What Matters More

by Liora Blake

  While she didn’t feel unsafe, she did feel oddly vulnerable, even while she maintained enough distance to make it clear she had no interest in striking up a conversation with them about trucks or cigarettes, or even to offer up a helpful suggestion as to where they could buy a nice t-shirt. The wide berth between them wasn’t quite enough, though, because their creepy rubbernecking still made her skin crawl a little.

  She had planned to mow the lawn after finishing up Kevin’s lesson today but decided to put it off for another few hours, hoping that her audience would eventually take a break from all their chain-smoking and go back inside. There had to be something else on their schedule today. She could only hope that a few seasons of Sons of Anarchy were sitting in a Netflix queue awaiting him, so Tyler would finally saunter inside and probably watch it for the millionth time, somehow taking away new fashion cues about how to accessorize while still going shirtless.

  As Anya walked up the Greenes’ driveway, she snuck a look back toward the Hintons’ and watched as Tyler lit a new cigarette. She sighed. Please let the Hintons have a bag of pizza rolls in the freezer with Tyler’s name on it. There was no way he could resist that.

  Four hours later, Anya couldn’t stand it any longer. She’d wasted a few hours sunning by the Greenes’ pool, but now it was early evening and the stupid sprinkler system was scheduled to run in a few hours, so she didn’t have much time left to get the lawn mowed today. Tomorrow she started a new part-time job at Wine, Wonder & Whimsy, an art studio and supply store where they’d hired her to teach paint-and-sip classes four times a week. Between Kevin’s private lessons, this new gig, and working on her own paintings, Anya would need to stay on top of the routine maintenance that came with her house-sitting responsibilities. Otherwise, things would get shaggy in a hurry.

  She peered out the mini-blinds in the dining room and groaned. Tyler was really putting in the hours out there today. He had also acquired some new sidekicks in the last few hours, so now there were four shirtless guys milling around in the Hintons’ driveway. She had no idea what was going on under the hood of Tyler’s stupid truck, but there they all were, peering about the engine compartment while Tyler gripped a wrench in one hand and proceeded to do absolutely nothing with it.

  With a long-suffering sigh, she let the blinds snap shut and trudged out to the garage. She dragged the lawn mower out to the yard, muscled it over the decorative rock border and into the grass, and then gave the starter cord a yank.

  Aaand, nothing happened.

  Anya had mowed a few lawns in her day, so this didn’t immediately throw her. She gave it another yank, harder this time, but again, nada. A few more tries followed, returning nothing.

  She checked the gas tank, finding it full. Unfortunately, this concluded her troubleshooting knowledge when it came to lawn mowers. The only trick she had left was to give the machine a dirty look.

  Anya could almost feel the smirks from Tyler and his entourage searing directly into her backside. She wished then that she were wearing a different outfit, because the denim cutoffs and cropped swing tank she had on suddenly felt like not nearly enough armor. On top of that, one of the guys had the radio on in his truck and left the doors open to let the music drift out, so now she had an obnoxious hip-hop soundtrack to go along with everything else.

  She was just about to abandon the mower in the middle of the yard and stomp back inside when a familiar vehicle turned down the cul-de-sac and headed in her direction. She grumbled a few cuss words under her breath. As if her afternoon hadn’t already been frustrating enough . . . now JT was home.

  Great.

  His arrival meant that she would have another set of eyes on her, although JT’s gaze on its own didn’t bother her. In fact, if he hadn’t treated her like an annoying uninvited party guest the last time he had seen her, Anya would be game for JT doing a hell of a lot more than looking at her. Instead, he acted as if the idea of her temporarily living across the street was horrifying, which meant any ideas she had about the two of them making the most of this unexpected situation were fleeting.

  She yanked the mower cord a few more times, desperate to look busy so that they could easily ignore each other the way they had been for the last two weeks. The mower sputtered once before going silent.

  JT’s SUV rolled to a stop in front of his parents’ house, and even though she told herself not to look his way, she gave in the moment his brake lights went dim. He stepped out of the car and met her stare.

