"Hey, did you see that," Wade exclaimed excitedly. "We've got a chance to win this all because Tom Long is choking over there."
And, she was choking right here, right now, as the slick plastic box slipped from her fingers while Zoe watched George and Lemon kissing in a way that even old man Jackson could see meant that they'd surely made up. Otherwise, the crisp and proper Miss Breeland would never allow that much unseemly affection to be displayed in such a public venue.
"Damn it, Zoe," Wade's frustrated tone accompanied the clank of metal falling to a disorganized mess at their feet. "What the hell happened?"
She could feel his searching eyes follow her crestfallen gaze across the lively town square to the happily reunited couple and, immediately, the doctor knew something had irrevocably changed between them. It wasn't for the better either as her race partner growled, "Fifty screws and bolts all over the grass, we're never going to win now."
"Wade, let me help you with that," Zoe guiltily tried to rectify the damage that she'd unwittingly done to more than their chances to win the competition but he wouldn't let her. His brusque, silent, movements were something she wasn't familiar with when Wade was normally flowing with self-confident ease and teasing banter flirtatiously aimed at her.
"No, just stop; okay. Forget about it. There's no point," his angry, closed-off disposition, exploded at her as he grabbed the few parts she'd managed to gather out of her hands in a way that made her feel even more rejected than his snide words. "It's over. And, thank you for costing me five thousand dollars. Thank you for that."
"Wade, I'm so sorry," she desperately tried again to get him to calm down, to forgive her for this careless mistake, and help her fix things like he always did but, this time, Wade was far from accommodating with her.
"I cannot believe that I didn't see this from the beginning. You never wanted to help me," his accusations cut through her like her trusty surgeon's scalpel with their condemning truth making her bleed regret. "The only thing that you wanted was what you always do. Him," he nodded toward George in a manner that was so far from congenial at the moment that it was hard to believe that the two had been good friend's their entire lives.
"And you are," Wade shook his head in bitter disappointment, "you are so obsessed with getting what you want that you don't care who you hurt along the way. Well, let me tell you something Zoe Hart; George Tucker and Lemon Breeland are getting married. That is how this story ends," his words were so inevitably stated, so resolutely strung together, that she finally understood so much more than her doomed future with the town's golden boy. "Why does everyone in this town see that but you? Probably," Wade added with no small amount of disgust and disdain, "because you never care about anyone but yourself."
Instantly, Zoe felt ignominiously swatted down like the most common of houseflies, crushed again by the all too fresh memory of Wade yelling about how stuck-up and superior she was to his brother but if he really thought that way about her; why had he ever wanted her for a partner anyways?
Suddenly, completely fed up with shouldering the brunt of this town's wrath for every little thing, Zoe petulantly challenged him, "Oh, yeah?"
"Yeah," he shouted back with a mouth twisting grimace of utter futility and then stomped off into the cool darkness leaving her standing there alone with nothing but their disassembled rod for company.
"I'll show you, Wade Kinsella," she furiously sputtered at his disappearing back as she pulled off the loose warmth of the hoodie he'd leant her earlier when a chill had come upon her with the setting sun and plucked up the only things she'd find useful from the myriad pieces of their fishing rod still strewn on the ground and then hurriedly shoved them in her jeans.
Ruthlessly, she turned and marched toward her new destination, mentally calculating that scaling the church couldn't be that different from the grueling climbing tower she'd eventually mastered at that stupid sleep away camp her mother had always sent her to for a couple weeks each summer so that Zoe got a proper dose of less-polluted and stifling air than could be had in Manhattan during the doggiest days of summer.
Well, as the doctor clumsily managed to scrape her way up the side of the wood slatted building without the aid of a ladder, Zoe sarcastically figured that the moldy scented air in Bluebell could only get cleaner and purer the closer she rose toward the quaint spire that presided over the God fearing town. She was just about to move from the pitched roofline to the ledge along the white fronted facade when she heard Wade's disgruntled command finally break through her indignant monologue, "Get your foolish butt down here, Doc."
