Bundle 0f Lovel

by Erin Wright

  “No,” he said slowly. “My mom – Ruby Whitaker – her hands are getting worse. The arthritis…” He shook his head. “I broached the topic today about moving over here and you’d think I’d suggested she move to outer Siberia or somethin’.”

  Ms. Blackburn laughed dryly. “I know this doesn’t help, but that’s actually a really common response, at least at first. I’m sure your mom has been here, visiting friends, but still, another visit might be in order. It’s one thing to go somewhere just to chit-chat with your friends; it’s different to take an official tour and look at it as a potential future resident. It might help her realize that quite a few of her friends are here already, and there are some fun things to do, I promise.”

  “Actually, my girlfriend, Kylie, said that y’all are associated with Second Time Around. I think my mom would love to work there, once she got past her pride.”

  “Not everyone can work there,” Ms. Blackburn said, “and even if someone wants to and is able, their shifts aren’t usually for very long. And that’s okay. I try really hard to match physical and mental abilities with tasks so that everyone can play a part, if they want to.

  “It’s all voluntary, but I’ll be honest, I think that store is part of the magic of this place. At so many retirement homes, people move there right at the end, when the family can’t take care of them any longer because their physical and emotional needs are too much. Being in a strange place – it’s hard any time, but it’s especially hard if you’re not mentally capable of understanding what’s going on. We do have some end-of-life cases like that here, but the people who do the best were moved here when they were still active and loving life. When that happens, residents find that they have friends around them again. They have a purpose. They have a job to do, a job that they’ve chosen and want to do. And, they get to hang out with their buddies while they do it.”

  She laughed a little. “Honestly, people don’t change just because they get older – they still want friends to hang out with. Sundays are a pretty popular day for families to visit so you see lots of them here right now, but even on a Tuesday evening, you’ll find residents out here, listening to music and chatting with their friends. Not everyone is happy 100% of the time, but that’s because they’re human beings, so…” She shrugged and laughed. “But for the most part, once people settle in, they love it here. They tell me that every day.”

  Adam nodded, looking closer at the elderly women scattered in chairs throughout the grounds. Keeping track of who his mother’s friends were had never been a specialty of Adam’s, but a few of the women looked damn familiar to him. If nothing else, she surely had acquaintances here. “I’ll see if I can talk her into a tour,” he said finally. “I believe that she’d love it here, if she’d give it a try. I’m afraid she won’t, though, just to spite me.” He gave the center’s director a wry smile.

  “Some people are more stubborn than others,” she said mildly, and he wondered for a moment how many residents had fought her tooth and nail when they’d first been moved into the place. She didn’t have an easy job, that was for sure. In that moment, wrestling steers to the ground almost seemed relaxing by comparison. He sure couldn’t do what she did.

  “Well, thanks anyway for your time,” he said, and headed back to his truck. More than ever, this seemed like exactly what his mom needed. He’d give her a few days to calm down, and then try the conversation again. By the end of this, his mother was either going to love the retirement home, or hate his guts, and he wasn’t too sure which outcome he should place a wager on.

  Oh, Mom…

  Chapter 34

  Kylie

  Ahhh…Monday morning.

  Usually the most dreaded day of the week, Kylie found that hers was going delightfully. Since Adam hadn’t been able to come over at all yesterday, their kiss upon him arriving to work that morning had been…*ahem* more than a little lusty.

  By the end of it, she’d been pretty sure that Adam was going to throw her over the desk and pound into her right then and there, but then the phone had rung, interrupting them.

  Damn phone.

  Hours later, Kylie found herself squeezing her thighs together, practically vibrating with need. Now that Kylie knew what sex with Adam was like, it was hard to think, to breathe, to move, without sending desire sizzling to every nerve ending. Saturday evening had been an explosion of need and desire between them that they’d both been holding back for way too long, and she’d spent most of their dinner afterwards (when she wasn’t worrying about Ruby, of course), waiting eagerly for round two.

