by Harper James
“I doubt that’s true,” I answer. “Why don’t you try to go without reading these for the rest of the day?”
“I wasn’t going to sit here reading them all day. I have things to do too, you know,” she says stiffly. I nod, but am sure that she’s going to turn back to the emails as soon as I leave. She doesn’t plan to sit and worry all day any more than I planned to hit Heath’s car this morning, but that doesn’t mean it won’t happen.
I have to check the yard twice more before I leave, taking the backroad home so I don’t have to go down the same roads I took this morning.
By the time I’ve gotten dressed and made it to Daily Grind, my coffee shop of choice, it’s nearly twelve and my co-workers are already hunched over their computers. People nod at me as I come in, a few small waves. They aren’t actually my co-workers; we’re all just work-from-home people who happen to like working away from home. It’s the closest thing to an office culture I’ve got, though, and I find I need that most on days when my mother is particularly bad. It’s like going out and socializing is proof that I’m not going to wind up like her.
“You look frazzled,” Bella says. She works for some sort of recruiting company and spends most of the day groaning at resumes with spelling errors, the most ridiculous of which she shares with me. I slide into the seat next to her at the long table in the center of the coffee shop.
“I am frazzled,” I say, shaking my head. “Fender bender this morning, followed by my mother.”
“Long morning.”
“No kidding,” I say, opening up my laptop.
“How’s your mom doing?”
I shrug in a full-bodied way as my computer boots up, then type in my password. “Same as always. I don’t think anything is going to improve until the parole hearing is over.”
“Yeah. Still no chance he’s going to get out, right?”
“No way. Dad’s gotten in so much trouble in prison already. They’re not going to reward that with a reduced sentence.”
I see Bella wince a little at the word “Dad”, and I get it— if your dad is awesome, hearing the word used for someone who sucks as much as my dad does must feel weird.
“Well, luckily for you, you’ve got my Halloween party tonight to take your mind off things.”
“Yeah. I’m excited,” I say.
“You forgot about it, didn’t you?”
“No!” I lie. I really, really forgot about it. But it’s barely even October, so who could blame me? It was the only weekend everyone Bella wanted to invite was available, though, so we’ll all be dressing up and drinking orange soda based cocktails tonight, the seventh, instead of on the thirty-first.
“Costumes are mandatory,” she reminds me, eyes sparkling. “Do you have one?”
“I’ve got something,” I say, which is only a teeny tiny lie. I’ve got some ideas for costumes I can throw together at the last minute. “How many people are you expecting? Do you need help setting up?”
“About twenty or thirty. Big for the size of my house. A few friends are bringing friends or brothers or cousins or whatnot, so that’s nice— it’ll be good to have some new blood hanging around,” she says. “Speaking of— is your car okay? Want to have my brother take a look at it?”
Bella’s brother, Jack, worked for a local mechanic all through high school, before he joined the military and traded fixing crappy sedans for fixing expensive tanks or airplanes or something else super impressive.
“Maybe tonight,” I answer, nodding. “At the party? Think he could check it out then?”
“Yep, I’ll let him know,” Bella says. I haven’t seen Jack in person in ages, but the photos Bella used as her phone wallpaper throughout his deployment tell me that the military got rid of some of the rough edges. You could tell from his smile that had developed from youthful cockiness to smooth adult confidence.
The exact same sort of confidence that Heath-the-total-dick had this morning, actually. The difference, of course, is that Jack is from my hometown, and Heath was a total stranger.
I hate the fact that I can remember an obnoxious amount about the way Heath looked; the way his shoulders seemed like they could carry the weight of the world, how I knew his chest would be hard and unyielding, how his hair was perfectly buzzed in lines as rigid as the musculature on his forearms.
If he hadn’t been hugely irritating— if he’d just apologized instead of blaming it all on me— I’d have been basically speechless, in fact. It’s not like I talk to guys that look like that all too often.
