by Kira Blakely
* * *
An hour later, I mopped at my beaded forehead and sat back on my haunches. I was dutifully removing all the area topsoil with a spade and no one had showed up to help me. Thank God. This was going to be an all-day job, and I didn’t know if I wanted Chet Browntooth to be an all-day neighbor.
“You’ve done a great job,” Chet’s voice rang out behind me and I jolted.
“Thanks, Chet.” I twisted and greeted him with an unenthusiastic wave. He approached down the driveway with his arms loaded in tools. Great. “You really don’t have to come over and help me,” I went on. “This is going to take all day and I—to be honest—I enjoy the solit—”
“No problem at all,” Chet insisted brightly. He dumped his tools at my feet and added, “You know what would really set your fountain off and give it some flair? River rocks.”
To be polite, I asked him, “Oh?” and kept chopping at the topsoil.
“Oh, yeah, I’ve got a few bags of those,” Chet said. “I just found them in my garage the other day. You can have them. For free,” he added heavily.
I slanted my mouth to the side. Woohoo, free stuff that you forgot you even had in the back of your garage. What a gesture, Chet.
“I was actually going to go to the store and grab a few pounds of stone dust,” I told him.
“Oh, no, you don’t want that,” Chet assured me. “River rocks are the way to go.”
“Oh, um, no, I don’t—”
He upended the first bag and sent a thick stream of river rocks over my yard. I coughed and brought my forearm up to my mouth.
“So classy,” Chet went on. “Where’s your pump and your basin? Let’s get this show on the road.”
“The base has to be level for the basin,” I reminded him, packing down the river rocks with my spade. They shifted and collapsed wherever I touched. “I just tried to tell you that.”
“Aw, shit, I’m sorry,” Chet murmured, scrubbing at his hairline and separating the sprayed front line. “We’re gonna be out here all day now.” He paused as I began slowly but diligently removing the river rocks from my hole. I quelled the urge to snap at him because he hadn’t known what he was doing. When I looked up, I caught the way his eyes bore hungrily into me, and I wished there was a way to garden without bending so much.
“Is it insanely hot out here, or is it just you?” Chet asked. “Let me go grab us some cold drinks. I’ve got soda, lemonade, tea. What’s your poison?”
“Lemonade,” I called over my shoulder. He was already jogging toward his house when I looked again.
He was still in his kitchen when Andrew’s truck jostled into my driveway, even though he had already dropped my car off yesterday. Technically, there was no reason for us to talk. A hot bitterness rose up in my heart as my eyes tracked his shadow, leaning and ducking from the interior. Sunlight poured over him as he swung down onto my driveway. He wore slate gray jeans and a green, plaid, sleeveless button-down. My lip almost quirked in a welcoming smile. This was the most countrified I’d ever seen him look. I forced myself to look stern.
“Hey,” I called to him, scooping more river rocks from the hole.
“You’re installing a fountain,” Andrew deduced, nodding firmly as he surveyed the scene.
“Yes.” I kept shoveling and my eyes were trained on this pile of river rocks. I wondered how shitty I looked. Our fight last night threw off my whole routine, and I hadn’t washed my face before bed or drank any water when I woke up. All I’d had to drink was coffee and I felt hideous.
“What are you going to do with all the river rocks?” he wondered innocently, like he assumed I had a good answer for that. “Bury the basin?”
“Actually—”
“Okay, call me old-fashioned, but I found a little gin in the back of the liquor cabinet,” Chet’s voice filtered through the hedges. He broke across the barrier between our yards with sweating glasses of bright yellow and dark brown, one in each hand, looking down to make sure he didn’t trip and spill them. “I made myself a whiskey and Coke, and you—” His eyes tipped to us and caught on Andrew. “Ace,” he said, though it didn’t read like a greeting. It sounded like an accusation as Chet’s eyes flashed over him. “What are you doing here?”
“I have business,” Andrew assured Chet coolly.