  And then, just as dinner was done and things were about to get interesting again, his phone had rung and he’d had to leave to go check on a mare who was in breech with her first foal.

  She really was starting to think that the apocryphal story her history teacher had told about President Ulysses S. Grant dismissing the telephone as “not being something anyone would want to use” had been more spot on than she’d realized at the time. In fact, if she had her way, she’d unplug every phone in town for at least the next week, if not two.

  Yum…two weeks of nothing but sex with Adam…

  Kylie bounded up from her chair. Just sitting there, thinking about nothing but sex, sex, sex was gonna kill her off if she didn’t quit it. She could…

  She cast her eyes around the office, thinking. What was left to do? She’d cleaned and filed and organized the place to within an inch of its life. She’d already scrubbed the nose prints off the glass front door from yesterday, and there hadn’t been any dogs in yet today.

  Oh! She could check the batteries in the smoke detectors. She hadn’t done that yet.

  Before she could discover where Adam had the ladder stored, though, a gold Lexus sports coupe pulled up in front of the clinic and an older woman, about the age of her mom or so, swung out of the car, a small Yorkie in her arms. The little ball of brown fluff was completely adorable, especially with the red ribbon tied on top, and Kylie mentally added Yorkies to the list of potential dogs to look into adopting.

  The heavier-set woman, salt and pepper curls around her head bouncing with every step, came striding into the clinic. She put the dog down on the ground to sniff around before walking over to the counter. “I’d like to set up an appointment for Yorkie Poo,” she said imperiously, not a hint of laughter at the ridiculous name anywhere on her face. “She’s been acting weird lately, and I want Dr. Whitaker to take a look at her.”

  Kylie swallowed hard, trying to keep the bubble of laughter from actually escaping her lips. Yorkie Poo? She couldn’t be serious. Was she being serious?

  Another look at the woman’s face…Alrighty then. Yorkie Poo it is.

  “Do you have a date you prefer?” Kylie asked, scooting into place in front of the computer and clicking over to the calendar. “It looks like Dr. Whitaker will be spending the day in the clinic on Friday, so if that works for you, he could put you in at 2:00 p.m.”

  “Sure,” the woman said dismissively, almost as if she were completely uninterested in this appointment she’d supposedly come all the way in here to set up. Kylie shrugged to herself. Weird but whatevs.

  “And your name?” she asked, clicking to create a new appointment.

  “Mrs. Richard Plossy,” she announced imperiously, rather like she was introducing the Queen of England. Or thought that she was the Queen of England.

  Well, at least now she knew why the woman looked vaguely familiar. Her youngest had graduated with Kylie, something Kylie’d tried her best to forget over the course of the last four years.

  Mrs. Plossy’s son was an asshole of the first water, to put it mildly.

  Kylie ignored her instinctive dislike of the woman in front of her, putting on her best customer service demeanor like a knight arming himself for battle. She had to treat all of Adam’s clients politely, even the ones who’d mistakenly left their crowns at home that morning.

  “Well, Mrs. Plossy, here’s your appointment card,” Kylie said,
sliding the business card across the counter to the woman. “Friday at—”

  “Are you and Dr. Whitaker dating?” the woman interrupted.

  “Wha–what?” Kylie sputtered. She did not just ask that. I’m having some sort of alternate out-of-body experience right now. I have to be.

  “I heard around town that you two were dating, but since you’re knocked up with a bastard’s child, I was just sure that was wrong,” the woman said, her voice dripping with saccharine sweetness as her gaze dropped down to Kylie’s rounded belly and then back up to her face. “There’s no way that Dr. Whitaker would saddle himself with a home wrecker like you, right? So I told all of my friends that I’d come down here and find out for myself so we could set the record straight, once and for all.”

  Kylie had never understood the phrase seeing red…until that moment. It wasn’t a metaphorical thing after all. It was literal. The world went red with black around the edges and a roar echoed in her ears but even through it all, she didn’t punch the woman or call her a bitch, something she was rather proud of, actually.

