Page 79 of Making the Save

“Where are you going?”

“If we leave some food outside of the window that might tempt it out sooner rather than later.”

“Or invite a whole new family back inside.”

I shook my head. “It’s raccoons. Not bears.”

“You don’t know what’s coming through that window,” she said.

I turned from the cupboards and her eyes dropped to my crotch again.

“Ignore. It.”

“Are you sure it’s not a problem that it stays like that for so long?”

Feeling her breasts crushed against my back when I carried her out of the bedroom didn’t help. Her perfect ass in the corner of my eye helped less. Watching her now, kneeling on the sofa mattress, I could see the shape of her hard nipples through her t-shirt.

Not helpful.

“No,” I said.

She scrambled off the sofa bed as soon as I opened the cabin door. “Wait, you can’t leave me inside with it!”

“Syd, it’s behind a shut door.”

She shook her head and joined me at the cabin door. “I’m coming with you.”

“You don’t have shoes on.”

“They’re in the bedroom. You don’t have shoes on either.” She pointed to my feet.

“I’m not worried about raccoon poop.”

She put that bottom lip under her teeth and shot me a look under her lashes. An evil fairy. An evil fairy bent on destruction. “I could piggy back.”

“I could piggy back, she says,” I muttered under my breath. Like having her breasts crushed against my back and her legs wrapped around my waist wasn’t going to prolong my erection situation. “Hop on.”

That’s how I ended up carrying my evil fairy out into the woods, around the cabin, to the open bedroom window to try and lure a raccoon out of my bedroom.

“I think I read somewhere raccoons like grapes,” she said over my shoulder.

“We didn’t have grapes, I got pretzels.”

“Is salt good for raccoons?”

“How the hell should I know?”

“Someone’s a little grumpy.”

“Someone was sleeping soundly until someone else came out of her bedroom and woke him up.” I set the pretzel pieces on the windowsill and then a few along the ground outside.

“Were you really?” she asked, her voice quiet. Worried. “Sleeping soundly?”

“No. I was wide fucking awake.”

“Why…why didn’t you come to bed with me?”

I couldn’t answer that question without getting knee deep into my feelings. And that wasn’t anything I liked to do. She asked for no complications and I was complicating things left, right and center, thinking about baby headphones and retirement and little girls with Syd’s eyes.