Six Months

by Dark, Dannika

  The second I saw the man Trevor was salivating over step onto the curb and adjust his mirrored shades, it triggered a memory. As did his spectacular body beneath his tight, long-sleeved shirt—nary an inch of skin showing. Not to mention his chiseled face that had a light dusting of whiskers around the chin—a face I’d thought I’d never see again. Only now, fully dressed, he gave off more of a paramilitary vibe. Maybe I’d forgotten the scary aspects about him, but his looks still lingered in my mind all these months later.

  “I think I know him,” I said under my breath.

  Four months ago, I gave Lexi a ride home. Reno Cole, Austin’s brother, was outside throwing horseshoes in the yard without a shirt on. A thin sheen of sweat covered his broad torso, which was the only thing I noticed since he was wearing sunglasses and a baseball hat. I had a “stupid” attack and almost tripped in front of him. I’d never felt more intimidated by a man’s presence in my life. I felt cowardly and my mouth refused to work, and when it finally did, I mentioned something about the heat like I was a walking weathergirl. Reno’s fit body spanned just over six feet, but his expression was tight and menacing. I shamelessly fled the scene, but the tire on my car wedged into a pothole. He stalked over as if he might rip my car door off and pummel me for messing up their driveway.

  But he didn’t. He pushed the car free and I never saw him again.

  Fingers snapped in front of my face and Trevor gave me a killer smile. “Nice to see you still have a pulse. I was beginning to think your libido took a permanent vacation. April, my mission this year is to find your Mr. Right.”

  Trevor was kidding, of course. He’d always been overprotective and never let a stranger approach me without giving him the third degree. He liked the idea of me finding a man more than the reality.

  “I hope you find a place soon, Trev, but you can stay with me as long as you need to.”

  “At least you’ll have someone to talk to besides those damn critters you keep taking in. You still got the squirrel?”

  Picking at my blue nail, I shook my head. “Skittles didn’t make it.”

  “Rabies?”

  I slapped his arm and we belted out a few laughs.

  Over the years, I’d gained a reputation for rescuing injured animals. Some I found along the road, while others wandered in from the woods. They were amazing creatures—like the garter snake my grandma had attempted to murder with a broom. It was a good feeling to help something wild and then set it free. As much love as I had for them, I learned you couldn’t hold on to something with a wild heart. They live on instinct and they’ll never love you back.

  Trevor held my hand up to his mouth and kissed it. “I’ll be gone a day or two—tops. And then we’re roomies.”

  “My trailer won’t fit all your stuff.”

  “Stuff?” he scoffed. “I won’t have much to move because none of the furniture was mine except the couch, and he can keep it. I don’t want anything his ass was on.”

  “The very ass you talked about endlessly when you first met?”

  “The very fucking one.”

  Chapter 3

  Later that evening, after a long walk home from work, I freshened up with a quick shower and went to bed in my bra and panties. I only ran the air conditioner for an hour or two and usually shut it off before bedtime. Despite the humidity, the days were beginning to get cooler. Thank God.

  Trevor was right. The trailer park was creepy. It’s something I tried not to think about, but late at night when I heard rustling noises outside, it made me curl up and pull the sheets over my head. I never thought about stuff like that when Rose lived at home. Things had quieted down since the drug raid last year that took out some big dealer. Now there wasn’t as much traffic at all hours of the night, not to mention loud parties.

  The third time I heard a high-pitched noise outside, I sat up with adrenaline pumping through my veins. The intensity of my heartbeat couldn’t be matched as I tiptoed to the front door and grabbed a long knife from the kitchen drawer. I drew the curtain back and peered outside.

  The orange light from the lamppost illuminated the area around the barbecue grill and I spotted a shadow moving.

  “Oh, no,” I whined. The shadow wasn’t a man-eating alien but a wounded animal. A stray dog limped a few steps before lying down on the muddy gravel.

  I threw on a silk robe and slippers, careful not to make any sudden movements as I stepped outside. I crouched down and placed my fingertips on the ground, avoiding direct eye contact.

