“What?”
“Wipe your feet before you leaf.”
“You mean leave? Leave where?”
“No. That’s our clue. It’s somewhere around here, and our clue is to wipe our feet before we l-e-a-f. Which probably means it is near that tree.” He pointed towards the lone oak growing over the old shop that was serving as the location of their adventure.
“Come on,” he grabbed her hand and pulled her towards the tree. Sitting on the third branch was a little house.
“A tree house,” Abbie squealed. “I haven’t been in one since my brother kicked me out of his when I was in middle school.”
“In middle school? Weren’t you a little old to be playing in a tree house in middle school?”
“Well, I went up there to get away from the noise – my parents fought a lot. My brother was six years younger than me. One day, he informed me that I was in his fort and I was too old to visit.”
“And also no girls allowed in the clubhouse, right?”
“Exactly,” Abbie told him. “And I listened. I never went there again.” She looked wistfully up at the tree house before saying, “This is like going back to my childhood.”
Parker winked and jumped up to the first branch. He grabbed it with his hands and pulled himself up. His arms bulged and his shirt pulled up, revealing just a slight hint of his abs. Abbie tried to tell herself to stop staring. When he was up, he sat there waiting for her, perched like a cat on the branch.
“You know there is a ladder right here, don’t you?” she shouted up to him after her brain started working again.
He swung down monkey bar style hanging upside down by his legs. Now his shirt fell farther down, and Abbie realized the hint she saw earlier had not done him justice. He grinned at her before tucking a lock of hair behind her ear.
“I know,” he told her, “but how would I impress you with my athletic prowess and agility while simultaneously showing off my muscles, if I used the ladder?”
“I guess that’s a fair point, but I’m still going up the correct way.”
“Suit yourself,” he shrugged before pulling himself back up. “If you want to go the easy way, then do it.”
He swung up the branches like a monkey, and met her at the top of the ladder. She climbed into the house and he followed. There was not enough room for them to stand, so they sat crossed-legged on the wooden planks.
“Now what?”
“We have to find the cache. Where do you think it is?”
“I don’t know. I still don’t know what I’m doing.”
“OK. Then how about I figure this one out, and you find the next one.”
“Deal.”
“Alright. The title of the cache is ‘wipe your feet before you leaf’. So we know it is the tree, but what about the wipe your feet part?” he said this out loud but clearly to himself. “So it’s got to be the welcome mat.” He pulled up the dusty mat that lay just inside the entrance, and they both saw a small hole that worked its way into the branch below the wooden plank. Sure enough, when Parker felt around, he found it. He pulled it up and there it was a little waterproof container that, dirty as it was, appeared to have once been a pencil holder a child would use at school. Parker lifted it and showed Abbie his find.
Inside, sat several small objects: a spinning top, a match car, a ring from a quarter machine.
“OK. Give me the object,” Parker said and reached out his hand.
“What?”
“The object you brought. We take something out and put something in. Don’t you remember me telling you to bring something?”
“No. No. You didn’t!” Abbie’s eyes were huge. Had she done something stupid? “I didn’t bring anything!”
“Then this was all for nothing.”
“Oh,” Abbie sighed.
“Unless, of course,” Parker teased, “I didn’t tell you to bring something, and I brought something for both of us.”
He pulled out a small book and a fishing lure from his pocket. Abbie hit his shoulder in relief.
“Don’t do that to me,” she told him. “I scare easily! I didn’t want to mess this up!”
Parker stopped what he was doing and put his hands on either side of her face. “Not possible. There is nothing you could do that would mess this up.”
Abbie swallowed. There was no way he was just talking about the geocaching. Parker shook his head and moved back to the cache.
“We have to sign the logbook,” he showed her. “And then we pick out something from the box, and replace it with these. He handed her the book, a small 99 cents journal, and filled out the log. He placed the lure inside and picked something out of the container. He put it in his pocket without showing her what it was, and then handed the box to her.
“If I can’t see what you got,” she scolded him, “then you can’t see what I get.”
“Fair enough,” he said while turning around. She placed the book inside, and stared at the options laid before her. She didn’t hesitate in her choice: she picked up the fishing lure and held it tightly in her palm before placing it in her pocket. She wanted something of Parker’s to save.
“I’m done,” she said. They put the cache back in its spot and went to have lunch before Parker took her out to find more caches, ones where she was able to find them.
That night, Maggie asked Abbie how the date went.
“It was perfect,” Abbie told her and then she emphasized, “Parker could not have been more perfect if he tried.”
15
Parker could not have been more frustrating if he tried. He was sneaking around and being closed-mouthed and Toby knew why. Abbie. His friend was sticking to their plan, and Parker thought it would be the best thing for Toby if he heard as little about Abbie as possible. Realistically, Toby realized that Parker was right. But knowing something was for the best and liking it were two different things.