  She groaned under her breath. This guy really needed to stop coming home looking like he’d just finished a sweaty grunt-fest workout and was about to shoot a sports drink commercial. Would it kill him to shower at the gym and put on an ensemble that Anya would find less appealing? Ideally, that involved him dressing like an octogenarian, rocking a pair of chino shorts belted high above his belly button and some orthopedic socks with sandals. Maybe that would do the trick.

  Anya had seen his body up close, so she understood that none of his lean muscle simply happened. It surely required crazy conditioning routines and some tire-tossing hijinks, but she hated that it inevitably led to him showing up every evening looking like the embodiment of her secret hot jock fantasy. The fact she had the fantasy at all was bad enough, let alone that she’d fostered it for more than a decade, ever since watching Varsity Blues when she was twelve. Blame it on the hormones and a preteen tendency toward swoonyness.

  She wasn’t asking for much, really. Just for him to find some workout shirts that were a couple of sizes too big for him, instead of the ones he preferred, which fit his body perfectly. Bonus points if the shirt had some vaguely offensive witticism emblazoned on it. He also needed to stop wearing sweatpants, because only JT in joggers could make her believe that sweatpants were hot. Never before had she thought that, and to save her sanity, Anya needed to go back to that place in time. That might make it easier for her to stay pissed at him.

  But today that wasn’t going to happen. Instead, she was treated to JT in a pair of low-slung black joggers, a sleeveless shirt, and a ball cap on backward, a determined look on his face. JT’s gaze lingered on Anya for a few moments before shifting to Tyler and his friends.

  His expression hardened and Anya swore that she even saw his lip curl, as if he was letting out a snarl. JT’s macho show wasn’t lost on Tyler and his friends, either. In a matter of seconds, they all turned away and scuttled off toward the Hintons’ backyard.

  JT watched their retreat and then started in Anya’s direction. She latched one hand onto the handle of the disobedient lawn mower, hoping a strong grip would keep her from bolting into the house like a nervous kitten.

  “Hey,” JT said.

  Anya stifled a scowl. All hail the standard dude bro conversation opener. Hopefully she still had enough willpower to keep from losing her cool over one tiny word. An annoying word that made Anya want to scream in frustration. Instead, she lobbed the blasé greeting right back at him.

  “Hey.”

  She sounded decidedly not blasé, though. Her tone was barbed, laced with just enough of an are you kidding me attitude to make her sound a lot like a cranky teenager on the brink of a meltdown.

  JT lowered his eyes.

  “I wanted to apologize. For how I acted when you got here. It caught me off guard, and I ended up acting like a . . . drama-llama.” He visibly cringed at his choice of words before looking up to meet her gaze. “Or at least that’s what someone I work with called it. Either way, I felt fucked up about you seeing me here, and I took it out on you. That’s wasn’t right, and I’m sorry.”

  Anya studied his expression, looking for any evidence his apology was an act, but saw only apprehension in his eyes. She narrowed her gaze on him.

  “I was going to say you acted like a jerk. Or an asshole. But I like ‘drama-llama’ better. It fits.”

  A grin quirked at his lips. “I’ll tell Lexie you said so. She likes being right about things, but she likes pointing out when I’m wrong even more.
She and my buddy Chris spent most of our time at work last night telling me about all the ways I screwed this up.”

  Anya lifted a brow, smirking. His colleagues sounded like truth-tellers, and everybody needed a few of those around.

  JT glanced at the mower. “Do you need help with that?”

  Anya released the mower handle and wriggled her fingers to loosen them, quickly realizing how much of a death grip she’d had on it.

  “I’ve got it. It’s just a little temperamental.”

  She smoothed her hands down her front, tugging on the cropped hem of her swing tank. JT followed the motion of her hands but didn’t stop at the hem of her shirt, continuing over her legs and down to her toes. Then his gaze ventured a return trip upward, at a lingering pace that made her skin feel hot.