  “Mrs. Plossy, taking a second look at the calendar,” she said evenly, keeping her eyes pinned on the woman in front of her, “it turns out Dr. Whitaker will be busy on Friday after all.” She picked up the appointment card from the counter and tore it into little pieces, letting them flutter into the trashcan, and then marched around her desk and over to the door to hold it open. “I’m sure you can see yourself out.”

  “How…how dare you!” the woman gasped. “Do you know who my husband is? The Plossy Ranch is one of the largest in the area. When he hears about what you just did, he’s never going to use Dr. Whitaker as a vet again.”

  “It seems like if more people were willing to tell you the truth, maybe you wouldn’t be so inclined to think it was okay to be a bitch,” Kylie said mildly. “Have a good day.”

  Hmmm…so, she’d failed on the “not calling the woman a bitch” front, but in her defense, the woman had deserved it, and a whole lot more, so ehhh. She just couldn’t find it in herself to feel bad about that particular slip-up.

  The woman marched over, snatched Yorkie Poo off the immaculate floor, and cuddled him close. “There’s probably diseases on this floor that I don’t want him to get anyway,” she huffed and brushed past Kylie, head held high. “Some people!” she harrumphed, right before slamming her way into her car.

  Some people was right. Kylie let the front door swing closed behind her as she marched back to her desk, righteous indignation in every step. How dare she say that to her. How dare she think that it’s okay to talk to another human being like that.

  She felt her eyes stinging with hot tears but she absolutely refused to let them slide down her cheeks. No way, no how was she going to let that woman make her cry. It was something the Plossy boy had taken great pleasure in for years, and Kylie wasn’t about to let that damn family win now.

  She sat down and then sprang right back up, too much anger and rage boiling through her veins to sit in a chair. She wanted to beat something, she wanted to throw something, she wanted to…

  She wanted to clean.

  She marched into the employee bathroom and attacked the toilet, scrubbing it furiously. “You…you…asshole!” she yelled into the toilet bowl. “You entitled piece of shit! I am not your subject or your servant, and I don’t care if your husband is the freaking King of England, you still don’t get to treat me that way!”

  “So, you wanna tell me what happened with Mrs. Plossy?” Adam asked quietly, standing right behind her.

  Startled, she swung in a circle, toilet water flying everywhere. She looked down at the brush, horrified, and then dropped it back in the toilet. She leaned over and washed her hands – the bathroom was so tiny, she didn’t have to move an inch to do it – and then planted her clean hands on her hips.

  “Mrs. Plossy,” she snarled at Adam, “is a first-rate asshole, and so is her son.”

  “Hold on, her son was here?” Adam asked, confused.

  “No, he wasn’t. That was just a general statement on the assholishness of the Plossys in general. Anyway, she had the balls to call me a home wrecker to my face and she demanded to know if we were dating and she called my baby a bastard’s child and…and…I called her a bitch,” she announced. “You can fire me if you want to. She deserved it and I won’t take it back. I don’t care if I have to be homeless. I won’t do it. I—”

  Adam pulled her against his broad chest. “It’s okay,” he said soothingly, trying to cuddle her rigid body against his. “I’m not upset with you, I promise. I just wanted to know what your half of the story was when I called her back. I was pretty sure she’d left out more than a few details.”

  “But…but…” Kylie sputtered, all of her righteous indignation leaking out of her at his understanding words, leaving only worry and mortification in its wake, “she said that she was going to tell Mr. Plossy what happened and that you’d lose all of his business!” The tears that she’d been so heroically holding back finally came spilling out. “He’s one of the biggest ranchers in the area. I can’t keep costing you money like this!”

  Adam continued to stroke his hands down Kylie’s back, never wavering, never pausing, just long, even strokes down her spine. “Kylie, darlin’, we’ve already talked about this,” he said softly once she’d stopped blubbering. “I have enough work to keep me more than busy. You know that. If Mr. Plossy decides to drop me because you actually had the balls to tell his wife the truth, I’ll be just fine financially, I promise. But,” he said, cutting off her protests before she could even sputter them out, “the truth is, the man will probably buy me a beer.”

