he hated me, either. This apparently was Simon making an effort. Now that I saw him up close, I noticed I’d misjudged his slovenliness this morning. The scruff he’d been cultivating recently had been tamed into a neatly trimmed beard that framed his jaw. Out here in the woods, the sunlight threw flashes of burnished red into his brown hair. He looked . . . better out here. “You’re going to want to take this lane back around, and where it curves to the left, there’s a side lane that goes . . .”

“I know.” I sounded more petulant than I wanted, but he wasn’t subtle about wanting me gone. “I can find it, thanks. I don’t think I’ll get lost in a couple acres of woods.” He didn’t need to know I’d been worried about that exact thing five minutes ago.

But I didn’t leave and neither did he, so we looked at each other uncomfortably until he finally sighed again. “Why are you here?” He sounded tired now, not exasperated.

“Um.” I looked around, as though maybe the answer were somewhere in the trees. “We’re all supposed to be here today, right?”

“No. Why are you here? At the Faire? Why haven’t you dropped out yet?”

I narrowed my eyes. “Because I committed to it. If I don’t do Faire, my niece can’t do Faire.”

He gave a long-suffering sigh. “We don’t actually hold people to that. It’s just a way that we make sure that the younger kids who sign up really want to do it. Surely you’ve noticed a bunch of parents have dropped out already.”

I had noticed that, but doing the same hadn’t even crossed my mind. I wasn’t about to admit it to him, but I was actually having fun. “Well, you know me.” He didn’t, but that to me made it even more passively-aggressively bitchy. “I like to help out my community.”

“But it isn’t.” He ran a hand over his jaw again, rubbing at the bristles on his cheek as though he could scrub them out. “This isn’t your community. You don’t live here.”

Those words were a dart, and they hit the bull’s-eye. To my horror, my eyes started to sting. “Excuse me?” I blinked hard. I was not going to let this asshole see he’d made me cry.

But he noticed. “I mean . . .” He had the grace to look a little ashamed and started to backpedal. “You’re not staying, right? I thought you were only here short term to help out your sister.”

“Well, I hadn’t thought about it yet. I’m . . .” I put up a hand, stopping the thought. Stopping him from saying anything else. “You know what? My future isn’t any of your business. What is your business is I represent fifty percent of your wenches, and Faire starts in two weeks. Do you really not want me here?”

Simon’s mouth compressed into a thin line, and instead of backing down I held his stare. We looked at each other for a good solid minute, which doesn’t sound like long until you’re in a staring contest with someone and you don’t want to lose.

Finally he sighed. “You’re right.”

“And?” It was nice to have won, but I still didn’t know what exactly I was right about.

“And we only have two wenches this year, so we can’t afford to lose you. I . . .” He looked over his shoulder one more time. To see if he had stalled long enough, and his drug contact had skedaddled by now? When he turned back to me, something in his face had changed. “Sorry,” he said, and I almost fell over backward to hear him apologize. “This time of year is hard. And this year is . . .” That was all he said, but I watched his face. He looked tired, maybe a little sad. Why did he do Faire every year if it made him look like this?