“Okay,” she said. “I’m in.”
He laughed, and she liked the sound of it, deep and rich.
He was already handsome; did he have to sound so good too? She was going to defeat him in every game, just to prove she wasn’t the pushover he supposed her to be. She could strategize with the best of them and would show him no mercy.
They spent the rest of the day that way.
Although she set out to trounce Enzo, he did a fair job of staying untrounced. He picked up the rules quickly and was a natural at strategy.
She found herself talking and laughing with him like the two of them weren’t enemies. They seemed to have agreed, without coming out and saying it, that they would pretend they were ordinary people spending time together.
If things had been different, Charity mused during an especially entertaining game of Yahtzee, if either of them had had a different background, maybe they could’ve been right for each other. Maybe the vision had shown her father who she would’ve married in a kinder timeline.
When the evening came, the lights grew dimmer, and the heater stopped working. The two took blankets from their beds and curled up on the couch in front of the computer monitor to watch shows. She let him pick the titles, and even though the menu had thrillers, he chose a romcom series instead. He was either trying to please her, or he’d had enough violence for a while.
They finished a few, then he went to bed in Zia and Milo’s room, and she slept in her parents’. Falling asleep proved difficult the first night. She couldn’t relax knowing that Enzo was only one room away.
Her nerves were caused by fear, by lingering mistrust. There was no other reason for her to be lying awake thinking about him.
During the following days, they fell into an easy, casual routine. They worked out, showered, ate, read, and played games. He grudgingly admitted that reading wasn’t so bad as long as he could point out what the characters should’ve done. And often his commentary was as entertaining as the books.
He flirted with her, and she found herself flirting back, but she wasn’t sure what it meant to him. Just a pastime? Something more? Did he worry he had to make her happy or her parents would enact some sort of retribution when they came back?
He told her she wasn’t lifting weights the right way and kept adjusting her posture. He’d stand close and glide his hands over her shoulders, her arms, her hips, moving them. Every time he did, she worried she’d drop the weights.
He smiled like he knew what he was doing to her and enjoyed her reaction.
Sometimes when he teased her or they laughed about something, she forgot Enzo was here against his will. When she remembered again, in painful thuds of realization, she had to remind herself that falling for him was a bad idea.
Easy to do, but a very bad idea. And perhaps happening again despite her better judgment.
She couldn’t decipher his feelings. He seemed to want to be with her and looked for excuses to touch her.
Every night when they watched shows, sharing a bowl of popcorn, he sat closer and closer to her. Perhaps that wasbecause of the small computer screen size, and he wanted to get a better view.
Eventually they sat shoulder to shoulder, and he had the habit of resting his hand next to hers so that the backs of their hands touched.
That casual contact didn’t seem to affect him, but it made concentrating on the shows hard for her. She kept thinking that it wouldn’t take much to shift her hand so it covered his, so that they were holding hands.
But she didn’t.
Once in a while, he ran his finger over the top of hers. The motion, that soft caress, always made her catch her breath.
What was it supposed to mean? She would have asked him, but she was pretty sure if she did, he would pull his hand away and not touch her again.
Every few days, the security system alerted them of people in the area, men tromping by on the road. That wasn’t the norm. Usually when the family stayed at the cabin, they didn’t see a vehicle going by, let alone people on foot.
On the tenth morning, a rush of soldiers passed by on the road. From the look of their uniforms, Breakaway soldiers.
Enzo peered at the security screen. “Where are we?”
“Apparently in the middle of a conflict.”
“How far are we from the Arkansas-Oklahoma border?”
She didn’t answer. They weren’t that far away.
He sighed in frustration but didn’t press her.