Thaddeus (Heartbreakers & Troublemakers Book 2)

by Hope Hitchens

  I had never been round to Bart’s house over the course of our entire friendship as often as I had been in the past couple weeks. He had just moved into this one, probably because of the kids. His last place was a total bachelor pad—big ass TV, couch and nothing else. The only shit you actually needed, really, but he was a primary caregiver now. He needed a yard, and rooms and more than one bathroom.

  I rang the bell and waited for Veronica to let me in.

  “Thank you so much for doing this,” she said, answering the door. She was dressed like she was going out. Her keys were in her hand, and she had shoes on. What the fuck was I doing?

  “No problem,” I said tightly. She turned and went back into the house, and I followed her. The kids were at the dining table eating something. It was crunchy; I could hear them chewing. The boy smiled when he saw me, but the girl did her usual silent stare routine.

  “I’m just going to be gone for a few hours,” she said. “You three can stay out of trouble for that long, can’t you?”

  Theoretically, the answer should have been yes, but I wasn’t sure I could be making those kinds of reckless claims.

  “You’re babysitting us?” Chris asked.

  “Mm-hmm,” I told him.

  “I didn’t know boys could be babysitters,” the girl said quietly. Her expression was still round-eyed, what, shock? Awe? Probably not the second one. She was probably just wondering what the hell her aunt was thinking letting the giant, unshaven man in the house.

  “Yes, they can Nikki, Dad takes care of us,” Chris told her.

  “But he’s a dad. Are you a dad?” she said, looking right at me. The little girl had me pegged. I felt like I was being cross-examined.

  “Nope. Not a dad,” I told her.

  “Are we your only kids?” Chris asked. He had this smile on his face like he was thrilled at the thought. I knew what he meant, but his phrasing could have been better. God forbid the day I became a parent. I couldn’t imagine, which was fine because it wasn’t happening. Even off the strength of my aversion to the idea alone, there was absolutely no chance in this world or the next. Veronica came into the room right then. Her hair was all pulled out of her face, tied back.

  “Call me in case of anything, okay? Don’t let them run in the house. They can’t have soda, and they need to put on sunscreen if they go outside,” she was saying.

  Was it too late to bail?

  It was too late to bail.

  She walked over to her nephew and kissed him on the cheek, squeezing him in a hug. She did the same with the girl, gently brushing crumbs of whatever the fuck they were eating from her mouth. So sweet. Disgustingly precious.

  “Be good you two,” she said, walking towards me.

  “Don’t I get a kiss too?” I asked. She gave me a small smile.

  “If you do a good job, you might,” she said.

  “We’re doing incentives now? I want the number of hours I spend alone with them, alone with you.”

  “I’ll see you in a few hours,” she said, ignoring my comment. She placed a hand on my arm as she walked out. I turned and watched her leave. Damn right she would, and I’d be waiting on that kiss when she did.

  I stood at a safe distance watching the kids eat at the table. They were... they were completely fine. They were sitting quietly, obviously enjoying their meal. Veronica needed to have a little more faith in the little guys. They were clearly more self-sufficient than she believed them to be. Probably a lesson learned from their bitch mom deserting them.

  “What are you guys eating?” I asked them, making conversation. They were big enough to do that, right?

  “Rice Krispie treats,” Nikki said. Both her cheeks were round, swollen with food. “Do you want some?”

  The treats were on a plate between the two of them. It was about two in the afternoon, but I could not imagine that this was their lunch.

  “Don’t mind if I do,” I said. I picked one up and bit into it. I hadn’t had one of those things in like, two decades. They were good, surprisingly. Better than I remembered as a kid.

  “When’d they start putting peanut butter in these?” I said, to neither one of them in particular. They had both been born after the final episode of The Sopranos had aired. I wasn’t exactly looking for common ground with them.

  “Aunt Ron made them,” Chris said.

  “Why would she do that? What do they cost in the store, like three bucks?”

