Under Locke

by Zapata, Mariana

  Then, nothing.

  "You pissed off again?" Dex finally asked after we'd arranged the paper products to make room for the other stuff he planned on buying later on.

  We hadn't really spoken much on the drive—he took the keys from me while we were crossing the street to the lot—and I hadn't made much of an effort since we'd walked into the store.

  I looked over at him, taking in the dark green t-shirt that made his eyes look nearly black, and shook my head. "No. Why?"

  Those normally brilliant blue eyes made a lazy trail from my face down, reminding me for some reason of the fact that he'd tucked his fingers into my back pocket at Mayhem the night before. "You're bein' all quiet, babe. It's weird."

  Uhh... What? "I don't really talk a lot."

  His eyes narrowed just a little bit. "You talk to everybody else."

  I don't think it was my imagination that his tone had dipped a little lower than it usually did.

  Thinking about it for a second, I guess I did. At Pins, I was usually always talking to a client or Slim or Blake. It was more often than not that I'd be speaking to someone. Yet the one person that I didn't really ever talk to was Dex. Not that that was a surprise either. More than half the time I'd known him, I hadn't held him in the highest regard. The other half of the time, I’d mostly spent trying to stay out of his hair.

  "Oh," I told him, giving him a droopy smile.

  Dex blinked slowly, his gaze hard and unyielding.

  Oh lord. It made my hands feel funny. I wheezed out an awkward laugh, reaching up to scratch at my head. "Thanks for putting me in bed that other night, by the way."

  He didn't say anything, he just kept looking at me.

  Well. I turned around to face the opposite shelves, feeling incredibly awkward that he didn't reply with at least a friggin' grunt. "You're welcome, Iris," I murmured under my breath, looking at the rows of granola bars on the shelves.

  "What'd you say?"

  Crap.

  I tried to play it off by coughing. "Nothing."

  The soft sound of his boots on the floor were my warning that he was approaching. "What'd you say?" he asked again, stopping just to my left. I could feel the heat of his chest on my arm.

  "Nothing." God, I was a coward.

  He took another step toward me, his abs brushing against my elbow. "Ritz, buck up. What'd you say?"

  Oh boy. I swallowed hard and tilted my head up to look at him.

  Dex was looking at me with that impenetrable gaze. "Didn't I already tell you to say whatever the fuck you want? I know you said somethin’, so repeat it."

  I really was a coward sometimes. Why wouldn't I just repeat what I'd said? Oh, right. I didn't want to get fired. "I said you're welcome."

  "Why didn't you just say that then? You still think I'm gonna get pissed or somethin'?" he asked carefully, his voice low.

  Buck up, he'd said. I eyed him carefully, taking in the dark stubble on his jaw. "I don't want to make you mad."

  "Why?"

  "Why?" I repeated.

  "Yeah, why? I don't give a fuck about pissin' other people off."

  Like I didn't already know that. I hummed in my throat for a second before reminding myself there was nothing about Dex Locke to be worried about. To be nervous around. He was just a man. A man with a temper. A man with a temper that asked for my honesty. "You're my boss. I don't want to get fired."

  I felt the nudge on my ribs and looked down to see that he'd elbowed me gently. His eyes were narrowed. "Why would I fire you?"

  The scoff in my throat just kind of came out. "Do you remember telling your friend on the phone that you didn't need a fucking idiot working for you? Or do you remember telling me that if I couldn't handle the job, I wasn't needed?" There was probably just a little too much edge to my voice.

  "Ritz," he groaned. Groaned! Like he was embarrassed or something when the words had come directly out of his mouth.

  I tightened up my shoulders and flattened my mouth to give him an incredulous look. It didn't really work because he just managed to look at my mouth curiously. "Well. It came out of your mouth, didn’t it?"

  The question had barely left my mouth before I physically flinched at the aggression in my voice. I’d told myself over and over again to stop, to move over, and I would. There were millions of things that were unforgivable and being a grumpy shit wasn’t one of them. Even if I wanted to believe it was. I had to pry half the words out of my mouth to feed them to him. “I’m sorry. I forgive you. I’ll figure out how to drop it sooner than later.”

  Dex scrubbed a hand over his face and sighed, frowning just slightly down at me. "I wouldn’t have said that shit if I hadn’t been pissed off before," he huffed. “If you’re hopin’ to make me beg you to forget about it, you’re gonna be holdin’ your breath a while, baby.”

  Was it mean of me to snort? Yes. But I did it anyway without even thinking about it. Him? Beg? I’d be sending parkas to hell the day that happened.

  I could forgive him but forget? Eh. Not so much, at least not so quickly.

  When I looked over at him, the side of his mouth was tilted up in a half-smile. The tip of his elbow nudged my side again. "I'm not gonna fire you, all right?"

  That didn't mean I wasn't planning on finding another job so that I wouldn't deal with his dick-ass but whatever. So I just tipped my chin down. "Okay."

  "Yeah?" he asked slowly.