“It’s a little early for me,” I told Chet, looming over me with those sweating tumblers. “And we’re going to be working out in the sun.”
“Welcome to Texas!” he called down to me.
“No thanks, Chet,” I told him.
“Well, I’m not going to drink alone,” Chet pouted.
Andrew easily snatched the two glasses from Chet’s hands and poured them onto the ground. “Problem solved,” he announced brightly. “Miss Harper, I’ve got the invoice ready from the work I did to your Volvo over the weekend. You never called me back, so here I am.”
I gaped up at Andrew as he extended a folded piece of plain white paper toward me. I took it out of his hand and swallowed dryly and squinted against the sun and didn’t look at the number on it.
“Doorstep delivery,” Andrew said overhead. “I couldn’t count all the services I offer a woman on one finger.”
My heart pounded hard. Wasn’t this what I wanted? Why did I feel like I was strangling alive? Was it just me, or had he emphasized the word “finger”? Did he still want me, or was this—it?
Ace’s Garage logo was up at the top of the paper. The itemized expenses were only for twenty-five dollars. There was no way that was right. “What is this?” I spat out, folding it over again.
“His garage is notoriously overpriced. Are you overcharging this woman, Ace?” Chet added with a macho sniff.
“Cost for the belt,” Andrew answered me, ignoring Chet entirely. “You can pay that whenever is convenient for you.”
“Oh, like I might need another payment plan?” I noted caustically.
Andrew furrowed his brow at me. “Are you making fun of me?”
“Are you patronizing me?” I fired back. “Charge me the full amount.”
“Fine.” Andrew snatched the bill from me and yanked a pen from his pants pocket, scratching out a new item on the receipt. “Now it’s 115 dollars.”
Damn it.
“Great!” I yelled. “I’ll get it to you as soon as possible!”
“When you and Gomer are done fully submerging your fountain in quicksand?”
“Hey!” Chet barked after him, but Andrew was already swaggering back to his truck.
“You should have gone with stone dust,” he called over his shoulder, not looking back at us.
“I love the submerged idea!” I yelled after him as he swung back up into his truck. “I know what I’m doing!”
Andrew didn’t say anything back to me, and his truck jostled back down the driveway and onto Mayhew. Everything was exactly the way I had said that I wanted it to be—I was finally a professional lawyer, carrying out my promise to the people, finally installing this damn fountain in the front yard I could finally call my own—and I should have been happy.
But I stared after Andrew’s truck with my heart in my throat and a crumpled bill in my hands and felt like I had nothing at all. All the effort had put me back on square one.
“You really like the river rocks?” Chet wondered, standing there sweating in the noon sun with an empty tumbler in each hand.
I answered simply. “No.”
Chapter 7
Andrew
I changed out four flat tires, three batteries, two sets of spark plugs, and a busted tail light before twilight on Sunday. I abused the bench press in my backyard without a spotter, which was dangerous. I chugged three beers when I needed to be chugging food and water, and I shoved Michelle Harper out of my mind every minute of the day.
I set myself up for the last of the last: an oil change for Lola’s mother’s car.
I rolled beneath the Chrysler and unscrewed its oil cap, letting the dirty oil run out into a refuse pan. I di
dn’t think about Michelle.
What was a scumbag like Chet doing at her house? Trying to give her liquor at noon? I could smell those drinks from where I stood!
I siphoned the oil into a container to be taken to the recycling center later, and I didn’t think about Michelle. I didn’t think about her bent over as she scooped those stupid river rocks out of her yard, right in front of Browntooth’s slimy gaze. I didn’t think about her tits crowding together at the neckline of her blouse, still in front of that goon. I didn’t think about it until I was torn between pulling my own hair out and not thinking about Michelle, so vulnerable, right next to a psychotic creep who could peer into her windows at night from the comfort of his home.
What if he’d been watching her for months? Waiting for an opportunity to exploit some weakness of hers? What if he was the one who’d been in her goddamn house, looking for any kind of conversation starter that could finally let him into her life?
