I wanted to restore the old fireplace in the front parlor and keep a lot of the original features, but I kind of just wanted it all to be a blank slate that I could add to when I decided on things.
Something else had happened while we were doing it all: Logan’s eyes and nose had stopped running as badly, so he was back to talking normally and not sniffing or blowing his nose constantly. He still sounded nasal and was wearing the sunglasses, but I was relieved I didn’t have to hear any more snot production in his sinus farm.
Sitting down on the couch in the living room, I nodded once, my decision made. “Okay, so, rip shit out, paint it all white, get rid of stuff I don’t want to keep, make a list of shit I want to restore, and then separate the work I can—”
“We can,” Logan interrupted, passing me a beer from the fridge with a discreet sniff. My parents had cleared out the food, but I knew for a fact the booze would still be in there and in the freezer. “I’ll help as much as I can, your parents will, too, and so will mine. This house is yours, and we all want you to feel comfortable in it.”
Smiling at him, I took a mouthful of beer and thought it over. Help was cheaper, and it also added extra sentimentality to the place. I liked the idea of that.
“Okay, so we’ll make a list of what we can all do, then I’ll get bids for other stuff.”
Rolling the bottle between his hands, he focused the full weight of his stare on me. “Have you thought about when you’re going to move in here?”
“Yes,” I replied immediately, then backtracked. “No. I mean, yes, I have, but at the same time, no, I haven’t.”
Raising his eyebrows, he smiled wryly at me. “That sounds like a whole lotta mess going on inside your puny brain.”
Here’s the thing, I had a small crush on Logan when we were kids. It wasn’t the type where I doodled hearts and wrote Mrs. Richards out, but I got a thrill spending time with him. I thought we had a special bond, something that meant something to both of us, but he’d been paid to make me feel like that.
It wasn’t that my crush had broken my heart after it all came out, it was that something special to me had been a total lie. So why was he being so nice to me now?
I wanted to believe in him and his offer to help, but I just didn’t trust his motives for it all.
Leaning forward in the seat he’d taken on one of the armchairs, and bracing his elbows on his thighs, he tipped his bottle at me with a frown. “That looks like some heavy thinking going on over there. Want to talk about it?”
No.
Yes.
No, definitely, no.
But did my brain listen? “Why are you being so nice and doing all of this? Last time it was money, what are you getting this time?”
He flinched visibly and dropped his head to look at his feet. “Bex, I never looked at the money I was getting as payment for spending time with you. I admitted to myself back then that I loved doing it and I was always looking for stuff we could do together so that I could spend even more time with you. Hell,” he straightened to look at me as he threw his arm out, “I spent more of the money on shit we did together than anything else. That’s why I did it even though I told myself to avoid you.”
Looking to the side, I had to concede on his point. “We did do a lot of stuff together.”
“It paid for gas for us to go places, entry to the waterpark, food at the diner, snacks, going to the movies. Every day when I got home from school after dropping you off, I’d look up new releases at the movie theater or announcements for shit happening near us so that I could spend time with you.”
Narrowing my eyes at him, I pointed out, “I always tried to pay, but you’d either put the money back in my bag or point-blank tell me no.”
“Because it was my job to pay, Bex,” he thumped his chest lightly with his fist, grimacing when he must have hit what I knew were bruises from today because he’d told me about it earlier.
“Which made no sense because you were dating Renna.”
Groaning, he placed the bottle on the floor and lifted the glasses so he could tiredly rub his eyes with the palms of his hands. “Can we talk about that part of this another time? Please?”
Rubbing my lips together, I nodded, forgetting he couldn’t see me with his hands over his eyes until he moved them and looked at me expectantly. “Yeah, that’s probably wise.”
“Bex, please don’t think that I didn’t care about you or that it was a hardship spending time with you because that’s so far from the truth. I never meant to hurt you, and it’s eaten away at me every day that I did. When you cut me out and then left town, it felt like part of me had just disappeared and it was my own damned fault. Having you back now makes me feel whole again.”
I could understand that because I felt the same way.
I was staring out the glass doors at the garden, thinking about what he’d said and wondering how we could move forward when he moved and sat down next to me.
“It’s going to take time to earn back your trust and even a little of what we had before, but I really want to work on getting us there. Do you?” He blew out a breath when I nodded at him. “Okay, how about we work on the problems like Renna a chunk at a time. We start with us,” he motioned between the two of us, “and trust and whatever other shit comes with that. Then, when we hit a stage where it’s not so tense and awkward, we tackle something else from the past until it’s all been dealt with.”
“I think that’s a good idea.” Then, I snickered and asked, “Once we hit the end stage, do we go out and get best friend t-shirts, bracelets, and shit like that?”
Pursing his lips, he thought about it. “What about bestie tattoos?”
Squealing, I clapped my hands dramatically. “I know, we’ll both get half of a butterfly on our wrists so when we put them together, they make it complete.”
Here’s a cool fact about Logan Richards that few people knew. Growing up, he had quite a few bad encounters with butterflies that’d left him with a bit of a phobia.
“That’s mean,” he hissed. “You know damn well those fuckers hate me more than even Doyle does.”
