by Holley Trent
“My mother wanted to video chat with Sidney. She felt bad about not being here yesterday, but you know how my father is.”
“I take it he’s not home right now to overhear the call, then.”
“You’re so smart. One of so many reasons why I love you.”
“Aw.”
Lo turned to Dean, smiled, and stretched her arms over her head. “Ready to hit the road?”
“What’s the hurry?” Olivia asked.
“I don’t want us to overstay our welcome. I’m sure you’ve got tons of things to do today.”
“Eh. Not really. Beyond pulling weeds in the garden and planting some more tomatoes, all I had planned was splashing in the pool for a while with Sidney. Ken’ll probably fiddle under the hood of that ugly thing in the driveway, and Clint will likely walk between the two of us taking pictures of us at our worst. Stay. Unless you’ve got something else to do.”
Dean already knew what Lo was going to ask before she turned that sweet, questioning face to him.
He shrugged. “I could help Ken.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah.” He reached over and gave her shoulder a squeeze. At least at the Morstads’, she wouldn’t be bored. Dean wouldn’t have to try so hard to find fresh things to talk about, and wouldn’t feel so stupid if he rehashed the same shit he’d already talked about to death. He was trying to do better, but was fresh out of creativity.
“I’ll go find you a sun hat.” Olivia pushed back from the table, paused at the side to crack her spine, and then continued toward the laundry room. “You can help me in the garden before the sun becomes too punishing.”
“I didn’t know you were a gardener, Liv.”
“She’s a fabulous gardener,” Ken said. “My girl went from zero to sixty in no time at all.”
“There’s just something about having your very own place to make something out of,” Olivia called out. “I didn’t have that before I met Clint and Ken. I was always moving, looking for the next place.”
“That sounds like me.” Gary re-entered the kitchen with his hair still dripping wet onto his shirtless chest and wearing some low-slung athletic shorts that seemed to have been an afterthought in his dressing. The black mesh things had a couple of large holes at the thighs.
Classy.
“Where’s Clint? I need to talk to him about something.”
“Videoconferencing with his mother.” Olivia returned wearing one floppy straw hat and carrying another.
“Fuck,” he muttered, dragging a hand through his hair. “Can’t let her see me on camera. Clint usually does me the favor of pretending he doesn’t know where I am.”
“Anything I can help with?”
“No, unless you can take an indefinite amount of time off to babysit me in Florida.”
Olivia cringed. “You talked to Wallace?”
“Yeah.” Gary settled into the chair across from Dean and massaged the sides of his nose. “The guy is sick,” Gary said. “He claims the idea was Cassavetes’, but I don’t buy that.”
Olivia put up her free hand and shook her head. “Wait. Don’t jump around with the story. Go back to the beginning and talk to me in an A to Z order.”
“You’re always so good at manhandling me, Liv.”
Olivia flicked the hat at him. “Oh, shut up. What happened?”
Gary closed his eyes and took a deep breath. Then he clucked his tongue a few times and sputtered his lips. “Uh. First he said that Cassavetes said I shouldn’t even come unless I’ve got a keeper. He said I could bring my own or they’ll assign me one if I can’t find anyone, and I’ve got less than three hours to rustle someone up, and then get in touch with them again so they can tell the travel agent what to do.”
“A keeper,” Lo said with a note of apparent incredulity.
Dean was feeling pretty incredulous, too. He didn’t understand why a man who had to be twenty-five, if he were a day, needed to be babysat.
“A chaperone.” Gary opened his eyes. His pupils shrank down to pinpoints in the kitchen’s bright light, and Dean spent longer than was strictly necessary staring into the man’s eyes, trying to figure out the color. The cool hue was one he could probably find in a box of sixty-four crayons, but rarely on real people.
By the time Gary turned around to look at Olivia, Dean still hadn’t decided if blue was quite right.
“He said that Cassavetes was on some overactive punishing spree, and I guess I’m getting the hammer brought down hard on me because the guy who triggered this mood of his was my last roommate. I’ve gotta be watched morning and night until my place on the team is secure, and Wallace couldn’t speculate on when that would be. Gotta get through a tryout first, and then wait and see what comes next.”
