Now, the woman that strode toward us was not the same person who had come over to help my little brother pass his exams. Well, that wasn’t entirely true; she was the same person, but taller… or maybe this was the way that she was holding herself, meeting everyone in the bar’s eyes with her steady, emerald-green gaze. Her hair hung behind her in a heavy, pale-gold sheet that reached down to the middle of her back, and her curves were swathed in a pair of jeans and a plaid shirt that could’ve been painted on her.
She held my gaze like a heavily polarized magnet.
“Hey everyone,” she said, smiling that slow, lovely smile that my stupid, high school memory had somehow painted as being toothy and dorky. Now, it seemed to hold a wealth of experience that I didn’t know anything about. “It’s great to see you.”
I stood up, not allowing myself to overthink or get cowed by the fact that this woman, whom I’d known since she was awkward and gawky, had become so beautiful that it practically hurt to look at her. “Back at you, Luce. It’s been way too long.”
I pulled her in for a hug, and her fresh, outdoorsy scent of lavender and cut hay seemed to overtake me.
“Quit hogging, Andrew,” Aaron said behind me, and I let go, turning around to shoot him a dirty look. All of my brothers knew that I hated being called by my full name, and that there was something that profoundly annoyed me whenever they used it.
I couldn’t help flashing Aaron my middle finger surreptitiously as I backed away from her, allowing him to come forward and hug her himself. “It’s great to see you, Lu,” he said, reaching forward and pulling her forward to envelope him in his big arms. It was honestly a little intimidating seeing her small frame wrapped in his embrace. None of us were small, but Aaron was the biggest of all of us, and between his generally laconic manner and the sheer size of his frame, he could be pretty intimidating to those outside of his family. His brothers, on the other hand, knew that he was a quiet, grumpy teddy bear.
Now, though, I couldn’t help worrying as I saw his arms tightening around Lucy’s smaller frame, and part of me wondered if he would crush her if he leaned forward even a little bit.
Soon enough, he let her go, and she patted him on the arm with that same warm smile before she turned to Austin. “Hey, Austin.”
“Hey, Lucy.” Out of all of us, Austin’s greeting was the coolest. I couldn’t help biting down on my lip as I heard the perfunctory way he said hello to her, remembering the faint thread of competition that ran through their relationship. Not on her part. She’d never been particularly concerned about proving herself, since she’d been shadowing Doc Boyd practically since she could walk.
On the other hand, Austin was particularly concerned with his reputation as our unofficial veterinarian and would be particularly annoyed with her whenever she made an assessment of the animals, especially when he learned that she was almost always right about them.
Still, he seemed to have overcome his bitterness enough to greet her like an adult, because he reached out his arms to hug her the way we all had and gave her a warm embrace. I noticed that it was a lot shorter than the rest of ours, but he did give her that usual, playful shove that he normally did before hurriedly sitting back down.
“I have to say, I wasn’t expecting to run into all of you,” she said, smiling around at all of us as she started pouring beer into each of the steins that she’d brought over from the bar and distributing them. “It’s been so nuts since I got back that I’ve barely had a second to breathe. Molly practically had to threaten me to come out tonight.”
We all laughed at that—Adam a little bit too hard in my opinion— and I settled back into my corner of the booth to look over at her. She settled her chin into her hand, tucking that long, silky hair around her ear so that it settled over her shoulder and caught the glow of the overhead lights.
Suddenly, awareness snapped into place at the appearance of my female lead, whose physical description had been evading me for weeks. I’d been playing with my outline forever, procrastinating beginning my work. I hated writing unless my characters were fully fleshed out in my mind, and for some reason, my female protagonist had been evading me to an intense degree lately.
Looking at Lucy, though, I felt like inspiration had struck me, and I couldn’t wait to get back home to my laptop and the worryingly blank word document.