It Happens

by Vale, Lani Lynn

  A minute or so later, the lights to the stadium were flipped on, and not only could I see, but I could see well.

  Zee came down the bleachers two at a time as he watched me.

  Now that the lights were on, I had the courage to turn to see where the skunks were headed. I found them at least thirty yards away, all in the middle of the field, huddled up next to the fifty-yard line that had been spray-painted pink for breast cancer awareness.

  I scrambled up to my feet just as Zee made it to the bottom of the bleachers and then hopped over the railing as if it was nothing.

  He landed lithely on the track, and that was when I got my first look at Zee in his sweatpants.

  Today was the first true cold day of fall. At a brisk forty-nine degrees, I had been excited as hell to finally run without sweating so badly that I couldn’t run like I wanted.

  Had I thought about the other added benefits of it being this cold out?

  No.

  But now that I was seeing Zee in sweatpants headed my way, I realized that not only was it hoodie season, it was also sweatpants season.

  Jesus Christ.

  I swallowed hard and tried to get control of my thoughts even though all I wanted was to continue to stare at Zee’s dick that was swinging away inside his loose sweats.

  “Why do you have a key to the lights?” I asked curiously.

  Something took off out of my peripheral vision and I tensed.

  He shoved the keys into his pocket as he watched the five skunks run toward the open gate where he’d parked his truck.

  “Because I run here quite a bit, and I know the maintenance man.” He paused. “Why are you running with it so dark?”

  He didn’t look happy to know that I was running here at all, but especially since it was so dark.

  I shrugged and bent down to stretch, no longer in the mood to run but knowing I really had no choice.

  “Because if I don’t run now, this early, I won’t have time to run later,” I told him. “I have to get two short and two long runs in during the week before work. But today is my really long run. I’ll be about two hours. If I don’t get up and run at four, I won’t be done in time for the Saturday viewings.”

  I had no idea why I was explaining this to him. Why was it his business, anyhow?

  “How many miles are you doing today?” he asked, eyeing me skeptically.

  “Twelve,” I said. “Next week I’m going for the full half-marathon.”

  He grunted something out and then looked at his watch.

  “If you run for two hours, that puts you at seven thirty at this point,” he mused. “Is that enough time? I know the viewing is at eight.”

  Everybody in the freakin’ county was going.

  The governor’s son might not have been well liked—he was creepy as hell—but the governor wasn’t. He was actually a really sweet guy.

  “Garrena, my part-time employee, is there to get everyone started,” I told him as I stood up straight. “Thanks for coming to the rescue. But I have to start.”

  He gave me a chin lift, and with nothing left to do, I started to run.

  I didn’t see him as I made my way around the track the first time, and it was on my fourth that I realized the reason I didn’t see him was because he’d made his way up to the top of the bleachers and had made himself at home in the alcove of the announcer’s stand.

  He was huddled up in himself, phone light illuminating his face, just sitting there.

  Honestly, it would’ve been creepy had I arrived and that’d been where he was sitting.

  But knowing it was him, as well as knowing he’d only stayed because of me, made me feel somewhat comforted.

  I say somewhat because I was still freaked out that he’d stayed.

  It was awkward, to say the least.

  The two of us really didn’t get along, and even more, we’d shared a really awkward night three nights ago, and I wasn’t sure where to go from there.

  Did I acknowledge that we’d had sex?

  Did I ignore it?

  Did we do it again?

  Because I really, really wanted to do it again.

  The more that I thought about that night together, the more I realized how right that it’d felt. How not upset I was about where we’d ended up, even if I didn’t exactly remember getting to that point.

  I may not like the man, but that didn’t mean that I couldn’t have sex with him.

  These thoughts drifted through my mind as I ran, and as the darkness slowly started to fade, and the sun began to rise, I realized that maybe I should just ask him. Maybe I should straight up confront him, ask him where we went from there, and see what he had to say.

  Zee was honest to a fault, even when he didn’t like where the honesty would take him.