“I know people like that,” Lo said. “They could keep you dangling all summer, and then at the end decide, nah, not a good fit, and oh well.”
“That’s what I said. Not sure what else I can do, though. I could wait until next spring to try to get on someone else’s bench, but that still leaves me in the lurch for this summer.”
“I hate to tell you this,” Olivia said, “but if you were thinking of asking Clint, he’s not going to be able to go. He’s leaving in two days for Germany and won’t be back for a couple of weeks.”
“Shit. And I imagine nobody else has enough vacation time saved up.”
“I don’t, man. Sorry,” Ken said.
“I don’t either,” Olivia said. “I burn through mine trying to piece together time to spend with Sidney.”
“I do,” someone said.
Again, Dean needed more than a few moments to realize that someone had been him, and he probably only made the connection because everyone in the room was looking at him.
He closed his eyes and shook his head. “I mean…I never take time off. I took a day off to get a crown put on a molar a couple of years ago, and of course I took time off for the wedding and honeymoon, but I’ve got weeks of vacation time.”
“Braggart,” Lo muttered. “I never have any. Mine don’t accumulate like yours do, and I think I spent all of last years’ helping my parents move.”
“We’ll go somewhere if you want, whenever you have some.”
“Glad to hear you have weeks and weeks of PTO, Romeo,” Gary said, “but that’s not helping me. I’m having something of a crisis here.”
“Poor you,” Dean said.
“Yeah, poor fuckin’ me. I thought for a moment you were going to volunteer to be my keeper for a couple of weeks.”
Lo lifted the collar of her shirt up to her nose and snickered behind it.
“Why’s that funny?” Dean asked.
“Baby, can you imagine? You babysitting this guy? He’d probably make your head spin in thirty minutes or less.”
“I think my bullshit tolerance is a little better than that.”
Gary slapped a hand over his heart and dropped his jaw. “Excuse me?”
“I call it like I see it.”
“One man’s truth is another man’s bullshit, I guess.” Gary dropped his hand and leaned his elbows onto the table, grinning at him the same way he’d been grinning at Lo before.
Apparently the smarm wasn’t personal.
“So, how ’bout it?” Gary asked.
“How about what?”
“You’ve got time off. You can come see beautiful South Florida, accompanied by the best tour guide there is.”
“The same Florida that has more alligators than baseball fans, you mean?”
“Well, I was gonna do the ‘pretty girls’ sales pitch, but I figured you wouldn’t believe me, and besides, you already have one.”
Lo slumped a little in her seat and averted her gaze.
Dean couldn’t even be mad. He wished he had Gary’s ease of flattering Lo. Dean always felt so damn stupid even offering her the smallest compliment. The words never sounded right coming out of his mouth. She was always sweet about them, though.
“Two weeks, then you can go back to bei
ng a walking grease wick and fiddling on the undersides of cars.”
“You don’t make the offer sound very tempting.”
“The idea of antagonizing me for two weeks on end doesn’t float your boat?”
Oh, it does. Dean cracked his knuckles. He wanted more than anything to frustrate the hell out of the man.
And his eyes were blue. Dark denim blue. They reminded him of the paint job on a bike he’d had briefly. Dean had loved that bike, but it hadn’t been a keeper. He’d ended up selling it to a collector and buying the bike he later sold to purchase Lo’s engagement ring.
Dean looked down at his calloused hands and cleared his throat. “I wouldn’t want to leave Lorena alone for that long.”
“Lorena doesn’t particularly wish to be at home alone for that long,” she said in the petulant tone she tended to reserve for whenever she was working her father over on the phone. Obviously her father wasn’t there, so Dean figured she either had to be joking, or she was genuinely perturbed by the proposal.
He looked up for confirmation.
Her forehead was furrowed, eyes narrowed, and lips poked out.
Shit. He reached over and took her hand. “I’m not going anywhere. I’m not leaving you alone.”