  “You can’t mow the lawn like that,” he said flatly.

  Anya tilted her head. “Oh, really? And why is that?”

  “You’re wearing flip-flops.” JT pointed at her feet. “You can’t mow the lawn in flip-flops. That’s a good way to lose a toe.”

  “I have ten of them,” she countered dryly.

  “And they’re cute. I’d suggest you try to keep the whole set.” He paused, as if debating his next words. “You should put on some pants, too. Maybe a different top. A sweatshirt would be good.”

  A sweatshirt? Apparently the fact that it was one hundred degrees out hadn’t entered JT’s mind. Anya snorted and reached for the pull cord again. He wanted her to put on some more clothes? If he only knew.

  “I’m fine,” she said. “I just need to get it started and then I’m golden.”

  JT reached forward and put his hand gently over hers.

  “I’ll do it. You should go in the house now,” he instructed. When Anya sent him a cutting look, he cursed under his breath. “Sorry. I know it doesn’t sound like it, but what I’m trying to do here is make up for being a dick. I’m good at mowing lawns. Let me do this for you.”

  Anya bit back the first retort that came to mind about all the things he could “do” for her. She thought there were a number of creative ways he might better make it up to her for acting like a drama-llama. Instead, she raised her palms up and backed a few steps away, giving in to whatever it was JT was trying to accomplish here.

  “You know what? Have at it.”

  Letting JT push the mower around in this heat instead of her? All while she sat inside, poured an iced tea, and stole the occasional glance out the window at him?

  Fine by her.

  If he didn’t want to atone in a way that Anya thought might be more fun, then she could at least enjoy the show.

  10

  JT

  JT believed that a freshly mowed lawn was one of life’s simple pleasures. He liked the evenly spaced tracks left behind from the mower’s path and the uniform height of previously unruly grass—and he really liked how much better a cold beer tasted when he was done. Pathetic as it might be, pushing a mower around for an hour or so never failed to leave him in a better mood than he’d started out in.

  When they’d first married, he and his ex had lived in the single-story bungalow he had bought as a single guy just back from his time in the Marines. JT loved that small house and its postage stamp yard, which he mowed every ten days without fail. Nicole had given him a tremendous amount of shit for the satisfaction he got out of what most people thought of as a chore, declaring that when they finally sold his “starter house” and bought the kind of house she’d always wanted, they were going to hire a lawn service. JT had chuckled, thinking she would eventually appreciate how cozy the house was, then, at some point, come to love it the way he did.

  A year later, the starter house was old news and JT was living in a new house with a yard—and a mortgage—so big that he came to hate mowing the lawn. The house was just the beginning, followed by every other kind of debt imaginable, all in JT’s name because he made most of the income and had come into their marriage with a credit score that made it easy to keep signing his name on things they couldn’t honestly afford. Looking back, the red flags were hard to ignore. His salary as a Marshal and her part-time work as a manicurist made for a solidly middle-class lifestyle—not the upper-class one Nicole had always dreamed of after growing up in a family that had never quite made ends meet. But at the time, JT had believed that everything in his life would last forever, from his marriage to the money in his savings account.

  Not long after their divorce, JT had muddled his way through some uncomfortable self-inventory and come to realize that, from the beginning, he had fallen a little too deeply in lust with Nicole. Her glossy chestnut-brown hair, her perfectly manicured nails, not to mention a body that belonged on the cover of a fitness magazine. He loved the way she carried herself, how she was completely self-assured in a way that JT found fucking fascinating. But it was also that aura of unattainability, which made him shortsighted. JT hadn’t truly seen Nicole as a partner. On good days, he’d put her on a pedestal, doing anything and everything to give her whatever she wanted without stopping to think about how long that could last. On bad days, he had seen her as another part of his life that needed to be maintained, as if she was part of a to-do list. Mow the lawn, wash the truck, clean the gutters, keep Nicole happy.