  “What?” Kylie gasped, pulling back and staring at Adam in amazement. Maybe he’d had one too many kicks to the head by ornery calves, and the brain damage was just starting to show.

  Adam gave her a naughty grin as he snuggled her back against his chest, restarting his strokes down her back. “He’d call me a liar to my face if that statement ever got around town, but truthfully? He can’t stand his wife. They’ve been on the outs for years. He can’t afford to divorce her, though, so they keep up this façade in public…Honestly, I can’t blame the man. Have you ever met him?”

  Adam’s hands were making Kylie melt into a puddle in front of him, and his words just barely registered in time for her to answer. “Uh-uh,” she said, pressed against his chest, not moving a millimeter.

  “Okay, imagine Mrs. Plossy. Now, imagine the exact opposite of Mrs. Plossy. Mr. Plossy couldn’t be a nicer guy. Down to earth, hardworking, humble…he doesn’t throw his weight around, which is part of his wife’s problem. She wants him to act like the lord up on the hill, and he won’t. It drives her crazy. So, with that in mind, are you ready for me to call her back?”

  “Oh, yes please!” Kylie exclaimed, pulling back just her head and flashing Adam a huge smile. She didn’t want to lose contact with the rest of his body. Not until she absolutely had to. “I’ll just stay right here so I can hear every word of it.”

  Adam was already pulling up his call history on his phone, using his other hand to continue to snuggle Kylie against his chest.

  “Hello?” came the tinny greeting from his phone.

  “Hi, Mrs. Plossy, it’s Dr. Whitaker. I’ve had a chance to talk to Kylie about the situation—”

  “Oh, good!” the woman said. “So I take it she’s fired now?” The smugness in her voice made Kylie roll her eyes in disbelief.

  “It’s more like you’re fired,” Adam said bluntly. “As a client. Although I enjoy my time with Yorkie Poo, I can’t say the same about you. You’re not welcome back here.”

  “What?!” the woman shrieked, even through the speaker on the phone. “How dare you! Just wait until I tell—”

  Adam hit the red icon and the sound blessedly went silent.

  Kylie looked up at Adam, her eyes huge. She began to giggle from the insanity of it all. “You…I…Oh my God, Adam, I can’t believe you actually did
that!”

  He grinned back. “A part of me can’t either. Honestly, I’ve been wanting to do that for a very long time. So! To celebrate, I say we play hooky,” he said, pulling her out the front door and flipping off the open sign as they went, “and go on down to the Muffin Man. I never did buy you that donut I promised you, and Gage has finally finished with the remodel, so they’re back to serving them again. That alone is cause for celebration. I mean, muffins are fine, but they aren’t donuts.”

  Kylie’s stomach rumbled even as she tried to protest. “I really shouldn’t…” she mumbled without an ounce of conviction as he began striding down the street towards the Muffin Man, pulling her along behind him. “Processed sugar isn’t at all good for you,” she felt obligated to point out.

  “Yolo,” he said, shrugging his shoulders, still pulling her along.

  “Yolo?!” she said, laughing until her sides ached. “I can’t believe you know that phrase.”

  “Ollie has been trying to teach me teenage slang so I can be cool. I keep telling him that he’s more likely to get pigs to fly, but at least a few phrases have stuck. You Only Live Once seems like a pretty good motto to live by, especially when it comes to donuts.”

  “Somehow, I am not surprised by this,” Kylie muttered under her breath. She was pretty sure Adam lived for donuts. How he survived this long with the Muffin Man operating at only partial capacity was inexplicable, honestly. She’d been trying her best to feed him carrot and celery sticks as part of her Keep Adam Fed project, and although he’d eaten them, she’d heard more than a few mumbles about rabbit food while doing it.

  Mumbles she’d chosen to ignore, of course.