by Tyler King
“Don’t you have anything better to do than wait for the walk of shame?”
“Don’t you have an appointment to get your dick swabbed for STDs?”
“Fuck off.”
“Get bent.”
And so everything was par for the course on a Sunday morning. I held out my middle finger as I turned toward the kitchen. That was fun. Let’s do it again next week, shall we? I had yet to decipher her scoring system. Asking for clarification would only validate her participation in my sex life.
Neither of us enjoyed living together. My parents’ house in the middle of nowhere was too big for two people and not big enough for the both of us. Since my dad left to take a job in New York during our freshman year of college, every day was a special kind of torture. But Hadley needed me. And as much as I couldn’t stand being near her, I wouldn’t abandon her again.
Besides, that girl could cook. I walked into the kitchen and pulled the tinfoil off the food Hadley had left for me on the stove. After I poured myself a glass of orange juice and prepared my plate, I took a seat at the granite breakfast bar that framed the gourmet kitchen. Her scrambled eggs, bacon, and cinnamon toast were reason enough to get up in the morning.
Hadley wasn’t so bad. I knew I could be a surly, inconsiderate bastard. Our spats weren’t entirely her fault. For the most part, we were resigned to grin and bear it for the next two years until graduation. Hadley was set on moving to Boston for her master’s degree. I was going to New York the second I fulfilled my promise to my dad and had my bachelor’s in hand. No one was under the misconception that this arrangement would last forever.
“You’re an asshole.” Hadley walked in to lean back against the counter beside the stove. She wore my black Tool sweatshirt with the sleeves rolled up and the hem brushing her legs just at the apex of her thighs. And those tiny black shorts that made my dick twitch every time she bent over. Those fucking shorts.
Reaching toward me, she swiped a piece of toast off my plate, never mind the three pieces still sitting on the platter. She did that all the time, and it drove me up the wall. Since she was the one doing all the cooking, I’d given up trying to break her of the habit and teach her to keep her thieving fingers to herself.
Rather than answer, I shrugged one shoulder and shoveled another forkful into my mouth.
“Stephanie Slater has sent me three text messages asking me to ask you to call her.” Her dark eyes looked past me or at the floor, anywhere but my face. “Do your own dirty work. I clean up after you enough as it is.”
“You know how much I dislike confrontation.”
“This is a new low, even for you. If you screw your friend’s sister, you could at least take her calls.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
“And stop fucking the crazy ones. She’s giving off a stalker vibe.”
“Anything else?”
“If Scott shows up with a hatchet, I’m not covering for you.” One corner of her lips turned up in a wicked smirk.
I gave her a wink. Hadley laughed, rolled her eyes, and sauntered off with my last piece of bacon.
I never went out of my way to piss Hadley off, but I rarely exerted too much effort to stay on her good side, either. That ship had sailed, hit an iceberg, taken on water, snapped in half, and dragged all souls aboard down with it a long time ago.
Half the time I wanted to throttle that girl. The other half I wanted to wrap her in blankets and swear undying allegiance if she’d smile again. I cherished the rare moments when Hadley was relaxed, laughing, and more like her old self. I had a debt to Hadley that I’d spend the rest of my life repaying. I owed her my head on a platter. And if ever given the chance, I’d take a bullet for her.
* * *
After breakfast, Hadley sat on her bed with a sketchbook on her lap. The shard of charcoal between her fingers rubbed across the page, making a soft scratching sound in the otherwise silent space. I enjoyed watching her work. The expression of intense concentration she wore. Bobbing her head to the music playing through her earbuds.
I sat on the edge of the bed. Hadley flipped her sketchpad when I tried to steal a peek. Reaching over, I tugged one of her earbuds out. The sound of Fiona Apple’s voice sprang from the tiny speaker.
“I’ve got to take the Les Paul to the shop. You want to come along?”
“How bad is it?”
“The neck is loose. It sounds like shit. Vaughn will have to strip it down and reset it.”
“What an asshole.”
Not Vaughn. The asshole was the drunken bastard at my show last week who jumped onstage to give us his best Slash impression. He grabbed my Gibson Les Paul, so I decked him and tossed the guy to the floor, but he managed to take my guitar to the ground with him.
“We can run by campus to pick up our textbooks and hit the grocery store on the way back.”
“You’re going to class this semester?” She arched a sassy eyebrow.
“I go when it’s necessary.”
“Right. What could an institution of higher learning possibly teach the prolific Josh MacKay?”
“I’m still waiting to find out.”
Hadley rolled her eyes and swatted me with the back of her sketchpad. “Swing us by the art supply store and you’ve got a deal.”
Really, Hadley never asked much of me.
“Sure. You need me to wait outside first?” I got off the bed and shoved my hands in my back pockets.
“Nope.” She stood to put her sketchpad away in her nightstand. Hadley tied her hair up in a ponytail and wrapped the wires of her earbuds around her neck. “I’m good.”
She proceeded mechanically toward her bedroom windows that looked out on the woods behind the house. In the same order, always the exact routine, Hadley unlatched and latched the locks five times, clicking back and forth. Her hand lingered for a few seconds. Fingers squeezed and twitched to repeat the action. Then she took a breath and spun around to continue throughout the house.
To every window and door, I followed behind as Hadley performed her ritual. I never rushed her, was never impatient about her process. I’d done this to her. It was my job to assure her later, when she teetered on the edge of an anxiety attack, that she hadn’t missed a single point of entry.
She had done well today, and I smiled at her when we made it to the alarm keypad in the foyer in less than four minutes. I felt like an arrogant shit for trying to offer her my approval, but Hadley seemed to take some level of pride on the days when we didn’t make two or three trips mid-ritual back to the second floor to start all over again.
She keyed in the code three times, disarmed the alarm three times, and didn’t hesitate to take a step back when she was ready for me to finish up. Definitely a good day.
At the front door, Hadley locked up and only jiggled the handle for seventeen seconds before she sighed and plastered on a calm expression. I held open the passenger door to my black ’65 Mustang, watching as Hadley got in and brought up the security app on her phone to check again that the system was armed.
In the car, she sat with fists clenched and knuckles white as the engine groaned and came to life. One finger pried its way free to tap the stereo to cue Black Keys at an earsplitting decibel. Her attention was aimed straight ahead at the tree-lined dirt driveway that spanned a hundred yards out to the two-lane road.
When the stone-faced house was no longer visible behind us through the thick surrounding forest and my front tires crunched over the last of the uneven dirt and gravel to the flat pavement, I hit the clutch and slammed the stick shift. Hadley rolled down her window as we exceeded the posted speed limit toward the highway. She liked it when I drove fast, so I was more than happy to oblige.
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