"No," she defiantly shook her head down at him in mutinous reply. Wade's disbelieving, hip fisted stance did nothing but reaffirm her commitment to her course of action and Zoe edged even closer to the corner that jutted out before her trying to ignore the murmurs of concern now rippling across the crowd assembled below in well-timed succession like the celebratory wave at the local football games.
"I'm not kidding now. This is stupid," her bad boy neighbor lamented her denial. Suddenly, he looked uncharacteristically nervous with her spontaneous activity as he added, "You're gonna get yourself hurt."
"I told you we were going to get everything we wanted, Wade," Zoe yelled down to him as she extended her sneaker clad foot out over the precipice of free falling air and onto the small rim that ran under the large, circular window. "And, I'm not selfish enough," she huffed out as she lithely swung the rest of the way around the corner, "to let your pigheaded stubbornness make a liar out of me where you're concerned."
"You falling and breaking that pretty little neck of yours is definitely not what I want from you, Zoe," Wade leveled in an intensely intimate way that shivered along her spine in silent recognition of something infinitely more significant now passing between them than him using her given name without the habitual curse in front of it.
Grunting heavily with her exertion, Zoe evasively countered, "But the money for opening your own bar is..."
Her words suddenly faltered along with her previous steadfast grip on the corner of the building as Zoe tried to shimmy closer to the colorful magnetic fish dangling just out of her reach and Wade swore, "Damn, girl. Your usual brand of craziness isn't cute or funny right now."
As she steadied herself, gulping in much needed air to temper the insane pace of her rapidly beating heart, Zoe heard a few residents sporadically cheer on her partner as Wade swiftly scrambled up the path that had previously taken her much longer to traverse. And, before she knew it, his calloused hand was covering hers, tangling their fingers together as he expertly led her back to the relative safety of the side roof and his solidly muscled embrace before she could even offer a protest. Helplessly, she looked up into eyes that were as murky as the storm of his earlier mood and questioned, "I thought you were mad at me and had given up. So what are you doing up here?"
There was a suspended moment of uncertainty swirling around them before a slow, reckless, grin spread across Wade's slightly whiskered face as he leaned in a little too close for proprieties sake to answer, "Because, Doc, you weren't never gonna admit that you needed me but even if you was in them silly skyscraper heels you usually wear, you weren't ever gonna be tall enough to reach that fish by yourself."
She arched a sardonic brow up at him and impetuously gainsaid his claim, "That's why our line and magnetic lure currently reside in my pocket as a back-up plan."
He gave her a soft, all too knowing look of appreciation just before he smacked her ass companionably and rushed past her. The astonished gasp that escaped her mouth kept on coming when quick as a wink; Wade swooped out onto the tiny ledge and effortlessly snagged the whopper of all of Bluebell's notorious aquatic life along with the boisterous congratulations of all the townsfolk swimming in celebration below. Their merriment happily continued, increasing in volume and praise until Wade purposefully swept her back into his arms on his return to the slanted roof and an expectant hush suddenly cloaked their community in anticipatory silence.
The entire nosy population of her gossip ridden Alabama home were breathlessly hanging upon every second of Wade's lips lingering all too temptingly above hers right along with Zoe and she was thunderstruck with a lightning flash of absolute clarity in that eternity of waiting. She'd sure wanted to make a grand gesture by joining this race and Zoe certainly had but this surely wasn't the one that the doctor had planned since the only person she'd been subtle with by her actions had obviously been herself all along.
When Wade's lips finally crashed down on hers in a dominant winner takes all move; Zoe knew that they hadn't gotten everything they'd originally wanted from this competition but, maybe, just maybe, this year's Bluebell Battle winners were getting everything they'd truly needed as the city girl happily surrendered to that special something that had been brewing with her home-grown neighbor from her very first night here in the heart of Dixie.