  “She says everything is better when you make it at home,” Chris chirped. I had just been thinking out loud, but I wasn’t going to tell him that. I went over to the fridge and opened it. Bart and Veronica Kingsley kept a dry house. Just my luck. There was lemonade or something on the table that the kids were drinking but I was not a lemonade kinda guy. I could throw the kids in the back of the truck and take them for a beer run, couldn’t I?

  “Is that right?”

  “Mm-hmm. Do you have Hulu Plus?” Chris asked me. I closed the fridge and checked the cabinets. Didn’t girls like to drink wine when they thought beer had too many calories? Where was Veronica’s stash? I wasn’t a wine guy either, but I was willing to become one to get through the afternoon. The kids were fine now, but there was no telling what would make the afternoon go left. I was probably more fun to be around after a couple of alcohol units anyway.

  “No. I don’t.”

  “Can I see your phone?”

  I turned and looked at him.

  “No. You can’t. My phone doesn’t have games on it.”

  “What about YouTube?”

  “Why don’t you and your sister go outside or something?” I said.

  “Are you going to help us put sunscreen on?”

  I frowned. Sounded like a lot of effort.

  “You can’t do it yourself?”

  “Nope. Aunt Ron always helps us rub it in, so we don’t look like ghosts.”

  “Go watch TV then.”

  “We can’t watch TV without permission.”

  “No? What does your Aunt Ron say about that?”

  “If you watch too much TV, you’ll get square eyes,” he said seriously. Ah, a classic. My mom used to say the same shit. It’s like they all read the same one parenting book.

  “Your Aunt Ron sounds like kind of a bummer,” I said. Christopher giggled.

  “She’s nice, she’s our guardian,” Nikki said, defensively. “On Sundays, we’re allowed to eat pizza.”

  Pizza on Sundays—the height of luxury. They were spoiled rotten. This was more interesting than I had thought it would be, getting the dirt on Veronica’s parenting style. Apparently, Aunt Ron ran a tight ship.

  “Hm. Does she have a boyfriend?” I asked innocently.

  “No. She said girls don’t have to have boyfriends if they don’t want them,” Nikki reported.

  “Of course, they don’t,” I said. Harmless women’s lib shit. I wouldn’t hold that against her, as long as she didn’t do anything crazy, like refuse to let me top her, or insist on paying for me if we were out.

  “Do you like her?” Nikki asked hopefully.

  “I think she’s great,” I said. Christopher had finished eating and had taken his dishes to the sink. I was impressed. I didn’t know kids came in self-cleaning models. Nikki finished soon after, and both of them ran into the living room. I followed them and saw something I never thought I’d see in my life again since leaving childhood. Jenga. Fucking Jenga. Why did Bart have board games at his house? Was this 1995? What was going on?

  The pieces clattered onto the coffee table as Christopher emptied the box.

  “Wanna play with us?” he asked.

  “Uh… no, how about you two play, and I watch?” I suggested.

  “It’s more fun with more people. We can teach you,” Nikki said. She was looking at me in that innocent way that only kids can because life hadn’t fucked them over yet.

  I really didn’t want to play Jenga with them. I didn’t want to play Jenga with anybody, especially not a couple of seven-year
-olds, but they looked so, hopeful. They needed to do something I didn’t need to participate in.

  “Are you sure you can’t watch TV?” I asked.

  “Not without Aunt Ron’s permission. Are you going to call her and ask her?” Chris asked.

  Again, too much fucking effort.

  “How about ice cream? You like that don’t you?”

  That caught their attention. Nikki looked at her brother, obviously the older, or at least more shameless of the two.

  “We don’t have ice cream unless it’s a special occasion,” he said.

  “I’d say today was pretty special, wouldn’t you?” I coaxed them. Why were they so well behaved? I was giving them an opportunity to have something they obviously wanted, and they were hesitating.

  “Can we have two scoops instead of just one?”

  I fought the urge to roll my eyes. Did Veronica have them clean eating or something? Yeah, ice cream was literally frozen sugar and fat, but they had to sit on one spot to eat it, and when kids’ mouths were full of it, they couldn’t talk.