Actually, Toby was torn. He both wanted and didn’t want to know about the Abbie experiment. He wanted to know what was going on because he wanted to make sure it was working – at least that’s what he wanted to believe. There was a part of him that knew it was because he missed her, despite his best efforts not to. He made a point to not talk to her at work because he couldn’t risk it. However, that didn’t mean he didn’t want to talk to her every time he saw her. So he relied on Parker to get his Abbie news and Parker wasn’t delivering. On the other side of the coin, he didn’t want to hear Parker talk about Abbie because he hated hating his best friend. Hate was too strong a word. He couldn’t ever hate Parker, but he had found in the last few weeks he could be jealous of his best friend, and that was almost as bad. Yes, he reminded himself, this was all a game. He told himself Parker was only spending time with Abbie as a favor to Toby. He told himself Abbie was bad for him and this is what he wanted. He told himself a lot. It didn’t make it true.
Toby made himself stare at his monitor. He would not look up at Abbie. He wouldn’t. He did.
“Hey, Abbie,” he heard himself saying, “how was your weekend?”
Abbie looked up in surprise. Toby knew why. He hadn’t even bothered saying hello to her in a while. It was an awkward working situation, and not just for them. Just last week, Ms. Rachel had even told him that the two of them had better make up – or at least pretend to – so the rest of the office could get some work done.
“Nobody,” she informed him, “likes working on a landmine.”
And that came from a woman who created landmines in her spare time just for the thrill of watching them go off. So broaching a tentative relationship with Abbie was the correct professional decision. But not even he believed that professionalism was his guiding factor in making the first move towards reconciliation.
“Good,” she replied in a hopeful tone, “it was really good. How was yours?”
“It was fine. Just fine. Did you. Do anything special?”
He was fishing, and it was dangerous. If Parker wasn’t going to tell him, though,
somebody needed to. He looked up at the girl sitting across from him and noticed she had a slight flush.
“I, well, I went geocaching. Have you heard of that?”
“Yep. My friend …” He almost said the name. Dangerous, dangerous game, “Er, we go sometimes. Was this your first time?”
“Yes. I had the best time.”
Toby had started this conversation to learn more about her date. He only had to open his mouth and say the following words: ‘who’d you go with?’ That was all it would take, and he would know everything.
“Did you find a cache?” he asked instead. He didn’t want to hear her say his name.
“Yep,” she said, avoiding his eyes.
“Oh,” he told her. They sat there awkwardly before Abbie finally turned back to her computer.
“I guess I should … “
“Yeah, me too. A lot of work …”
Toby went back to his work, but not before he noted the tiny smile Abbie had on her face. He hoped it was because they were back on speaking terms.
16
If there was anything Parker would want Abbie to know before this all went to hell, it was that he wasn’t faking. At least not with her. He was playing a risky game, he admitted, but he was playing it with Toby. He was a good friend with only the best intentions despite how it would inevitably appear when he ended up getting caught, and that is what he would want Toby to know before this all went to hell. Because it would all go to hell eventually, and there was nothing Parker could do to stop it. He just hoped he could lay the groundwork of his plan solidly enough that once the worst was over, he was able to put the pieces back together stronger than ever.
On the day Parker had agreed once again to Toby’s plan, he had done so with no intention of actually hurting Abbie. In the end, he realized he wasn’t the kind of guy who could do that no matter the justification and no matter how he felt about the girl in question. However, Toby was not in the place to hear it, and Parker was afraid his friend was going to do something stupid if Parker did not stop him. So he decided to bide his time.
This is what he figured: Toby was the best person Parker knew, and from what little he knew about Abbie at the time, she was a pretty nice person herself despite her propensity for unwise, sarcastic posts on a stupid online diary. If these two great people caused each other constant pain and embarrassment, there was only one cause; they were not right for each other. Parker figured if he let them handle this by themselves, the two stubborn, hot-headed idiots would end up married to someone they could not stand because they both thought the sparks between them were caused by love and attraction and not by the friction caused when you put together two vastly different people. So it was up to him, as best friend and self-acclaimed Abbie’s Outings fan, to save them from themselves. And while his plan was admittedly not fully thought out, the best way he had come up with to achieve this at the time was to play their game.
He would keep Toby happy and would give him some much needed space from Abbie, in which Toby would hopefully realize his mistake in judgment on his own. Parker would do his best to get Toby interested in someone else. Someone more suitable. As for Abbie, Parker was more than happy to keep her mind off of Toby by making her realize Parker might be a better option for her than her co-worker. And he would not be fake around her, he would just be himself. Because Parker was pretty sure the real him would be enough to win over Abbie. So while he was lying to her in the sense he hadn’t revealed he knew Toby or her blog, he was not lying to her in any other way.
He had been interested in meeting this quirky female from the beginning, but now that he actually knew her, she was even better than he had imagined. After they had lunch last Saturday, they had gone out for more hunts. Parker had never found geocaching more fun. After the first one or two easy ones, she picked up the concept, and he finished the date with a night hunt she found on her own. She was a natural, and her fun-loving nature only showed him that he was right about her. She was a beautiful, smart, funny, fun, adventurous, mostly-kind human being...who sometimes did stupid things. Parker had never had an easier time opening up to someone.