  “Hi there. Did someone hurt you?”

  I shuffled forward and he lifted his head, his snout wrinkling as he bared his sharp canines. As soon as I spoke in a calming voice, his savage expression vanished. If it’s one thing I knew about, it was how to placate an agitated animal. Years of practice.

  “I’m not going to hurt you, sweetie. Can I just see? Bet I can help, and I have some leftovers inside you might like.” I kept my voice confident and soothing, knowing animals responded to tone and body language.

  He was an intimidating creature. His breed resembled a Husky, but fierce, like what I imagined a wolf might look like. From what I could tell, his thick coat looked earthy brown and his face had all kinds of dark markings on it. It was an unusual pattern for a dog, but boy, was he a looker. He was also well fed, which led me to believe someone cared for him and he was domesticated.

  “Come inside?” I clicked my tongue three times.

  He wasn’t going to be a submissive fella, so I slowly backed up and walked inside my brightly lit trailer. It looked welcoming from the outside, and I’m sure he could smell the cheeseburgers I’d cooked up earlier.

  “Come on, tough boy.”

  My grandma used to say I was crazy for letting wild animals in the trailer.

  Bat crazy.

  She’d made me keep them outside, which is why some of them had died. I’d been a fearless child who had a penchant for helping injured animals. Every wild thing deserves tenderness even if it doesn’t want it. The thing is, I’d always been good about reading animals. My dad used to say I was Doctor Dolittle in a past life—that some people were born with more compassion for all of God’s creatures. I felt more connected to animals than I did to people because I understood their basic emotions. I’d once saved a jackrabbit from a feral cat with a voracious appetite, but because I was forced to keep it outside, a red-tailed hawk had dined on him for breakfast the next morning. That had upset me, even though I couldn’t blame the hawk for having survival instincts.

  I kicked off my slippers and left the door ajar, breaking off a few pieces of meat and placing them near the door. Either he’d come in or he wouldn’t. The choice was his.

  Ten minutes later, a noise startled me. I turned my paperback facedown on the tiny kitchen table to the right of the sink. A steady growl rumbled in the quiet room. Not a menacing one, just the kind that told me he was hurt and too stubborn to admit it. Coming inside the trailer proved he wasn’t aggressive; animals acted violently out of fear, and feral ones stayed away from humans. If he walked up those steps on his own, he had a fearless heart. He wouldn’t be the first dog I had let inside the house. Trevor once suggested that I get a job working in a zoo.

  I laughed and told him I already worked in one.

  The dog’s toenails clicked on the floor and I got an eyeful of his enormous size. I briefly entertained the thought of locking myself in the bathroom, but decided it wouldn’t be in my best interest to show fear and run. After polishing off every morsel on the floor, he lifted his nose and sniffed in my direction, his tail wagging lightly. I kept my eyes glued to the table so he wouldn’t perceive me as a threat.

  “Change your mind?” I asked softly. “Good boy.”

  His wet nose glided across my left arm and I shivered. I sat motionless, allowing him to check me out even though a small voice in my head was whispering, You’re a certifiable idiot. You just let the Big Bad Wolf in, whetted his appetite with hamburger meat, and now you’re going
to become the main course.

  The poor thing limped in a circle and collapsed on his right side. He looked barely conscious, panting the way an animal does when it’s in pain. I circled around him and locked the door.

  “Oh, baby. What happened?”

  I knelt down and ran my long fingers through his silky fur. His face relaxed at my touch and while I couldn’t see any blood, his front leg was curled in a peculiar position. When I gently lifted his heavy paw and peered underneath, I saw why.

  Instinctively, I began humming a made-up melody to keep him calm. Lodged deep in his upper leg was a screwdriver. It made me steaming mad to imagine that someone could have impaled him intentionally; we had sickos in the area notorious for animal cruelty. The brown handle protruded from the inside of his leg and the spike angled toward the back. I bent over to make sure it hadn’t gone into his chest cavity, but it looked clear. His dense fur made a close examination difficult. I couldn’t call animal control because they would only put him down.