  “You can have as many scoops as you want. Come on, let’s go.”

  They scuttled away like crabs to get their shoes on.

  “Are you sure we’re allowed to leave the house?” Christopher called from the door where he was putting his shoes on.

  “Keep asking questions, Chris, and we’re staying right here,” I said, tired. So many questions. Couldn’t he take a good thing when it was offered to him and shut up?

  I took my phone out to tell Veronica we were leaving the house. The piece of shit chose that exact moment to completely flatline on me. I looked up, hearing the kids come back into the kitchen.

  “Looks like we’re out of juice, guys,” I said, looking at my phone. “Any suggestions?”

  “We could write her a note,” Nikki offered, “I’ll get a pen,” she said, racing out of the room. It was like they ran everywhere, was walking really that inefficient on those short legs?

  “Hey, uh, Christopher? Is there a piece of paper or something I can write on?” I asked him.

  The kid ran to the refrigerator and detached a pad of loose-leaf paper they kept mounted there, bringing it to me. Right there, that was the only benefit to having kids that I could see; tiny people who could get shit for you when you didn’t want to stand up. I wrote a short note and ripped the paper from the pad.

  “Can I sign it?” Nikki asked.

  “Knock yourself out,” I said. Both kids signed the paper and Christopher attached it to the fridge with a magnet. The key to the front door was easy enough to find hanging there at the entrance. The kids raced out of the door and stood at my truck.

  “Can I ride shotgun?” Chris asked.

  “I want to ride shotgun,” his sister said. Oh shit.

  “Nobody’s riding shotgun. You have to be at least this tall to ride shotgun,” I said, holding a hand up to about chest height, taller than both of them. I opened up the door to the backseat.

  “No fair,” Chris said.

  “If you don’t like it, I can just take Nikki, and you can hang out here waiting for your aunt,” I told him. I was trying to do that thing that Veronica had done when they were fighting that one day when Bart was there. She hadn’t threatened to leave one of the kids home alone, but I’d got the general gist, sort of. He climbed into the seat. Whatever. It had worked.

  “Can I ride in the back?”

  I was surprised he had taken so long to ask. My dad had driven a truck, and that had always been the first place that I wanted to ride when I was a kid. It was safe-ish if you didn’t go too fast and if there wasn’t traffic, but these weren’t my kids. Veronica would probably have a breakdown if I let them do that. Bart would probably shoot me.

  “Nope. Your aunt wouldn’t want you doing that.”

  “What if we didn’t tell her?” Chris asked. I looked at him through the rearview mirror.

  “Nope. Try again, buddy,” I said, amused.

  A few more hours with me and that one would be a hoodlum in no time.

  8

  Veronica

  He had said yes.

  He had said yes, and he hadn’t asked any more questions. This was great. At the house, he had been chatty and flirtatious, so normal. Hopefully, the whole thing that night at the restaurant was already forgotten. Michael and I hadn’t talked since then except to set a time and place to meet and talk.

  Part of me had been prepared to get a no from him to my question of whether he would watch the kids for me. Nikki had sounded incredulous when presented with the idea that he could possibly be the one watching them—with good reason, to be honest. Based on appearances alone, he looked like the sort of guy who would get you pregnant then not help you raise the baby. He looked like the sort of guy you let have sex with you, but you never really claimed publicly, especially not in front of polite company.

  He had made the suggestion enough times; was I wrong to think he actually wanted me to take him up on it? It probably wasn’t a great idea, but there were worse. I mean, I had made worse decisions, on record; I wasn’t trying to say I was perfect. I had been married for all my adult life, so I hadn’t made bad decisions of his nature but… I could. Maybe now was the time to start. He was the only person that I knew in Monterey, and unless I was giving myself a lot, he seemed to be interested.