  That reductive way of thinking was his biggest failure as a husband. Even when his checkbook had made it clear something needed to change, he’d told himself the hard times would pass and just kept digging. Right up until he was barely keeping up with payments on a maxed-out credit card for their latest vacation and treading water on the mortgage. When he finally went to Nicole about it, she felt like the rug was being pulled out from under her—and JT couldn’t blame her. After that, everything between them became an exhausting battle of wills, and their marriage buckled under the strain.

  Part of their divorce settlement included an agreement to sell the big house they’d bought and that Nicole would receive any profits from the sale, accepted in lieu of any future alimony payments. It had been on the market since their divorce was finalized, but Nicole had final say over what offer to accept and she’d turned down three already, claiming the terms didn’t suit for one reason or another. Their real estate agent was running out of patience, as was JT. Until Nicole accepted an offer, he was on the hook for the mortgage and everything else that came with being a homeowner—utilities, association fees, maintenance, the fucking lawn service—even if JT didn’t actually live there, which was an experience he likened to sucking on a lemon while nursing a few hundred paper cuts on his tongue. Not that he didn’t accept full responsibility for the house and everything else; he did. But that didn’t make paying his bills any easier.

  He was working off a budget that would have him out of his parents’ place by the end of the year, but selling the house would give him the flexibility to move out sooner, and he sometimes dreamed about that, especially on nights when he was staring at the ceiling, unable to sleep again. When that finally happened, he could rent a dumpy little house somewhere downtown, one with the kind of postage stamp yard he liked, and then spend every weekend mowing the damn thing to his heart’s content.

  For now, though, all he had was the satisfaction of mowing someone else’s lawn.

  JT dragged the lawn mower back into the Greenes’ garage and brushed the stray grass clippings off his shoes, trying to decide if he should walk straight back to his parents’ house for a post-mowing beer or if he should let Anya know he was finished first. It was a flimsy excuse to talk to her, but so was everything else he’d done since he’d seen her standing in the yard, wearing a pair of denim cutoffs and a tank top that was cropped enough to reveal a few inches of her belly.

  Unfortunately, Tyler Hinton had also found Anya hard to ignore. Call it the instincts of a Marshal—or the equivalent of pissing on her leg—but JT wanted Anya far away from Tyler. He and his dirtball friends liked what they saw in the neighbors’ yard way too much for JT’s taste. Convincing Anya to go inside had just made the law
n mowing all the sweeter by keeping her cloistered behind stucco walls that still weren’t thick enough for him to feel like she was truly safe.

  JT rapped on the door between the garage and the house. He cocked an ear, listening, and when she called out for him to come in, her voice came through loudly enough to make it obvious she was right on the other side of the door. He opened it to see Anya just inside the mudroom, rinsing out paintbrushes in the utility sink. She gave him a quick side-glance.

  “Feel better now?”

  JT sighed. How this woman could so easily see right through him, he would never understand. Anya smirked, then used one of the damp brushes in her hand to gesture for him to come inside. JT toed off his shoes before stepping across the threshold.

  “Yeah,” he admitted. “I do feel better.”

  She let out a little snort. “Did Tyler and his posse finally pack up for the night? Or are you guys going to hang out and knock back some beers together? I’m thinking he’s a Mickey’s malt sort of guy.”

  “He better be a Shirley Temple kind of guy,” JT muttered, then answered the questioning look Anya gave him. “He’s on parole for drug trafficking, so he needs to keep his nose clean. No drinking, no drugs, no bullshit.”

  Anya’s mouth dropped open a few inches. “Seriously? Does he know you’re a big bad Marshal guy? He acted a little squirrelly when you showed up, but I just figured it was because there was too much testosterone in one area.”

  “He knows. I haven’t gone over there and flashed him my credentials or anything, but I don’t need to. Between my mom and his aunt, he and I already know everything about each other.” JT scratched the back of his neck. “But I’d be full of shit if I said testosterone wasn’t part of it, too. I didn’t like the way he was looking at you.”