  My hands trembled and I took a deep breath. I had to pull it out, and that would snap him out of his placid state of semiconsciousness, and he’d be looking for someone to bite.

  “How did this happen?”

  He refused to answer the question.

  I slipped out of my robe and decided the best thing to do was cover his head so he wouldn’t see me when I pulled it out.

  Kneeling before him in my bra and panties, I draped my silky robe across his back, sliding it over his face until it obscured his view. I wrapped my fingers around the handle, ready to pull it out with lightning speed. At least I had medical insurance, even though the deductible was outrageous.

  “Here we go,” I whispered. Then I did a mental countdown. One… two… three!

  In a clean motion, I yanked the handle and pulled the screwdriver free.

  He yelped and growled all at once. The wolf flipped onto his feet and the robe fell away, revealing one pissed-off animal. I scrambled backward, holding the bloody screwdriver in self-defense.

  He limped forward, tracking blood with each step as his brown eyes locked on mine like a target.

  This was it. I was going to be one of those sad-o’clock news stories about a lonely woman found mauled to death in her bra and panties. Then they’d go to commercial and talk about squeezably soft toilet paper.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said in a shaky voice, lying on my back as he reached my legs and then my hips. “You had a bad thing happen, and I’m… Please don’t hurt me.”

  In that moment, I was either going to be ripped to shreds by an incensed wolf, or I was going to kill an animal to save my life—something I’d never done.

  My fingers gripped the handle tightly and I tensed, preparing for the inevitable attack.

  Tension mounted.

  I couldn’t breathe and kept thinking about my sister.

  The wolf lurched forward and fell beside me, resting his chin on my left arm. After two short wags of his tail, his tongue stretched out and licked the bottom of my jaw. I sighed dramatically and stared at the ceiling in relief.

  “Just another exciting night in the life of April Frost,” I said, laughing with tears hovering at the corners of my eyes.

  That was the night a fierce and beautiful creature walked into my life and changed it forever.

  The next morning, I sleepily crawled out of bed and brushed my teeth. I made a mental note to pick up toothpaste on my next trip to the store since I had all but sat on the tube to get a smidge on my brush. My wild encounter the previous evening had slipped my mind and I went about my morning routine. When I suddenly remembered, I burst into the hall and found the wolf asleep in my kitchen.

  Just as I’d left him. Lying on top of my grandma’s blue blanket, a bandage wrapped around his wound, which I’d carefully cleaned before going to bed. He wasn’t showing any signs of sickness and seemed to be almost smiling in his sleep.

  I set a pan on the stove and heated up a few slices of sausage. If he planned to become a regular tenant, then I needed to pick up dog food from the grocery store.

  He still had his eyes closed when I sat down to eat. What a gorgeous animal. His large, heavy paws were crossed in front of him, giving off a regal aura. I’d never seen such an unusual pattern as the dark mask that covered his face. He must have been a mixed breed, because wolves didn’t live in Austin. I’d heard of coyote sightings, but they were smaller and more skittish of people.

  “Are you hungry? I’ll share what I have with you.”

  His brown eye popped open as if he’d been listening all along. The nose-twitching led me to believe he was famished, despite his indifferent demeanor. But when I held out my sausage, he made no attempt to lunge and gobble it up.

  Peculiar.

  Lexi sent a message on my phone asking me to hurry my ass up—in those exact words. Which meant I’d overslept.

  “Shoot,” I grumbled, scratching my wolf behind his ear. My life was just getting too weird.

  ***

  “April, can I see you for a second?” Lexi tugged the hem of my orange work shirt and dragged me away from a customer. I knocked over a counter display of Pop Rocks, but we both ignored it.

  “What’s up?” I leaned against the vending machine and her eyes pretty much scraped me from head to toe. I tried to pretend I had no idea what she was about to say.

  But I did.

  “You cannot walk around the store looking like you just crawled out of a Vietnam War movie. Don’t you have a change of shoes? It looks like you’ve been to boot camp and then ran through a jungle.”