  If we were working on appearances alone, then he wouldn’t be anywhere near me, the house or the children. He was, for some reason, Bart’s friend and he could be nice—I had seen it. Nice and able to watch children were two different things, and I was about to find out whether leaving Chris and Nikki with him had been a huge mistake.

  Everything would be fine.

  It had to be. There were two of them, but there was no way they could take down a thirty-year-old man, could they? They were sweet kids. They wouldn’t try it. Laurie had done something right before she had left. I still couldn’t believe it. What a fucking bitch.

  Another thing she had done right was gotten Christopher and Nikki immunized. This seemed like it was common sense, but in California, you could never be sure. You couldn’t be quite that sure with Laurie either. She was a pretentious California type, but she was also a little trashy. It could go either way with her, but thankfully she wasn’t anti-vax.

  They had to have been immunized in order to get into school; the quest to find them a school being the reason why I had to ask Thad to watch them for me. Most kids their age were in second grade, but they were going to third in the fall. Being home with them all day was fun, but it was coming to an end. They were going to go to school and then my new life could really start.

  I would have to find hobbies and make friends. I could get a part-time or even full-time job. I could even find Michael’s replacement. Another man who could make my life miserable for far too many years before I finally came to my senses and left him. Did I even know how to date? I’d probably meet a guy and ask him to move in after one drink. How did it even work? I hadn’t dated as an adult because I had gotten married almost as soon as I had become one. I didn’t know the first thing about being a single girl in her twenties.

  Would I have to get on one of those sites? The thought was depressing. I was twenty-four, but I could count the number of long and short-term relationships I had had on one hand. Most of the guys here were probably military anyway; they’d be gone like half the time just on deployments. Mix that with traumatic brain injury and PTSD and my prospects were just downright miserable. Thad was a bad idea but when propositioned to either lick cat shit or pigeon shit, did it matter which one you chose?

  There had been no phone calls, which was both a good and a bad thing if you thought about it. On the one hand, maybe they were having so much fun together, they never even thought to contact me. On the other, maybe the twins had managed to drive Thad crazy, and he would never do something like this for me again. If it was the latter, at least I was home, so I could relieve him. It was unreasonably hard to get your kid int
o elementary school, but the Monterey Peninsula Unified school district was excellent. All I needed was to dig up their birth certificates and show proof of residence, transfer approval and medical history and they’d be enrolled.

  I turned the key in the lock and let myself in.

  I wasn’t really expecting the kids to come rushing to the door, happy to see me like puppies but I was at least expecting to hear something. Anything. A vase smashing. Screaming. The television. There was nothing—not a peep. The house was pin-drop silent.

  “Hello?” I called.

  Nothing.

  “Guys?” I walked through the house to the dining room. It was empty, and so was the kitchen. I hurried to the living room and checked the patio and yard. More nothing.

  “Nikki? Christopher?” I called as I ran up the stairs.

  I tried not to panic. It wasn’t like I had left them alone. No, it was worse. I had left them with a man I didn’t know and had left the house. I ran to each of their rooms, mine and Bart’s and found nothing. My pulse was beginning to pound so hard I could hear and feel it. I ran back downstairs.

  Oh, my God.

  Where were the kids?

  Thad was gone too, but that didn’t necessarily mean that they had gone together. I took my phone out and ran back into the kitchen. The remnants of the snack they had been eating had been cleared away. It was just the children themselves who were lost. And Thad, sure he was gone too, but I wasn’t his legal guardian. I pulled my phone out of my purse and started searching for his contact. I was pacing up and down when I finally saw it.

  It was pinned to the refrigerator with a magnet, and it was printed in text that was too exact to belong to either of the kids.

  ‘Gone fishing. Not really. Just out for ice cream. -T’

  Below it were Nikki and Christopher’s signatures.

  Somehow, the thought that he had locked them in the basement felt like it would be more likely than what apparently had happened. No way. I wasn’t believing it until I saw it. All this told me was what Thad’s handwriting looked like. I wasn’t going to allow myself to picture that man, with those kids eating banana splits until I saw it.