Even with Sam's anti-Machiavellian antics, Rebecca wasn't quite ready to delve into things again with her mother yet. Mom was being good though, she wasn't pushing.

When they got back "home" both SUVs were still there, but the cabin was locked up. Laura passed Rebecca a note tucked into the doorframe while she fished a key out of her pocket. Chrissie's handwriting explained everyone's whereabouts: she was off hunting with Walt, the boys were down at the pond fishing, and she used a pair of time-and-day-matched keywords indicating the message was genuine.

With the house buttoned up, the woody, slightly smokey mustiness of the inside tickled Rebecca's nose as they entered. It reminded her of past trips when they'd opened the door for the first time in months. As they circulated through the house lifting the windows again, she felt a brief pang of jealousy over how the other ground-floor bath split that side of the house in two — making for some nice sound insulation between the bedrooms. When she was looking into the backyard, she saw some familiar bales of straw past the garden that jogged her memory.

Back in the kitchen, she gladly accepted a refreshed bottle of water from Sam and looked at Laura. "Hey Mom, does Uncle Walt still keep the bows in the same shed? I think I'd like to go poke at the targets out back for a while."

Laura slid her keys across the island at Rebecca. "Yeah, go ahead and let yourself in. Leave it open though, I need to do some work in the garden — if that's okay while you're out there."

Rebecca gave her mother a self-aware smirk. "Hey, I'm not going to let a little grumpiness get in the way of food production."

"Good, good. Priorities."

"Yes," Sam called out from their bedroom. "I support this notion!"

Laura chuckled and lowered her voice. "Quite the handful you've got there."

Rebecca briefly lifted her eyebrows in agreement. "Yeah." When she carried their packs back to the bedroom, she found Sam changing from her hiking shoes into a pair of more comfortable sneakers. "Rosie, wanna come play with the bows n' arrows with me?"

"Oh, hey now." Sam straightened from tying her shoelaces as she sat on the edge of the bed. "You didn't think I forgot there was an apple tree out there, did you? You better not have any William Tell nonsense planned."

"No, no." Rebecca raised a hand concedingly after she'd set the packs down on the table. "The only thing I plan to make a pincushion out of is a couple of hay bales. Full, like, Ronnie grade range safety rules in effect.

"Heh. Well, okay. That sounds like fun then."

Rebecca led Sam down the side steps and around the back of the house, past freshly sawn segments of a certain downed tree to where a prefab wooden structure backed up against the house. She unlocked the door, then opened it cautiously and flipped a light switch just inside out of habit. That made her sigh at herself — what exactly was she expecting? — as she swung the door fully open to let as much daylight in as she could.

Sam raised an eyebrow at her. "Looking for a trap or something?"

"Well," Rebecca leaned her head in and looked around and above the door, then relaxed. "I guess with Mom and Walt living here, they kept the usual spiders and wasps or whatever the fuck out. Better safe than sorry."

"Okay then!" Sam backed up, gesturing towards her and the shed. "By all means, take any precautions you need. Do you need to go ask your mom if there's a flamethrower in the house?"

Rebecca glanced at her with a grin and then entered. Sam was mostly okay with spiders, so it was probably the mention of wasps that got her.

The same wooden shelves ran down the right wall, a good ten feet back to a workbench of sorts, and the left wall was clad in wooden pegboard sheets with various hooks supporting garden tools and, more to her immediate interest, a collection of archery paraphernalia. Walt had a couple of long guns around too, but he probably still kept those upstairs in a safe.

She passed Sam a couple of quivers filled with cheap plastic-fletched practice arrows from the bucket they sat in, then took down a pair of bows and armguards. As they walked through the garden, they glanced around at Laura and Walt's handiwork. Several planting rows were covered with wooden or aluminum frames draped in clear plastic, including more than a few shower curtains sealed together with duct tape. Two half-barrel planters were actually covered with transparent umbrellas, and a taller improvised greenhouse appeared to be made out of, no joke, two-liter soda bottles threaded onto sticks and pipes. Multiple hoses forked out from a tap at the side of the large plastic water tank — big enough that if the top opened three or four people could bob around in it comfortably — that filled from a spring up the hill and also supplied the house.

