Page 18 of While the Sun Shines

He starts to tap out a response, but beneath him, the tractor lurches. Drew grabs for the wheel, steering against the slow slide of the tires on the slick ground, and when he looks down, a berm of mud pushes up into deep ruts.

It’s fine, he tells himself. The sheep, the rain yesterday. Penny’s very welcome visitor. She can have a friend here—what does he care?

Can I see your room? Abelardo had asked.

The tractor lurches again. Then it swerves to the side, a furrow forming in the mud. The steering wheel fights as he tries to wrench it back the other way.

“No, no, no, no,” he murmurs, shifting to a lower gear.

Drew lets the clutch out, but the tractor only sways, mud spraying up behind the back wheels as they spin. The tires dig in deep, the soft road giving on one side until the tractor’s stuck at a tilt, ungainly and awkward.

Fuck.

He cuts the engine and birdsong floods where the rumble of the tractor should be.

Abelardo jogs up to the front of the tractor. “Everything okay?”

“Great,” Drew says. Fucking shit. “Yep, everything’s great.”

CHAPTER FOUR

“Could we push it?” Abelardo asks.

Drew drops his hand where he’s pressed his palm to his forehead. “Push it? Push the tractor?”

Abelardo braces his feet, apparently not bothered by how his loafers squish into the mud, and sets his hands against the wheel well. And sure enough, he pushes, the muscles in his arms flexing. “Pen, jump up and steer,” Abelardo says.

Pen. Pen. Drew hasn’t heard anyone other than himself, Whit, and Cooper call her that.

“It’s too heavy to push,” Drew says. “We’ll have to bring the truck out here to tow it.”

“We could try, right?” Abelardo asks, but thank God, Penny shakes her head before Drew has to line himself up with the guy and pretend he also looks like he works out in a gym.

Because he doesn’t. He hauls around crates of cheese and wrestles with hay bales. Drew’s in good shape, but he doesn’t look like that.

“No, no, no.” Penny points to the top of the hill. “No pushing ’cause I’m hiding back here, thank you very much.”

Yeah, hiding sounds like a good plan. Slip into the shadow of the tractor, settle himself in the mud, and pretend he was never out here. But Abelardo follows Penny’s finger and Drew can’t help but look too.

“Who’s that?” Abelardo asks.

Next to the mower, someone’s waving toward them.

“That’s Travis,” Penny says. “Fucking hell.”

“Oh, yeah, Travis,” Drew says. “Our neighbor, Caroline, that’s her son. He must be visiting. He lives down in Manhattan.”

“Travis,” Abelardo says slowly.

Penny turns her finger toward Abelardo. “Do. Not.”

Abelardo smiles. Laughs a little and claps his hands. “I have to meet him.”

“You don’t,” Penny says.

“First prom pictures, now this,” Abelardo says.

“What about him?” Drew asks. A pain in the ass, Drew’s always thought. Younger than Drew by enough years that it was a drag when Travis would tag along after him. And then Travis grew up and—well, Drew’s not the only one in this neighborhood to fall headlong into a crush on Penny.