  I nodded. "Yeah."

  He didn't look completely convinced with my answer. "You're hangin' in there, babe." He paused. "Even when I gotta fix the shit you mess up sometimes. I'm not complainin' anymore."

  Anymore. I snorted. Whether he was just being nice because my brother, Trip, or Luther had said something to him, I wasn't going to ask.

  As long as he wasn't still being a dick, I'd take it.

  "Have you heard from Blake today?" I asked him, trying to get away from all this talk about me getting fired.

  Dex plucked a box of organic granola bars from the shelf and dropped it into the cart. "Yeah. Sean's got meningitis. He's still in the hospital."

  A little kid in the hospital? My stomach churned. "God, that sucks."

  He nodded, his eyes on another shelf. "Yeah. We need to stop by Sonny's and pick up your shit," he announced, glancing at my what-the-hell look out of the corner of his eye. "You're comin' with us."

  Chapter Twelve

  “One of you please explain to me why we’re leaving tonight and not tomorrow morning,” I yawned, hoping my question made sense.

  It was two-thirty in the morning and Houston was still two hours away. Dex was behind the wheel of a big, black GMC truck I’d never seen before—he always came to work on the back of his Dyna. Slim, on the other hand, was sitting shotgun and fiddling with the radio station. Again.

  For the tenth time in less than twenty minutes to be exact. It’d be the last time if I had anything to say about it.

  “We have to be there by eleven to set up the booth,” Dex explained, looking at me through the rearview mirror. “I don’t wanna risk not wakin' up on time tomorrow mornin’.”

  Ugh. I guess he had a point. I also guess I shouldn’t be complaining since I wasn’t the one actually driving. Regardless, I would have rather gotten a few hours of sleep in my bed—by that I meant Sonny’s guest room that I’d made my own pad over the last few weeks.

  “Go to sleep, Iris,” Slim chimed in. “At least one of us can get a decent rest.”

  I thought about telling him he could go to sleep because there was no way I would be able to. Even as a kid, it'd always been hard for me to sleep in a car. I think I was just paranoid that something would happen along the drive and if I'd stayed up, I could have prevented it. It sounded crazy but it made perfect sense in my head.

  “You can go to sleep. I can survive on a few hours,” I told our resident redhead.

  No joke, he looked at Dex for approval, nodded and promptly passed out with his forehead against the glass window within a three minute time f
rame.

  “Well,” I muttered, looking at him to make sure he was asleep. He was. I had a feeling this was going to be a fun trip.

  Or not.

  How I got wrangled into it, I still didn’t understand, and I felt guilty. Really guilty.

  Dex needed someone else to tag along to help set up the booth and have another person to sit there constantly. It was doable with three people but nearly impossible with only two. And Blue, damn her, rarely went. Something about her not being social enough. Considering I'd maybe only spoken about twenty words with her in a month, it kind of made sense.

  Apparently, I won by default. Though I still wasn’t sure whether this was something to consider a win or not.

  An hour after we made it back from the store, Gladys from Smiling Faces Daycare Center had called to offer me a job nearly a week after my interview. Fudgesicle sticks. The "yes" that spewed out of my mouth was unintentional, at least so soon. I should have thought about it longer considering that the pay was considerably less than what Dex was paying me but...

  Wasn't that what I'd wanted?

  I had every intention of informing Dex that I was quitting but he kept interrupting me or saying we'd talk about things later. And later had turned into later and later, and the Houston trip had fallen into my lap like an unwanted pregnancy.

  We'd dropped by Sonny's after Costco so that I could pack my bag, call my brother and tell him what was going on—he somehow already knew—and haul ass back to Pins for Dex's appointment.

  That was exactly how I found myself riding along in the backseat with Slim and Dex in front, deciding that I should probably wait until we got back to Austin before I broke the news. Was I a coward? Completely. Was it noticeable that I was stressing? Definitely.

  Dex was glancing at me out of the corner of his eye, one hand wrapped loosely around the steering wheel while the other rested on the door.

  “You buckled?” he asked me in a lowered voice.

  I looked down. No. “Yes.”

  Dex sighed, glancing at me again. “Buckle your goddamn seatbelt.”

  "Sheesh." I usually always had it on, especially if I was in the backseat but this time I’d been so distracted and worried about driving overnight that I didn’t even think to do so until he mentioned it. With a huff, I pulled the belt across my lap and strapped in, mumbling, “Friggin’ bossy,” under my breath.

  A moment later the truck swerved to the right quickly before aligning itself just as fast. In the meantime, despite the jarring motion, Slim stayed asleep while I freaked the hell out and leaned forward to pop my head between the two seats.

  “Are you okay to drive?” I whispered.

  He cut me another sidelong glance. “There was a dead raccoon in the road,” he explained in an equally low voice. “And I’m fine to drive, quit stressin’.”

  Quit stressing. Like that would happen.