  “I’m sorry. I’ll rinse them in the sink again,” I said, staring at my white sneakers.

  Which were now my brown sneakers.

  “Look, I have a pair of sandals in my car you can borrow. Austin’s funny like that. He helped me pick out a new car and lately he’s been obsessed with stocking it for every kind of emergency imaginable. Blankets, clothes, bandages, flares, and even food,” she said with a roll of her eyes. “So if an asteroid wipes out the planet, I’m good to go because I have a bag of jerky and peroxide.”

  “I think I saw your boyfriend’s brother yesterday,” I said, changing the subject.

  “Who, Denver?”

  “No. The guy with the motorcycle.”

  A smile wound up her face and Lexi flipped her long hair behind her shoulder. “Ah, you mean Mr. Mysterious. Where did you run into Reno?”

  “Oh, we didn’t speak. He was walking outside a store.”

  “Did he talk to you?”

  What she really wanted to know was if I went flying over a newspaper stand or knocked an old lady down.

  “No, I was in the car.”

  Lexi folded her arms. “What car? You don’t have one.”

  “Trevor’s. He’s a close friend of mine. He’s been in the store a few times. You complimented his belt and he liked that. Nobody ever notices stuff like belts and it was one of his favorites.”

  “Yeah… I remember now. The belt is probably the first thing I notice on a guy, kind of a habit. He was pretty cool—sexy from what I recall, but polite. You two, uh…” She pursed her lips and her eyes slid down.

  “Jeez, Lexi. Can’t I just have a male friend and it not be a thing?” I peeled off my shoes and tossed them to the side. “You better grab those sandals for me; I don’t want to keep our customers waiting.”

  Her smile waned. “Charlie made a good choice hiring you, April. Thanks for not bailing on me. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

  I sat on the bench, watching Lexi cut through the store.

  When Charlie died, he’d left her a mess of legal documents to sort through. Lexi had e-mailed me some of the files since she wasn’t sure what she was looking at. I’d found the inventory records as well as the vendors he worked with. Over the past few nights—perhaps out of boredom—I’d been examining those files a little closer. There were odd withdrawals in the account I couldn’t find any explanation for. Maybe it was for ch
arity, but it was always the same amount every time. Lexi had been given access to his house to pick up a set of keys and anything else she needed. Charlie had left a comment in his will that everything in the office was hers for the taking. She’d found a ledger, files, and a few extra flash drives I’d copied to my computer. It felt good to know she trusted me—partly because of my education, but mostly because Charlie had always touted that I was going to make waves someday with my skills.

  He was the closest I’d had to a father figure in a long time. I’d enjoyed our afternoon conversations in the shop before he started working more from home. Charlie had a great laugh and loved to talk about history. My real dad was the most amazing man I’d ever known, but he’d died in a car accident when I was fifteen.

  “I think that’s a sexy look; barefoot really works for you.”

  I glanced up at Denver. He smiled at my feet and nibbled on his bottom lip. My first reaction was to pull my legs under the bench since I hadn’t painted my toenails that week and the blue polish was chipping.

  I frowned when I noticed his cupped hand holding a colorful assortment of sour candy.

  “Where are your shoes?” he asked.

  I tipped my head toward the corner of the room and he noticed the dirty pile.

  “So you walk to work. No car?”

  “The transmission died. At least, that’s what the mechanic told me. I don’t know anything about cars except how to turn them on.”

  “Hmm,” he pondered, popping a green candy into his mouth with a sly smile. “I’d say knowing how to turn something on is pretty important.”

  Dang, I was staring. I lowered my eyes to his flat sneakers and noticed his legs. He had on a pair of knee-length cargo shorts and jeez, what calves! Denver must have spent time outside because he had a warm tan and strong legs. His frame was average, but he filled out just right.

  “Are you here to save the day again?”

  “I might,” he contemplated, nibbling another piece of candy and staring at my legs.

  “Denny! Lexi said I could have a bag of candy, but I can’t reach the big round ones,” a blond-haired girl whined, tugging at his shirt.