“If you fall asleep in the sun with your mouth open, something’s bound to happen. Just feel lucky a bird didn’t poop in it.” Granted, if I’d almost swallowed one and then had to watch it die, I’d be pretty scarred by it.
“And the one that sent me to the emergency room after it tried to blind me?”
“Sunglasses, my dude. Why do you think I have so many pairs?”
In all honesty, he didn’t know that I was a whore when it came to the things, so he couldn’t answer this. I already had three other pairs in Pops’ car, mainly because I kept forgetting I’d put them down in it, though. I just had enough backup pairs in my purse to keep making it possible to do.
“I don’t think they let you wear those in fourth grade, Bex. I don’t remember any other kid wearing them during recess, including you.”
“Look,” I snickered. “You ran into the butterfly—”
“It flew into me.”
“—and it left behind a couple of legs and some wing in your eye because instead of smacking it away from you, you crushed it into your eye.”
“I panicked,” he ground out. “It was instinctual. Plus, my eye was swollen and infected for over a week thanks to that bad bastard.”
It had been. His eye hadn’t reacted well to having the butterfly pieces in it, but it’d been made worse by him using toilet paper and the rough paper towels from the machine in the boys' bathrooms to try and get it out.
“You put those scratches on your cornea yourself.”
“Because I was panicking,” he cried. “I had butterfly body pieces in my damn eye.”
It was incidents like this that’d led to him freaking out whenever he saw a butterfly. By the time he turned thirteen, whenever he saw one, he’d crouch down and shut his eyes tightly with his lips pressed together.
“So,” I drawled, “does this mean we’re not getting a bu
tterfly tattoo?”
His expression was serious as he shook his head, but then it was replaced by a smirk. “What about a Black Widow tattoo?”
“Like the character?” I asked hopefully.
“No, like the spider. Or a Huntsman. Maybe something tropical that’s bright and pretty. Half on you, half on me.”
“You’re such a dick,” I hissed, leaning away from him and looking around the room to make sure there weren’t any. “Why would you say that? Did you see one?”
“No, but do you still leave your open soda can unattended while you do stuff?”
“Never,” I replied solemnly. “You only make that mistake once.”
“I’ll never forget you taking a mouthful and then spitting it out with a Black Widow in it. You were so fucking lucky,” he shook his head with amazement. “I don’t leave mine unattended ever because of that, unless it’s a clear bottle or glass.”
Shuddering, I checked inside my beer bottle before taking a gulp from it. “That was one of the worst moments of my life. I just felt something hard in my mouth—” I ignored the chuckle from him “—and thought it was a leaf or something. When I saw that damn spider…”
Both of us went silent after I stopped talking. I couldn’t say for sure what Logan was thinking about, but I was remembering some of the funny moments we’d had together now.
I jumped slightly when he burst out laughing at something. “Do you remember when we got stuck on the roof?”
“Oh yeah, it was during a thunder and lightning storm as well. Thanks for that.”
What had we been doing on the roof—this roof, to be precise—during a thunder and lightning storm? Honestly, we were doing our homework. I was late with a project on the universe and stars, and he was testing gravity because he had a paper to write on Isaac Newton.
Neither of us had bothered to pay attention to the warnings of the storm, and roughly ten minutes after we left the adults talking about politics after dinner to climb onto the roof, the shit had hit the fan. We’d scrambled to get back in again, but the tiles were too wet for us to get to the window.
What was worse was that the lightning was close to us, and when the thunder shook the ground, we slid down the tiles and closer to the edge of the roof. We’d even screamed our heads off for help, but they couldn’t hear us over the noise of the rain and thunder.
“Yeah, I don’t want to repeat that ever again. I still have nightmares about it,” Logan cringed. “If Dad hadn’t gone to the bathroom, we probably would’ve fallen.”
“One day maybe we’ll be able to laugh about it properly.”
Raising an eyebrow, he looked over at me. “I doubt it. I can laugh at it slightly, but the full weight of what could have happened is way too real for me now.”
“I get you on that.”
“So,” he sighed. “I think we should move you in this weekend. You’ll get more of a feel for what you want done while you’re in it. Plus, if anything is faulty, you’ll find out sooner rather than later and can get it fixed.”
Looking over at Pops’ chair, I knew what to do to protect it. “I want to put his chair in his room and then lock the door for a while. I’m not ready to touch his stuff or change it in there, and I want to keep the chair safe. He was the only one who ever sat on it, and I don’t want anyone to ruin it.”
Not even waiting a beat, he stood up and moved over to it. “Let’s do it now, so you’ve got that weight off your shoulders. We’ll lock his room up tight, keep it all safe, and then you only have to focus on the rest of the place.”
Knowing he was right, I got up and took one side of it. There really wasn’t any need for me to do it because I knew full well he probably could’ve carried it himself up the stairs, but still.
When we got to Pops’ room, though, I took a step back. “Can you do it? Just put it in a corner or wherever there’s space.”
He didn’t even bat an eyelid at the request and took it inside, locking the door with the key when he was done.