  And it didn’t. For the next thirty minutes, I rubbed my hands down the length of my thighs, thanking whatever divine entity that could be listening in, that the road was surprisingly empty. There had only been a handful of cars on the highway and if it weren’t for that, I’d probably be freaking out even more.

  “Would you calm down, Ritz?” Dex whisper-hissed at me.

  “I’m calm,” I argued. He turned to look at me over his shoulder for a moment, which made me squeal. “Keep your eyes on the road!”

  “I can feel the little panic attack you’re havin’ back there," he mumbled. "Fuck, I’m surprised you haven’t woken up Slim with how much stress you’re puttin’ out, babe.”

  I sighed, turning my attention outside the window to the right. So far, besides the swerving incident, he had been a good driver. Not that that meant anything because there wasn’t any traffic but still. He was over the speed limit but not too much, and except for glancing at me a moment before, his attention had been glued to the road.

  “What’s freakin’ you out?” Dex asked in that soft melodic voice he’d only used on me a couple of times before.

  “I'm worried you're going to fall asleep driving or something.”

  Not even a heartbeat later, Dex responded. “I'm wide awake, babe. Swear. I took an energy drink before we started drivin'.” There was no hesitation or annoyance in his tone.

  I hummed in response.

  A few more minutes passed by. Dex fiddled with the knobs on the radio. If I wouldn't have been paying so much attention I would have missed his quick glances to the backseat.

  "Ritz."

  "Yeah?"

  Without an introduction or a ramp that apologized for being nosey, he asked, "What'd your ma die of?"

  There was a knot in my throat I hadn’t felt in a long time—a very long time. Such a long time that it was laced in rust and spider webs, foreign in my body. In the same way I’d avoided telling people about my parents being gone, I avoided telling them how Mom died, and mostly, people didn’t ask. Mortality is a delicate subject. Most people don’t like to get reminded of how fragile and unstable life is. Mom wasn’t even near forty when she first got sick.

  People asked about my family if they cared to get to know me. Most of the time I didn’t get close enough to establish that type of relationship with anyone. I liked people in general but with life and work as unstable as they were, leaving people behind or getting forgotten hurt too much. I lived the last few years of my life being friendly and cordial.

  But I was tired.

  And Dex had cared enough to ask.

  "Breast cancer." Something that constantly scared the crap out of me but I didn't admit that.

  He let out a long, suffering sigh from his nose. His free hand went up to pull his cap off his head, tossing it onto the center console. “Fuck," he groaned. "How old were you?"

  Just answering pierced me a little. Just a little. I'd accepted what happened a long time ago. "Sixteen. My brother was eleven."

  Dex hissed long and low. Turning to glance at me out of the corner of his eye, his gaze was heavy and curious. "Fuckin' kids," he murmured in that low register.

  One kid raising another kid with only the weary monitoring of yia-yia. Even before my mom had died, she'd been sick for a couple of years. By the time the aggressive disease had gotten to be too much, I'd already felt like a thirty-year-old in a teenager's body. Deep in my bones I knew that my life would have been completely different if my dad wouldn’t have left.

  I would have still gotten sick and maybe Mom would have still had useless mastectomies, and pesticides shot into her veins, and for all I know, she would have still passed away. But maybe the paragraphs that had been written in between Mom and yia-yia’s deaths wouldn’t have been so roughly drafted and eventually published. I may have still been in Florida, with a college degree, and married with the Golden Retriever I'd always wanted. And maybe Will would have done something else with his life that didn’t involve running away to start over.

  But like the few other times when the pity party started without my permission, I reined the thoughts in with a restrained mental lasso. I rarely went down that path of what-ifs. They were pointless and painful, and I’d come to accept that my life was the way it was because… it just was. It was the brew of a million decisions and possibly fate if you believed in it.

  I didn't. Then again, I didn't believe in a lot of things anymore.

  I had to swallow back the knot in my throat, push the focus of my family off while I still could. My brain leeched onto the first topic that came to mind. “Are you looking forward to the expo, Charlie?”

  He made a choking sound. “Charlie?” Dex glanced at me through the rearview mirror, one eyebrow raised like he couldn't believe what I'd just called him.

  Maybe I shouldn’t have called him that out loud, but I’d already said it and I knew Dex wasn’t going to let it go. Plus, I thought it was kind of cute. It softened up the impression I had of him. “Yeah. Charlie. Charles. Charles Dexter.”

  He grunted. "Dex, babe. Not...that."

  "It's a
good name," I told him. "No need to get extra grumpy about it. It's not like your first name is Leslie or Clancy."

  Out of all the things he could have picked up on, like the fact that I thought his first name was a good one, he went for the obvious. “You think I’m grumpy?” he asked.

  I didn't like lying and it wasn't like he'd kick my ass for telling the truth. I think. He'd probably leave me in Houston or fire me...

  “Well you aren’t going to win any congeniality awards when you’re pushing customers out of the shop and always grinding your teeth away.” I thought about bringing up his not-so-sweet actions but I’d told myself I didn’t want to go there anymore.