I check my bank account. Nothing in my “pending” list; he didn’t go straight to deposit the check. I consider, for a moment, putting a stop payment on it just to hassle him, but…then he might call the police or something. It’ll be more trouble in the end than it’s worth. Instead, I get to work, trying my best to forget the events of this morning— and I do. Sort of. Mostly.
Except for Heath’s stupid, awful, incredibly hot blue eyes.
Chapter 3
My Halloween costume is pretty decent, I think, given the fact that I basically made it from stuff around the house. I have on a white dress, white shoes, angel wings, and a unicorn horn made out of tin foil that I stuck onto a headband. I could have just gone as an angel and skipped the whole unicorn/Pegasus/pegacorn thing, but I really didn’t want to deal with creepy dudes making “fallen angel” type jokes all night. Even at a close friend’s party, there’s bound to be at least one creeper.
Of course, they’d call those jokes compliments. Hell, even some of the girls I know would call those jokes compliments. I’ve never been a fan, though; I don’t like it when guys make an assumption about me, about what I like or don’t like, about what I want or don’t want. More often than not, I’ve found that guys are just saying what they want me to want or be or whatever. I haven’t had a serious boyfriend in…well…ever, I guess, but my pickings have been pretty slim since I moved back here after college. I’d rather be alone than date someone more out of obligation than desire.
I’m right on time, which means I’m one of the first people to arrive. Bella is in the kitchen, carefully studying the stream of liquor she’s pouring into a cauldron-shaped punch bowl.
“Does that look like three cups to you?” she asks when she sees I’ve walked in. The handful of other early arrivals are hanging out by the kitchen table, admiring the spooky-themed snacks that Bella made. It’s like an entire Pinterest board laid out before us.
“I have no idea,” I admit, shaking my head. “Do you have a measuring cup?”
“It’s in the dishwasher. I used basically all my dishes making those this afternoon,” she says, pointing to the table.
“I think it was about three,” I lie, and Bella nods, then pours a little more booze— it’s gin— into the cauldron. She then ladles me a cup of the drink, and watches while I taste test it. It’s delicious— and dangerous, I suspect, since I can’t taste a bit of the alcohol. “Perfect,” I say.
“Oh, good,” she says, looking relieved, then ladles herself a cup as well. “That’s it then! I’m all set. Oh— music!” she remembers, then scampers to the main room to turn on what I’m sure is a carefully curated playlist. I stir the punch absently, feeling a little lost without Bella there. The girls at the table are clearly in the middle of a conversation that I wouldn’t be able to follow— something about someone dating someone and leaving someone— and I don’t want to interfere. I notice they’re all wearing a group costume; they’re the Fanta girls. They’re missing the orange one, but I suspect she’s just running late. It’s the sort of thing my friends in high school would have done, and I smile at the memory. They’ve all moved to new cities, have husbands or wives and babies or dogs.
I would be with them, if it weren’t for my mom. I should be grateful that I’ve landed in a career that allows me to work from whatever city I want, but I have to admit, sometimes I wish I had a built-in excuse to be anywhere but here.
Bella bounces back into the room, and
I realize she’s dressed at a sleek witch— she wears so much black that I hadn’t even connected that she was in costume when I first saw her. “Hey, my brother just got here and said he could look at your car, if you want.”
“Now?” I asked, alarmed.
“He said he needs to take a look before it gets dark,” she says with a shrug. “Besides, I need you to get him out of the house so I can hit on his hot friend because oh my god, Karli, the guy he brought is just stupid hot.”
I laugh a little at Bella, then follow her out from the kitchen. A few other guests have arrived, dressed as cave girls and baseball players and some sort of lumberjack (or maybe that’s just a hipster sans costume?). I scan the room for Jack and smile when my eyes land on him. He’s dressed as a last-minute Mario, with overalls, a red t-shirt, and a red ball cap. I wave a little as we start toward him, but then another figure who was previous stooped over the speakers rises and turns toward me and Bella.
“You have got to be kidding me,” I say, the words too much a groan to be coherent.