You’re such a busy little bee, his words came back to me, paired with that relishing gaze spread over her body and face. Ugh! I just wanted to pry his eyes off of her. She was mine.
The thought occurred to me with disturbing force, boiling in the pit of my stomach. But I couldn’t feel this way. She wasn’t mine.
I organized all my invoices for Amy to file in the morning and washed up when daylight was spent. I tried not to think about Chet’s clingy nature, how he would invent excuse upon excuse to stay in her home, to stay between her walls, like an insidious parasite. He would burrow between her legs using any means necessary. What would he tell her? How was he going to fake his way into her life? She was too attractive and too accessible; it was only a matter of time.
My phone bleated at me and I saw an accidental text message from Michelle: 1jk;;
I was already halfway to my truck when I thought about how I was supposed to not think about Michelle. She was my attorney, and I was her mechanic, and I was already turning over my engine and rolling onto the street. She hadn’t texted me. It was a butt text. But what if she’d had my contact information open, thinking about it? What if that had been the draft of a text she never could bring herself to begin?
I couldn’t take the risk. I had to see her.
* * *
The fountain in Michelle’s front yard balanced on immaculately packed stone dust, inlaid with pastel baubles. Tiny lights twinkled wirelessly along the rim and in the basin of the fountain, and I had to assume they were solar powered. Surrounding the lazy arc of the water fan was a retinue of porcelain fairies.
I couldn’t help but smile softly as I strode by. I could tell that she’d worked hard on this all by herself—and kicked Chet completely out of the picture early on. I remembered group projects with Chet. He had to be completely ostracized, or he would become the dictator.
I knocked gently at the door.
Maybe I should have had some more faith in her.
The front door fell open and she leaned her side into it, emphasizing the dramatic curve of her hips. She’d changed into silky, loose pants in a vibrant jewel-tone mosaic, and a cloying camisole.
Her eyes ballooned dreamily as she took all of me in, and she lulled slightly forward. I could feel the haze of steam coming off of her from some recent shower, could smell the shampoo in her hair.
“Hey,” she breathed.
“Hey.” All the words drained out of me as I traced her with my eyes. Her hair was down around her shoulders, damp and thick. I wanted to pull those adorable glasses off her nose. I wanted to bury myself in her neck. When I was around her, my impulse control eroded to zero. “I don’t want you to pay that damn bill.”
Michelle exhaled. “Okay.”
I took a tentative step into her space. “Can I come in?” I wondered, sliding one hand up the doorframe in anticipation. “I just want to talk.”
Michelle fell back a step, and I entered her space. The smell of soap and warm water intensified. “I want to talk, too,” she said. “I’m the problem, Andrew. I’ve got—” She bit the word back and then finished, “—problems.”
“Your work building probably has lead deposits in the paint,” I informed her, pseudo-somberly. “And, as a lawyer, you’re about seven times more likely to fondle mechanics. That’s a big problem, girl.”
A little smile tickled at the corner of Michelle’s lip. I saw it. She couldn’t hide it.
“I—I’m sheltered,” she explained, walking away from me and deeper into the den, breaking eye contact. “I was raised by dorm schools. My parents would just go to Europe for three months and leave us with literal servants. I’m that kid.” She twisted to face me and pinched her lower lip between her teeth. “It made me kind of crazy.”
Huh. That was new. I made a face like a smell was in the room. “Really?”
Michelle nodded. “And it made me—”
“You seem poor,” I went on warmly. I reached forward and grasped one of her hands without thinking about it, trailing my other hand the length of her arm. She was smooth with lotion. “You really seem genuinely poor to the untrained eye.”
“I am poor,” she assured me. “But my childhood was rich, and I probably have a phobia of strangers or something because of that.”
I drew her close and nuzzled at her ear. I loved cuddling her when she was warm and wet from the shower. I loved cuddling her when she was being overdramatic and self-conscious. “I don’t think you have a phobia,” I whispered against her ear.