“Wait, wait,” Olivia said. “Hold on. Maybe we can figure something out. How much time off do you have, Lo?”
“A few days. Maybe four, not counting sick time.”
“Sick time doesn’t count unless you’ve got a doctor’s note. This is just me thinking on my feet, but, what if you went down to Florida with Dean? When do you have to go, Gary?”
“I think I would fly down tomorrow or maybe even late tonight depending on the flight timetables. I’m supposed to be at the field on Tuesday morning.”
“Could you get time off that quickly, Lo?”
Lo narrowed her eyes and drummed the fingers of her free hand atop the table. “Maybe. The lady in HR owes me favors. I swiped some old Dominican rum out of my father’s stash for her, and that shit is worth a fortune on the free market.”
“Is she working today?”
“Maybe. I could call her.” She turned to Dean and raised a speculative eyebrow. “Are we really doing this? Are we going to Florida so you can babysit this brat?”
“Did you seriously just go there?” Gary asked.
Lo waved a dismissive hand at him without pulling her gaze away from Dean. “Well?”
“Up to you.”
“No, it’s up to you. Me going down for four days is one thing. You’d be gone longer. I could maybe fly down for cheap on the days I’m not working if you want, but you have to want to go.”
“I don’t want to leave you.”
“And like I said, I don’t want you to leave me, but I’ll be okay.”
“You can come stay with us while he’s gone, if you’d like,” Olivia said. “I know how you are about empty houses.”
“Hate them.” Lo shuddered and squeezed Dean’s hand. “So? You gonna help the brat?”
“I am not a brat,” Gary groused. “If anything, I’m a reluctant switch. Why’s everybody gotta be a top, anyway? The population should be more balanced than that.”
Olivia hit him with the hat again. “Behave yourself.”
“I was just telling the truth.”
Dean had no idea what that so-called truth was supposed to be, but whatever the truth was had Lo’s eyes wide as saucers. Obviously she understood him, and Dean hoped she’d fill him in on whatever the gist was later.
“Maybe so,” Olivia said, “but remember what I keep telling you. Your truth isn’t meant for everyone to hear.”
“God, you sound like my therapist from back when I was a kid.”
Olivia plopped her fists onto her hips. “Then she must have been a smart lady.” She looked to Dean. “Can you put up with his mess?”
Dean sucked in some air through his teeth. “I feel like I should say no, but I’ve never been the kind of man who’d run away from a troubling scenario.”
“Troubling, am I?” Gary’s lips quirked up at the corners. “Well, maybe I am a little.”
“A lot,” Lo said. “I’ve known you for two days, and I already know that.”
“Why are you so mean to me?”
“I’m not mean. I’m just telling you what you need to hear.”
“Are you sure your airline guests really can’t tell when you’re being rude? Because I can. I can a lot.”
“Keep insulting me, and I’ll keep my husband at home and all to myself, and then what are you going to do? Have that Wallace person find you a babysitter?”
Gary cringed. “Yeah, we don’t want that. Knowing my luck, he’d drum up one of the nuns from the Catholic school I went to as a kid. Being babysat is one thing. Being tortured is another.”
“You’ve gotta make this worth my while,” Lo said.
“Pardon?” Gary raised a brow.
“You heard me. This is inconveniencing. How are you going to make this up to me?”
“Make it up to you? Seems like I’d be making it up to the wrong person.”
“Yeah, well, he’s more laid-back than I am. I’m the one you need to worry about.”
“What do you want? Money or favors? I’m fresh out of one, but we could possibly negotiate something for the other.”
Lo gave a slow nod. “I’ll give compensation some thought. Maybe I won’t know today or even tomorrow, but when I ask for recompense, you better be willing to pay up.”
Gary fixed his tired gaze on Dean “She’s joking right?”
Denim-colored eyes. Dean had never seen anything like them. He gulped and stared down at the fingers he’d entwined with Lo’s. “I…don’t think so.”
“At first pass, she’s so sweet.”
“She’s always sweet.”