What he wanted to happen was for Toby to realize he had a better life when he had a work-based friendship with the beauty who sat beside him than when he had a non-work, more personal relationship with said beauty. He would then find somebody better. Abbie wouldn’t be hurt by this because she would, by that time, have realized Parker was who she really wanted. Toby would not be upset about his friend’s relationship with the girl he had once been interested in both because he had moved on and because he realized it was what was best for everyone. This seemed like such a simple, plausible plan, and if Parker could only kick the feeling that there was no way things could work out that smoothly, he would be a lot less stressed right now.
One of the biggest potential problems in this otherwise reasonable scheme, Parker knew, was time. Parker was in his residency and had weird and long hours at the hospital. This left little time to sweep Abbie off of her feet and set Toby up with his perfect woman. It also meant there was a lot of time for Toby and Abbie to interact at work where Parker could not interfere and that could only lead to talking and forgiveness and misguided reunions. And if Toby were to call Parker off and claim Abbie for himself, Parker wouldn’t even have the right to get mad about it since, in Toby’s mind, the relationship between Parker and Abbie was fake.
All in all, Parker thought, it was a shitty situation. The one upside, he conceded, was the stress of his personal life helped him forget about the stress of his job. His lack of nerves in that regard actually made him a more confident, and thus better, doctor, which was being noted by his bosses.
“Great,” he muttered to himself after diagnosing a patient and getting an impressed nod from the attending doctor, “at this rate, I’ll be chief resident, but I’ll be friend- and girlfriend-less.” Small comfort to save a life, he decided, if you had nobody to celebrate your achievement with at the end of the day.
Parker placed his stethoscope in his locker and changed out of his scrubs. Before leaving the hospital, he shot off a text to Abbie asking her if they were still going to dinner that night. It was Friday evening, and, while he had talked to her in one form or the other every day since the day they met, he hadn’t seen her. It worried Parker that he could miss someone so much when he had known her for such a short amount of time.
‘Yep,’ popped up on his screen. Parker laughed at himself. Even a one-word response from Abbie lightened his whole day.
‘See you soon,’ he texted back and headed to his car.
Despite the fact Parker wasn’t faking a perfect-personality with Abbie, he couldn’t deny he used his previous knowledge of her to his advantage. Namely, he steered clear of standard ‘dinner and drinks’ dates and planned instead to take her places that, while he genuinely enjoyed them, weren’t places he would’ve taken a girl under normal circumstances. Now that he tried it, he didn’t know if he would ever be able to enjoy a ‘regular’ date again. Maybe he wouldn’t have to.
He knocked on the door, and a little woman with big gray eyes and bigger, wild curls threw open the door. Parker was mesmerized for just a second; she looked just like a fairy. If only she had wings and a little outfit like the one in Peter Pan.
“You’re late … “ she had started to say before she had seen who it was. Even in those two words, Parker knew, while this lady was tiny, she was not to be messed with.
“Oh,” she grinned up at him, “sorry. I thought you were my boyfriend. You clearly aren’t, though, so you, I’m guessing, must be the Parker that Abs can’t quit talking about.”
“Hey!” he heard come through the door, and Abbie suddenly pushed between Parker and the mysterious stranger. “Don’t tell him everything,” Abbie scolded her friend.
“Sorry,” the fairy said with not an ounce of remorse in her voice. “I’m Maggie,” she announced.
“Hi, Maggie,” Toby laughed, “it’s okay. Abbie talks a
bout you all the time too. I take it as a compliment.”
“I do?” Abbie asked. “I don’t remember mentioning her. No offense, Mags, you know I thought about you a lot.”
“Yeah,” Parker stammered out. Had she not talked about her friend? Had he only read about her? “You must have. How else would I know about her?”
Abbie looked at him in surprise, her forehead wrinkled as she no doubt was going through all of their previous talks.
“I really don’t remember,” she admitted, and Parker didn’t understand why she was questioning him so much. Was he starting to sweat? He felt as if he were sweating.
Maggie looked at him with slight suspicion at his odd behavior before pushing her friend forward.
“Please, Abbie, he was probably just being polite. Don’t give him the third degree.” She turned towards Parker before saying, “Ignore her. She over-analyzes everything. Have fun, you two. Parker, it was nice to meet you.”
“You too,” Parker chirped, grateful to her more than she could know, and then the door was shut, leaving him and Abbie, standing on the porch.
“Sorry,” Abbie told him before wrapping him in a hug. He tightened his arms around her and took a deep breath in relief. The smell of her shampoo wafted up to him, and he didn’t want to let her go. He couldn’t hold on to her forever, though, so he released her and grabbed her hand.
“You ready for a good time?” he asked her as he tugged her toward his car.
“Always,” she replied grinning up at him.
When Abbie had asked him where they were going, as they drove farther out of town, he had told her an illegal picnic.
“Don’t worry,” is how he had really answered, “I promise I am not leading you out of civilization to make you another victim of one of my string of serial murders. You’re safe from that.”
“As good as that is to know,” she responded, as she placed her hand on his inner thigh,“can you be a little more specific?”
The Abbie Diaries: The Complete Series Page 8