As we walked back downstairs, he bumped my shoulder. “What are you going to do with the yard?”
I didn’t have green fingers. In fact, if I misbehaved when I was little, that’s what my punishment was. All the kids at school moaned about being grounded and having their phones taken away. Me, I’d moaned about mowing the lawn, weeding, pruning, and the hell that was gardening.
And the one that I now owned was fucking massive.
“Burn it all,” I muttered. “Get a flame thrower and just let rip.”
Bursting out laughing, he threw his arm around my shoulders and moved us to look out the window at it. The mean shit!
“Why don’t you think about what you’d like that’s easy maintenance, write it down or find photos, and give them to the dads to work on? They love gardening and yard work, so they’ll be all over that.”
Tipping my head to the side while I mulled it over, I knew he was right. And that meant I didn’t have to do it.
“I can’t believe I’m really doing this. It feels surreal.”
Squeezing me, he gave me silent support while it all hit home, and I was even more grateful for his presence.
By the time we threw our bottles out and locked up, I’d resolved myself to the fact I was moving home and was going to be living in the house. In a way, it was beautiful because I’d have my pops with me, seeing as how it was a part of him. But in more ways, it was heartbreaking. I had so many memories of him in that house, and I wanted more.
Death was final, though, and life didn’t always go how we wanted it to. You just had to make the most of it so you had no regrets.
I was just getting into my car when Logan called my name. “I heard from DB that there’s an opening for an English teacher going at the high school. There’s an application form online, so all you have to do is complete it and send it back.”
Chewing my lip, I thought about it. That was my passion. I loved being an English teacher and had dreamed about being one since I was a kid, so this position coming up right now felt like kismet.
Pops, if that’s you making sure I’m staying, I’m going to resurface your chair with bright pink leather.
Chapter Five
Logan
“So, I told her we were arresting him for domestic violence and get my cuffs out, while Carter went to the doorway to call an ambulance for her because she was screaming and no one could hear shit,” Alejandro groaned, holding the ice pack to his bruised face. “Given that she’s got a broken arm and is bruised to shit, and it looked like she’d want him gone, I turned to restrain him so I could get the cuffs on him—” he broke off, wincing at the pain in his jaw.
Standing with his arms crossed in front of him, Carter finished the story from his perspective. “I’d looked over as he turned with his side to her to deal with the guy, and the woman just launched herself at Alejandro, then started beating the shit out of him and yelling to leave the guy alone. I’ve never seen anything like it. It was like she was possessed.”
“Meth’ll do that to you,” DB sighed. “Guys, you know this already, but you never turn away from someone like that. We covered this again recently during the de-escalation training—keep your body language relaxed and maintain attention on everyone at all times. Your feet are important, your arms are important, your tone is important. All of it is fucking crucial to not being attacked.
“I get that you’ll have situations where it’s not possible, but in one like today, you have to do it.” He waved a hand at where Alejandro was slumped. “And this is why. You never know what the other person’s going to do when you change your body’s focus.”
I felt for the guy. He’d gotten the crap beaten out of him by a woman with a broken arm and drugs pumping through her body as he was trying to help her. The guy we’d been arresting had ended up being the calm one and helped me pull her off Alejandro.
“Sorry, DB,” he muttered. “It sucks to have it literally beaten into you why we’re meant to do it like that.”
Gently squeezing his shoulder, DB shrugged. “We all learn stuff the hard way, especially in this job. Have you been checked out?”
Naomi, who somehow knew Carter from their hometown in Florida, whispered, “Um, I looked him over when he got here, and he’s got some bruising and a few cuts that we disinfected.”
She’d done a first aid course when she first got the job here, and it was useful when we needed to be patched up. The correct forms were always completed for our records, so we spent less time at the ER, something which the mayor approved of. Less money spent on medical bills and insurance claims suited him just fine.
“You’re certain nothing’s cracked or broken?” DB pressed. “’Cos he looks all kinds of messed up from here.”
“I did advise him to go and get his jaw and cheek checked to make sure nothing was going on underneath, but he said it was okay.”
Tossing her a glare, Alejandro waited for the inevitable.
“In that case, seeing as how the advice has been to seek further medical care, you’re headed to the ER,” DB told him. “It pays to be careful with stuff like that, so that’s what you’re going to do.”
“I can take him,” she offered. “I just need to be back by four to pick up Shanti from daycare.”
“No, Logan will take him while Carter fills out the paperwork for the case,” DB decided. “Now, everyone else, get back to work and use this as your lesson for the day.”
Lifting himself gingerly out of the chair, Alejandro did some sort of penguin waddle toward me. “Just so you know, I don’t put out on the first date.”
Spotting him as he waddle-walked toward the cruiser, I pointed out, “You know, they have a lot of lube in hospitals. If you say pretty things to me, I’ll put out on the first date.”
A laugh huffed out of him as we reached the vehicle, making him groan. “Don’t make me laugh, fucker. I think a rib’s skewering my kidney.”
Helping him in, I jogged around to the driver’s side and got in. As we drove toward the hospital, I thought about the incident and was still confused.
Eat Crow (Cheap Thrills Series Book 6) Page 4