"Wow." Sam peeked under one of the umbrellas. "Simple, but damned clever." She glanced up at Rebecca with a coy grin. "Guess brains run in the family."

"Says the engineer."

As Sam rose, she scoffed. "Hey, you met my dad. I think we can establish some intelligence manifests spontaneously, 'cause Mom was no dim bulb, but Dad definitely would have brought things below average."

Rebecca blinked. On one hand, it was good to see Sam could make a joke about the run-in with her father. On the other, just, dang. She brushed her reaction to the back of her mind and tried to play it off. "Well wherever they came from, I'm glad."

"Flattery will get you most places. The fun ones, at least."

Jeez, someone's feeling feisty, even after last night. Guess getting out of the city is good for us. Crazy farm detours aside.

Beyond the garden, the ground sloped up across an uneven open area. They threaded up another, narrower, staircase formed of boards sunk into the earth until reaching a more level clearing. The stack of hay bales at the far end had seen better days, but the spray painted bulls-eyes were still relatively visible. Rebecca gestured for Sam to set down the quivers as she lay the bows on the ground, then showed her how to get one of the plastic half-bracers strapped to the inside of her left arm.

"Trust me. You don't want the string to bite you. Leaves gnarly bruises and oh my god, does it sting like a bitch. Also, pay attention when I show you how to stand — so it doesn't clip you in the boob either."

"Neither of those is something I want to experience... so yeah, I'll just take your word for it."

"Good idea." Next, Rebecca leaned over to scoop up the quivers, helped Sam settle one on her hip comfortably, and did the same herself.

But when she picked up the bows and held one out, Sam protested. "Wait a minute. Why do I get the girl bow? Are you being size-ist? I want the high tech one, you're the social sciences major."

Rebecca dropped her hand in mild exasperation for a moment, then held the bow out again. "Come on, I'm actually giving you the one that's more fun. It may look like it's 'just' a simple practice bow but it'll shoot flat to the range that targets are at, and I could go all day with it when I was sixteen. Depending on how out of practice I am — which is probably a lot — this compound bow may look cooler with all the pulleys and doodads, but is going to tire me out a lot faster."

"Mmm, not too fast, I hope." Rebecca could swear there was a hint of mischief to Sam's tone. "If you get the fancy bow, do I get to start calling you Katniss, then?"

"Hah. Only if you shave the side of your head and do a little braid along the edge like Natalie Dormer's character did. That was sexy as hell... and now that I say that to my girlfriend, probably something I should have taken as a hint."

"She did have some nice tattoos in that. Maybe that's why you like mine so much..."

Rebecca chuckled. "Yeah yeah." She showed Sam which way to position the fletching fins on the first arrow, and how to nock the rear groove onto the bowstring. But, when she stepped behind Sam and reached for her arms to guide her into a good stance, Sam nestled back against her with a cozying wiggle.

"Well, this is pleasantly cliché," Sam purred over her shoulder as she moved their right hands to her waist.

Rebecca chuckled bashfully. "You are in a mood, jeez." She moved Sam's hand back, then lifted her arms up into position. "Now draw your right hand back, using your shoulder and tucking your elbow like this, until the string touches your cheek below your eye. You can sight down the shaft that way." She let go of Sam's hands and stepped back so Sam could loose the arrow when she was ready.

Sam, though, still had another comment to make. "What, are you afraid your mom will see? Kinda makes it a little more fun, don't you think?"

Rebecca groaned and rolled her eyes, finally deciding she couldn't bear keeping her mouth shut anymore. "She heard us last night."

Sam's eyes widened and her fingers slipped, driving the arrow off at an uneven angle such that it thunked into the ground a few feet in front of her. As she shook her stung fingertips, she turned to look at Rebecca in horror. "Oh god."

"That's what I said. I've been trying to spare you the embarrassment, but since you're apparently still horny, I figured you should know."

Sam hung her head an inch and sighed. "Sorry."

"It's okay, I know you were trying to cheer me up. She was surprisingly chill about it, thank goodness."