It’s Heath. Still wearing that doesn’t-need-to-be-tucked-in dress shirt and jeans, eyes bright, brows dark, hair neat and razor-carved, chest proud and begging me to touch it.
It’s Heath. Incredibly hot, incredibly touchable, incredibly frustrating Heath. Here. In Bella’s house.
“So…uh…outside?” a voice says— Jack’s voice, I suddenly realize, and turn to see Karli and Jack staring at me. Clearly, one (or both) of them has been talking to me for the last few seconds or minutes or however long I’ve been staring at Heath. It’s only once my attention is drawn away that I totally understand that Heath was also staring at me. At least I’m not the only one surprised, I think.
“You know her, then?” Heath says to Jack.
“Her? Yeah, she’s my kid sister’s friend,” Jack says, and I try not to wince at being a “kid sister’s friend” at twenty-two. “Karli.”
“I know,” Heath says. “Karli rear-ended me this morning.”
“Whoa,” Bella says, slicing her hands back and forth like she’s calling an out on the baseball field. “Jack’s friend is the one that you hit?”
“Heath is the hot friend you were talking about?” I ask, and then realize that I’ve said this aloud.
Thankfully, Bella is pretty impossible to embarrass. “Uh, yeah,” she says, and gives Heath a quick shrug. He doesn’t look particularly flattered or embarrassed, which makes me dislike him even more. Who acts like getting a really nice compliment is as stock as taking a breath?
“It’d be great if you could look at my car. I wasn’t going all that fast when your buddy here suddenly braked, but I want to make sure nothing is messed up,” I say as kindly as possible. “Has he already told you what happened?”
“This is all news to me,” Jack says, looking like he really wishes he was under the hood of a car instead of in the middle of this conversation.
“Ask him about the dog he narrowly avoided,” I say smartly, giving Heath a quick, sarcastic smile. I tug Jack away just in time to hear Bella admire Heath for braking to avoid an animal. I smirk to myself as we head outside.
“So, uh. That was weird,” Jack says as I pop the hood of my car. He lifts it and sets the brace in, then begins to poke and wiggle at various cables and tubes and greasy blocks.
“Heath and I didn’t have the best start this morning,” I say tartly.
Jack lifts his brows as if to comment on just how big an understatement that is, then leans farther into my car. “Well, he’s not exactly a warm and fuzzy kind of guy. He probably wouldn’t have a great start no matter who had hit him.”
“Good, so long as I’m not special,” I say.
Jack sighs hard enough that I give him an apologetic look— he’s not Heath, after all, so there’s no need for me to keep up the smartass comments. “So he’s staying with you? Were you guys deployed together or something?” I ask.
“Yeah, we were in RTC together,” he says, then clarifies, “Navy basic training. Up in Illinois. We kept in touch after that, but he went into SEAL training and I went to play with plane engines.”
“SEAL training? Like, the SEALS?”
“Nah, like the little water animals at Sea World. You know, balancing balls on his nose, that sort of thing.” I narrow my eyes at Jack, who grins and says, “Yeah, the SEALS. He made it into the program right out of RTC. He should’ve just signed with them from the start— he’d have had no problem passing their tests even back then. Me, on the other hand? You remember how I looked coming out of high school? No way I’d have been able to do twenty pull-ups.”
“I don’t know. You were strong,” I argue, though to be honest, I have no idea if twenty pull-ups is a lot or not. I mean, I feel pretty confident I can’t even do one, so I guess two would be a lot to me.
“Not twenty pull-ups strong. And Heath did like fifty or something. Some ridiculous number. Hey— the car is fine. It looks like worse than it is, but I bet I can pop some of those dents out,” Jack says, and releases the hood prop. The hood slams shut and I jump even though I should have expected the sound. My mind was wandering though, wondering if all those pull-ups were what gave Heath that shield-like chest.
“Hey— is Heath’s car a hundred dollars’ worth of damaged? Because he had me write him a check for that,” I say, my eyes finding the SUV in the quickly-lengthening stretch of cars parked on the curb.