“I get really nervous around strangers.”
“I was a stranger,” I reminded her.
“You were an acquaintance.”
“Who you had known for... how many minutes?”
“You were special.”
My heart warmed and I said, “I’m glad you’re... the way you are.” I rubbed at her shoulders and then dropped my head to kiss her neck. My hands slithered over the ridge of her hip and into her pubic valley. Just the heat of her pussy on my palm could calm me. “It gives me a reason to be the way I am.”
I moved to press our bodies fully together and she separated from me. It was physically painful to experience.
“I still can’t go,” she explained firmly. “I promised myself that I wouldn’t get caught up in all this again.” She gestured vaguely around.
“In all what? Life?”
I stepped to close the gap between us and she stepped back to maintain it. Then she laced her arms over her chest in case I hadn’t received the message.
“In finding the right clothes and worrying about your friends and keeping my insecurities in check and being poised and charming and…” She took another step back, not even looking at me anymore. Her eyes fluttered everywhere but at me, like she couldn’t keep freaking out if she looked at me, but she wanted to freak out right now. “Stressing about where you stand and figuring out all the rules because they’re different for everybody and trusting again when I know—anything could happen.” She took another step back and her eyes fell to the floor. There were four baby steps between us and it looked like the Grand Canyon to me. “I spent my life doing that crap, believing my effort would make the difference, and it all fell apart anyway.” Her voice was a mousey whisper at the end of the tirade.
She couldn’t take another step back without bumping into the armrest on the sofa.
“What happened?” I asked, not pushing my luck by advancing. I could only imagine how the moment might fracture and fall if I made her topple over the side of a couch trying to get some space. “What fell apart?”
“Uh.” Michelle’s eyes ticked up from the floor and met mine. I didn’t even know the name for a brown so rich and vivid. “I was sixteen when my dad got arrested for embezzlement,” she breathed. “The whole charade was over and no one stayed. Not a single friend. I was sixteen,” she reiterated, suddenly ardent. I remembered the age: invincibility, certainty in one’s own choices, in one’s friends. I never had the experience of being abandoned by all of them, though. I was lucky enough to have friends who w
ere loyal to a fault. “My boyfriend—who had proposed and everything, we were supposed to get married after college—got with a friend of ours and... it all happened so fast. He wouldn’t even return my calls. Wouldn’t answer the phone. Said his girlfriend didn’t want us to see each other anymore. And she was supposed to be my friend, too! That was my whole life going inside out, and since then, I’ve really—um—streamlined.”
I listened to her talk, nodding as she quietly broke down at the mere memory of this total abandonment.
“You cut everybody out,” I said, taking a slow, small step toward her.
“I had a mission,” she corrected me. Her eyes fluttered up to mine. “I haven’t been back to Connecticut since.”
“How long has it been since you’ve been with someone like this?” I took another small step. There was only one left.
“Um, I last had sex in 2014. That was with a friend of mine. It was New Year’s Eve, we were drunk, it was stupid. College, you know?”
“I mean, like this,” I said, passing my hand back and forth between us, indicating that something was passing here. Didn’t she feel it?
She stared at me and swallowed. “Never.”
I crossed the space between us completely. “Me neither.”
She swallowed and gazed up at me with heavy lashes. I was in her space now. I punctured her bubble. “It’s hard to infiltrate someone’s world again—after being in your own for so long,” she warned me. “You don’t even know if there will be a place for you when you get there.”
My fingers scooped around her arms and trailed softly upward to her shoulders, exciting every little hair along the way. I leaned down and let my mouth brush over her earlobe as I whispered: “In my world, there’s a goddamn throne for you.” My mouth crushed its way down her throat and she flowered open in my embrace. I felt her fingertips kiss over the back of my neck and skate up into my hair. Her joints unlocked and I was the one who held her in place. I came back up to feel her breath on my lips and our mouths pressed together savagely, just as insistent on her side as on mine. She was mine. I knew it.