"No kidding. Oh boy. Well... uh..." Sam nodded towards the misfired arrow. "Can I at least get a pass on that, not have it count towards my score?"

"Oh, Rosie. Are you seriously going to start some kind of Legolas-and-Gimli points competition?"

Sam held the middle of the bow with both hands so it was horizontal in front of her, and kicked the ground like a little kid. "Nooooo... not really, anymore..."

Rebecca chuckled placatingly. "Maybe next time."

Once Sam recovered the errant missile and got to plinking merrily away — there's a Robin Hood 'merry' joke there somewhere — Rebecca took a deep breath and urged her muscles to remember how it all worked. Drawing her shoulder blades together for those last few inches had become an unfamiliar workout, and she was glad for the promise of a warm shower later. She specifically did not mention this notion to Sam, as randy as she seemed to be feeling.

The raspy hiss of the arrow shaft drawing back against the bow, followed by the rapid rush of the string through the air on release, reminded her of a respiratory cycle. It also jogged a recollection of her suggestion to Sam, of sending all their stresses away with the final rocks they threw into the lake. Once she shook the dust off her old techniques, she also realized the breath control techniques Ronnie drilled into her over months past were improving her consistency too.

All of that combined to gradually ease her emotions over the dozen arrows in her quiver. Once she was paying attention to what her muscles were doing, she noticed the groups she wasn't using for the bow relaxing while she intentionally activated others, and she could feel the annoyance with her mother reluctantly ebbing too.

God knows if there's four people in my life who always mean well, it's her, Sam, Ronnie, and Allie. Maybe that's the first thing I should tell her when we talk again.

With her head start, Sam finished her quiver first, and Rebecca could feel her eyes on her as she sent her last three arrows flying to the hay backstops. She glanced over her left shoulder before she loosed the last one. "You like what you see, huh?"

"Oh, I always do, but yes, this is particularly hot. I'm a little sad you've got a jacket on still. Given the way my arms already feel, I'm sure this would make for a great gun show."

Rebecca glanced self consciously down at where her mother was re-covering one of the improvised greenhouses a few hundred feet away, and sighed. "The things I do for your raging hormones. Get your phone out already."

"Oooh."

While Sam excitedly dug for her phone, Rebecca took off the light jacket she'd been wearing, followed by her hoodie, and rolled the sleeves of the t-shirt she had on beneath. When she saw Sam had the phone poised, she picked up the bow and reset her last arrow again. "You ready?"

Sam glanced up at her, then back down at her phone. "You know it." As Rebecca drew back, Sam let out a quiet whistle. "Okay, so we all know I hate when you get hurt, but god damn does it show off your scar well when you brace your arm like that."

Rebecca gave her a flat-mouthed skeptical glance, then looked back to the target and let the arrow fly — and hurriedly set the bow down and layered back up again. "Jesus. It can't be more than fifty-five, maybe sixty degrees here in the shade. I hope you appreciate that picture long after I've forgotten freezing just to make you happy. Though maybe that's appropriate if you're looking at me like a piece of meat."

Sam leaned in to finish zipping up Rebecca's jacket, rub her noses together, and kiss her on the cheek. "You know I appreciate you. But you probably shouldn't talk about steak. If I'm being honest, as much as I love you, I might leave you for a nice porterhouse."

"If you shared, I might be okay with that."

"Ouch!" Sam feigned offense with a hand on her chest as she backed away to a less intimate distance.

"You started it!"

"I know, just such a high price to pay for my freedom," Sam said mournfully.

"I should delete that picture while you're asleep."

"Damn you!" Sam sighed. "Technically there's more than one, and a video, but okay, you win. So now what, we get the arrows and start over?"

"Yeah, so we go back to poking at the targets instead of each other. Maybe one or two more rounds, then I think I'll be ready to go chat calmly with Mom."

"Okay, sugar. I'm sorry if I tease you too much... you just seem to like it beneath the curmudgeonly exterior."

"Get out of my head or I will show you curmudgeonly, and I'm darned well not carrying your arrows for you, so start walking."

Sam laughed at Rebecca's exasperation, clearly knowing that much of her annoyance was because Sam was right -- and knew she was.