Total pages in book: 72
Estimated words: 69895 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 349(@200wpm)___ 280(@250wpm)___ 233(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 69895 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 349(@200wpm)___ 280(@250wpm)___ 233(@300wpm)
Then he deleted the picture because it felt creepy to take it without Bram’s permission.
He sent the pics of Bram and the scarecrow to Bram’s phone and Bram sent a group text that popped up on Zachary’s phone.
Found my soul mate, the text said, and for a moment, Zachary’s heart leapt into his throat. But then he realized it was referring to the scarecrow, obviously.
A flood of messages pinged in Zachary’s phone, all from numbers he didn’t know.
A raised eyebrow emoji, a laughing emoji, a GIF from The Wicker Man, which made Zachary have a favorite sibling of Bram’s even if he didn’t know which one it was.
“Um,” Zachary said. He held up his phone.
“Oh, uh. Should I not have included you?”
Bram’s cheeks pinked. Zachary could tell he meant it to be something nice, but he didn’t really have any interest in a bunch of random texts from people he didn’t know.
“It’s nice,” Zachary said carefully. “But also very distracting if they keep writing.”
“Got it,” Bram said. He got a message then that said, END.
“Does that make them stop?”
“Yep. Sibling code.” Bram winked.
Zachary wasn’t sure that using the word end to ask people to end a conversation quite counted as code, but he appreciated its efficacy nonetheless.
“Okay, ready?” Bram asked, excitement firmly back in place.
“I guess so.”
They queued up with families and young couples near a fleet of tractors pulling wagons. Hay bales were stacked along the edges for people to sit on. When Bram and Zachary were waved into a wagon, Zachary squirmed to find a comfortable way to sit, but the hay was pokey and itched through his pants.
Bram slid off his jacket.
“Stand up.”
He put the jacket down on the hay, and when Zachary sat down again, the itchiness was gone.
“Won’t you be cold?”
“Warm-blooded.”
“Thanks.”
Bram put his arm around Zachary’s back. One of the boys sitting across from them with his family kept staring at them. Zachary’s stomach tightened. Was the kid going to say something? He reminded himself that when it happened he shouldn’t tell the kid to shut up because that would make his parents mad and it had been a long time since Zachary got in a fight, but he was pretty sure in a moving hayride would be a pretty unpleasant place to take it up again.
Fortunately, once they started moving, there were other things to draw the kid’s attention.
They drove through a wooden cutout arch that announced they were now entering a haunted field.
“Shouldn’t we be doing this at night?” Zachary asked, confused.
Bram bit his lip.
“Um. I thought it would be too scary at night,” he whispered haltingly.
Zachary smiled, incredibly endeared.
“Well, I hope you and all the six-year-olds have a great time,” he teased.
Bram chuckled warmly and gave him a friendly noogie.
The “haunted” part of the hayride mainly consisted of people in masks jumping out from behind stacks of hay bales on the ground. They were clearly keeping it G-rated for the family crowd (and Bram).
Zachary entertained himself by mentally editing the hayride into something truly scary. He was about to tell Bram about how he’d execute a particular effect when the man in question grabbed his hand and squeaked.
A person in a clown mask had just jumped out from behind a tree.
Bram blew out a breath and calmed himself.
“You okay?”
Bram turned wide eyes the color of the autumn sky on Zach and blinked. “This is scary,” he asserted.
Zachary patted his hand and decided he shouldn’t share his specially edited scary edition of the hayride with Bram, even in broad daylight.
The hayride did have one neat effect. As they approached the end of the ride, passing through a twin wooden cutout arch to the one at the beginning, the whole trailer let out a collective sigh of relief. And just as they were doing so, three different masked people jumped out from behind the arch and shot them with silly string.
Several people screamed, the kid who’d been staring at them earlier jumped up, and Bram leapt over the side of the cart to the ground, and ran toward the orchard.
“Er. Excuse me,” Zachary said as he stepped over people’s feet to get to the back of the car.
He jumped down and followed Bram, who had his hands resting on his thighs, panting.
“You okay?”
“Oh my god!” Bram said, wide-eyed. He grabbed Zachary and hugged him close like a stuffed animal after a nightmare.
“That one really got me,” he said.
Zachary stroked his back and slid his hand into Bram’s. A strange sensation lodged somewhere between his throat and his stomach. A fluttery warmth that seemed to intensify every time Bram squeezed his hand or smiled in his direction.
Chapter Seventeen
Bram
Zachary went about choosing a pumpkin with intent seriousness. Bram didn’t know exactly what he was looking for, but he supposed Zachary would know it when he saw it.