Lo beamed at him, and that smile made all the frustration and confusion of the morning worthwhile. He’d do anything to see her smile like that at him.
“Love you.” She leaned in and kissed his nose.
“Love you, too.”
Gary groaned and put his head down on the table. “I hope they’ll at least spring to put you in a separate room from me.”
CHAPTER SIX
“Ha ha ha, they lied.” Lo backed out of the motel room and looked pointedly at Gary.
He rolled his eyes and dropped his duffel bag onto the sidewalk. “I was pretty sure when the guy said ‘suite’ that what you were thinking wasn’t what he was saying. Language barrier. You were talking about connected rooms, and he thought you meant the room was nice. As in s-w-e-e-t. Let me call Wallace.”
While Gary rooted his phone out of pocket of his tight jeans, Lo turned to look at Dean, who’d been a bit green from the moment he’d stepped onto the plane in RDU. She’d had no idea he’d never flown before, and he didn’t quite seem to have recovered from the ordeal.
“Aw. Poor baby.” She pressed her hands to his cheeks and smiled. “You’re on the ground now. I promise.”
“Next time, we should just drive.”
“You plan on coming back to the swamps anytime soon?”
He closed his eyes and cringed. “Not if I can help it.”
“Hey, Wallace?” Gary said into his phone. “Is the motel the only place you could find to put me up? This can’t be the only approved vendor.”
“Must be,” Lo muttered, putting her forehead against Dean’s chest. “The only things we passed between the airport and here were gas stations and gator souvenir stands.”
Dean draped his arms tentatively over her shoulders, and she stepped closer to him. She couldn’t get any closer, in fact, unless she developed some technology to walk through people. Travel always stressed her out. Unlike Dean, the flying part didn’t bother her. The negotiation of lodging and finding stuff to do later was what set her on edge. Staying home was so much easier, but she didn’t want to be there alone.
“For fuck’s sake,” Gary said. “Hold on.” He pulled the phone away from his ear and
pressed his thumb over the mic. “Wallace says the motel most of the team is at for the season is undergoing renovation and half the roof is covered in tarps right now. The rest of us are here, and he says he’s only going to approve payment for one room. So.” He threw up his hands.
“No, no, no. Let me talk to him.”
Lo took the phone before Gary could object. “Excuse me, sir?” she said.
“This is Wallace. Who am I talking to?”
“Lorena Yeats. I’m here right now because you sent this guy Gary on a last-minute scramble for a chaperone and, out of the goodness of his heart, my husband volunteered.”
“And you thought to tag along?”
“Temporarily. I assumed he’d be sleeping apart from Mr. Morstad.”
“That would defeat the purpose of Mr. Morstad being babysat. Watching that guy is a full-time job.”
“I don’t believe that. Even twelve-year-olds can stay home alone for a few hours at a time.”
“Gee, thanks,” Gary muttered.
Lo put a finger over her lips and glowered at him.
“Listen, honey—” Wallace started.
“Don’t honey me and I won’t papi you, you got it?”
Silence filled the line, and Lo tapped her foot, waiting.
She could wait just as long as he could and never lose a single bead of sweat. She may have had to stand on a stepstool to look travelers in the eye at work, but she knew how to work them. She could always tell which ones were going to yell and shut them up before they could remember what they were going to complain about in the first place.
Wallace cleared his throat. “Okay. Look, I’ve been at this gig for a long time, and these boys pull new tricks on me more often than I care to admit. One of your husband’s responsibilities is making sure that Morstad obeys curfew, for one thing, and for another, that he’s not sneaking women back into the room. Some teams aren’t so uptight about that, but we are. Your husband can’t do that if he’s not in the room.”
“You admit what he’ll be doing is a full-time job, and yet you expected someone to do it in a volunteer capacity?”
“Hey, if you want reimbursement, take that up with Morstad. Demand that he pay you for pain and suffering, too.”
She cut a look over to Gary, who was leaning against the brick wall outside the room with his arms folded over his chest, grinding his teeth.
