How to Tame a Silver Fox novel · Chapter 7 of 32

Chapter 7: Nine Days

"Cancel it," I said.

Junie stopped with a slice of lemon cake halfway to her mouth.

We were sitting on the floor of the art building's sculpture annex, which she used as a bakery on weekends because the kiln made a very good oven.

"Cancel what? The plan with the fake fire alarm?"

"All of it."

"Willa, we have nine days. I printed a timeline." She waved a laminated sheet. "On day eight your dad walks in on you two, and on day nine Arlen is on a bus to Ohio."

"He's not going to Ohio."

"He has to go somewhere."

"He doesn't have to go anywhere, Junie."

She put the cake down.

She looked at me for a long, long time with her freckled face going slowly soft.

"Oh my God," she said.

"Don't."

"You like him."

"I do not."

"You slept with him."

"How would you even know?"

"You're sitting like a woman who got well fed." She clapped both hands over her mouth. "Willa Chadwick. You tamed the fox, and the fox tamed you right back."

"I'm not having this conversation."

"You're having it with frosting."

"I don't want him fired," I said.

The sentence came out of me so plainly that we both went still.

Outside, a leaf blower roared and stopped.

"Okay," Junie said, much more gently. "What do you want?"

"I want my mother's studio, and I want my father to be a person, and I want Sabrina out of my mother's chair."

"Those are three things."

"I want to know what Arlen owes him."

"That's four."

"I'm counting the way I paint."

My phone buzzed on the concrete.

Arlen had texted a single line.

Meet me at the east gate at noon. Wear something you can swim in.

I read it twice.

"Go," Junie said. "Go. I'll tell your father you're doing a life drawing class."

"He'll know I'm lying."

"He'll know I baked, and he trusts a woman who bakes."

The cottage was forty minutes from the house, at the end of a gravel lane, with a screened porch and a dock that stuck out over a small cold lake.

Arlen had bought it six years ago and spent the last six months pretending to sleep in the guesthouse instead.

He told me that while he tossed me a towel from the dock.

"You never go there?" I asked.

"I go there to think."

"You're thinking now?"

"Badly."

I stripped to my swimsuit with my back to him and went off the end of the dock before I could lose my nerve.

The water was a shock.

I surfaced shrieking, and he laughed at me, standing there in his rolled trousers with his hands on his hips.

"It's October," he said.

"You said swim."

"I said you could."

"Arlen Rhodes."

"Yes, Willa?"

"Get in."

He looked at the sky and at me, and at the surface of the lake.

Then he took off his shirt.

I stopped treading water and just watched.

He went in, a clean dive that barely rippled.

He came up three feet from me, slick and dark and breathing hard from the cold.

"You're a liar," I said. "You like it."

"I like you."

It was a small thing, a throwaway thing.

It wasn't the thing I needed him to say.

But it landed in my chest, and the rings went out forever.

He reached me in two strokes.

He did not touch me first.

He stopped a hand's width away, with water running off his jaw, and waited.

I wrapped my legs around his waist, and he made a low sound in his throat.

His hands found my hips under the water.

He pulled me against him, and the cold went out of the world.

"You're shaking," he said.

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