“Eh, anything is more than a hundred dollars. Hell, a scratch costs more than that to fix,” Jack says.
“Yeah. True,” I say, and I find myself torn. I mean, I still think it was bullshit for Heath to blame the accident on me entirely, and even more bullshit for him to lie about a dog running in front of him. But…why did Heath ask for anything at all, if he was going to ask for so little? Did he just want to irritate me? Probably, I think, though I’m not totally convinced of this as I follow Jack back inside. Maybe it was because he thought I was some poor small-town girl, and a hundred was all I could afford. Maybe he thought he was teaching me a lesson, that he was better than me. Maybe he pitied me.
I seethe. I hate being pitied.
The party is more active now, with people in clearly planned out costumes mingling with last-minute costumers like myself. There’s a guy walking around with a sign taped to his chest that says “YOUR EX-BOYFRIEND”, and is actually letting women slap him by way of a conversation starter. Though I guess that’s not much weirder than a girl dressed in a hospital gown, pulling around an IV stand that the interior bag from a box of wine attached to it. I get myself a plastic cup of Bella’s dangerously drinkable witch’s brew and nurse it off to the side, content to people-watch for a while.
Of course, people-watching might as well be Heath-watching. Everyone gravitates to him, perhaps because his sheer size pulls the crowd his way. Apparently I’m the last person here to know the details of Heath’s SEAL exploits. I pick up bits and pieces of conversations, enough to realize that he was on a mission that the entire country followed closely on the news— busting into a house in Syria and grabbing a terrorist that’d avoided capture for years. Operation Titan. They were supposedly making a movie about it, in fact. Heath wasn’t just like a celebrity— he was a celebrity.
Wine-IV girl giggles and laughs with him, as do a handful of witches, Black Widows, and one hopeful guy in a Robin costume. He’s polite to all of them, though his face is very…still. Just like it was when I met him, actually. It’s funny— this morning, I interpreted that stillness as frigidity, maybe even as cruelty, but now that I see it from afar I think that’s…well.
That’s just his face. He looks like a king at his throne, unwilling to show any strong emotion toward the peasants who hurry by, though unwilling to dismiss them either. I remember that glimmer of wisp of emotion I saw in his eyes back at the accident site, the one that came about when I mentioned my mother. I watch Heath for longer than I intend to, waiting to see a hint of that again…but nothing. Nothing at all.
My phone
chimes in my pocket, and I sigh— the only person that texts me other than Bella, who’s here, is my mom. Which means she probably wants me to come over and investigate the yard for prowlers again. I lift my phone, the screen near-blinding me in the dim of the party.
Unknown Caller: Is there a reason you’re staring?
I frown at the phone. Then I connect the dots, and realize— I look up to see Heath’s eyes on mine, still calm and cool, but this time so laser focused that I can practically feel them burning my retinas. I scowl and put my phone in my pocket, then go back to refill my drink. It only takes me a beat or two to realize how he got my phone number— it’s on my checks. And so is my address. So, great. Just great.
I shove a pumpkin-shaped cookie in my mouth shamelessly, and my phone chimes again.
Unknown Caller: You’re avoiding the question.
I glower at my phone. Heath is no longer in my line of sight, but I wish he could see my expression all the same. I type back this time.
Karli: Can I help you with something?
Unknown Caller: Probably.
Karli: What?
Unknown Caller: Meet me on the patio.
I should not meet him on the patio, or anywhere, really, but I also feel like if I avoid him, he’ll just keep messaging me. Besides, I want to show him that I don’t give a shit about him being some sort of famous G.I. Joe or whatever. I mean, I do, because it is pretty cool, but I don’t want him to know that. Plus, he’s going to walk right by me to get to the patio, so there’s no real way I could avoid him seeing me run away. Still, I wait until he appears at the dining room door. He meets my eyes for a flash of a second, then pushes through the patio door with intention, like he’s headed out to make a phone call or smoke a cigarette. I wait until those watching him turn away, put on my best annoyed face, then follow after him.
