Page 16 of Snake
Autumn let it be. “Okay. Thank you.”
With a nod, he finally pushed off the wall and stood at his full height—which towered over her, but virtually all of the male population, and most of the female population, towered over her.
Generally she enjoyed being petite. It was a pain when she needed to reach something high, but otherwise, the whole world had room for her. She was often underestimated and condescended to in business; a lot of men—especially older men—seemed to think because she was small she was an actual child, but she had learned to use that against them. She also usually wore five-inch heels so they couldn’t literally look down at her.
However, as Cox held the door open and she passed him in the threshold, Autumn felt a brief but powerful sense of being overshadowed.
“Y’okay?” he asked as he came through and let the door close.
“Sure. Where to?”
“I go where you go.”
“Yes, but we decided you were going to show me Signal Bend through your eyes.”
He shook his head. “I don’t see anything special through my eyes.” Seeming to decide not to be quite so recalcitrant, he huffed a sharp breath and added, “If your dainty feet can handle some walking, we can walk down Main Street, or over to the park, where they’re settin’ up the Spring Fling.”
The people setting up the weekend’s festivities were the movers and shakers in this town. “Let’s go to the park.”
Another one of those smiley twitches at the corner of his mouth. “Can your dainty feet handle the walk?”
Choosing to take that sarcastic question as banter and not challenge, Autumn replied with a pert roll of her eyes and headed off in the direction of the town square, which was half a mile away at the most. Cox caught up with her in two long strides.
She’d been to last fall’s Harvest Festival, which was exactly what one would expect of such a thing: food, rides, games, contests, vendors. The town had dolled itself up from front to back and top to bottom. Back in those naïve days, Autumn had been charmed.
“Is the Spring Fling like the Harvest Festival?” she asked as they walked.
Cox shrugged. “I guess.” Again, he rethought and decided to elaborate. “A lot of the same vendors, and there’s rides and music like the fall and summer, but the events are different. Different location, for one thing—in the middle of town, for the most part. And for spring, there’s a bonfire at the end of each night, and we roast a few pigs on spits on Sunday night.” He shrugged. “The kids’ll do some flower and ribbon dance thing to open things up Saturday morning.”
“You mean a Maypole?” She thought kids doing Maypoles was weird. People really needed to learn the history of the ‘cool’ thing they were planning. Eight-year-olds should not be doing fertility dances.
The private girls’ school her dads had sent her to had a graduation tradition where the senior class danced around a Maypole while wearing virginal white gowns, and one girl (usually the valedictorian) was proclaimed the ‘Queen of Love and Beauty.’ This at a school with a one-hundred-percent college acceptance rate and a sixty percent Ivy League acceptance rate. The alumnae of her alma mater included legions of doctors, judges, senators, and corporate executives, but still they graduated like medieval princesses.
To the day she died, Autumn would be proud that her class had gone on strike protesting the tradition, and that she’d been among the girls who’d led that charge. The school hadn’t ended the tradition, but Autumn’s class would go down in school history as the one class (so far) who’d refused to be cast as virgins in need of inseminating.
“There’s no pole. And it’s April. It’s just flowers and ribbons and dancing. You’ll have to ask Adrienne about it—she’s the one started it.”
Badger’s wife. Getting Adrienne on her side might help immeasurably with Badger, and thus with the Horde. “Will Adrienne be at the park now?”
“Can’t think where else she’d be. Her and Lilli are in charge of most of the party shit around here.”
“She,” Autumn muttered and then could have bitten her tongue off. She had some grammar twitches, but she tried to keep them to herself. People didn’t like their grammar corrected, so Autumn judged them silently instead. Usually silently.
“What?” Cox asked.
“Nothing.”
The weight of his gaze drew her eyes to his. “What?” he asked again.
She sighed. “You said, ‘Her and Lilli.’ The correct way to say it is ‘She and Lilli,’ because both names are subjects in the sentence, and ‘she’ is the subject pronoun. ‘Her’ is an object or possessive pronoun.”
Cox stopped walking. “You got a red pen in your head?”
Feeling her cheeks grow warm, Autumn rejected the urge to duck her head. “I guess I do. I don’t make a habit of grading people out loud, though.”
“You just sit there and silently judge people, and think that’s better.”
Now she did look away—but she didn’t duck her head. A crow cawed at the right moment, and she looked that way.