  Though just sayin’, he’d never had a single problem being honest with me. In fact, I knew he enjoyed telling me like it was.

  I stopped on mile six for a drink of water and then continued before I could get too comfortable with being idle.

  It was at mile marker eleven that he came down the bleachers.

  He must’ve been paying more attention than I was because I couldn’t keep track of my distance once I got past a certain point. Usually it was about ten to fifteen laps that I started forgetting.

  At some point he must’ve turned the lights to the stadium off, because it was on the last lap that the lights slowly started to dim out of existence, leaving me running the last four hundred meters in the early dawn light.

  I came to a stop at the table where I kept my things, then felt that deep burn of my muscles finally realizing that I wasn’t going to force them to go any farther.

  “You good?” I heard rumbled.

  Panting, I looked up and nodded. “Yes.”

  “Good,” he grunted. “Next time you run this early, let me know and I’ll come turn on the lights.”

  Then he turned on his heels and walked away.

  It was as he was reaching the fence that the words came out of my mouth unwillingly.

  “Thank you,” I muttered.

  Thanking him was like pulling fingernails.

  Sure, he’d come to my rescue this morning. Sure, I’m going to be on time to work for a very important client because of him. Sure, I should’ve probably said more than just ‘thank you.’

  Yet, nothing more would come out.

  Mostly because I could remember all those times that he wasn’t so nice to me.

  Like just last week when he saw me running down the side of the road and it’d just rained.

  I’m fairly sure he went out of his way to cross traffic, get into the closest lane, and hit that water puddle that not only drenched me from head to foot but also made me smell like a stinky, stagnant pond.

  Then there was four weeks ago when he’d walked into Shubert’s, the ice cream shop, in front of me.

  Shubert’s made bomb ass ice cream that tasted divine—especially the cookie dough one that I’d gone in there specifically for.

  Except, Zee had gotten there before me, ordered what I knew he didn’t like as well as a cone for himself and walked out the door. When I’d gotten up to the counter and tried to order the cookie dough, it was to find out that Zee had literally just ordered the biggest cone he could just so he could get the last of it.

  When I turned with a glare on my face, it was to find Zee grinning his ass off, waiting for me to turn around. Once I did, he deliberately threw the ice cream cone straight to a pack of crows that liked to frequent the back patio waiting for little kids to make a mess.

  They’d descended on it in seconds, and had it devoured before the thought of ‘I’m still going to eat it’ could cross my mind.

  Needless to say, uttering the words ‘thank you’ to the man took a lot of inner strength on my part because if there was one person in this world that was an asshole supreme, it was Ezekiel McGrew. At least when it came to me.


  Zee turned at hearing my words and gave me a level look.

  “It was only self-preservation on my part,” he admitted. “I know damn well and good that you’d have still gone to work, and I have to be there myself…unfortunately.”

  I wondered if he’d tacked on that ‘unfortunately’ for my benefit or the governor’s kid’s benefit.

  Either one would’ve worked when it came to Ezekiel.

  “Whatever,” I muttered, knowing he could hear me. “Thanks anyway.”

  He shrugged. “Go get your shower. You stink.”

  Then he was gone, going to his still-running diesel.

  It was only when I was halfway across the field, heading to where I parked my car on the opposite side of the track, that I heard the high-pitched squeal come from something inhuman, and a roar of outrage comes from Ezekiel.

  I didn’t even make it back to the car before the smell hit me.

  Chapter 5

  Why do we get dressed up for Thanksgiving when we never go anywhere? We get dressed just to walk around our kitchen.

  -Zee’s secret thoughts

  Zee

  “I can’t breathe,” Liner, one of the Bear Bottom Guardians MC members, whined.

  I looked over at Liner, who looked off somehow, though his offness didn’t stem from the stench that even I could smell radiating off of me.

  “Just fuckin’ pour the goddamn tomato sauce,” I grumbled. “Jesus fucking Christ.”

  Liner had been the only man on hand at the time of the skunking—though I should’ve fucking forced Jubilee to take care of it—and he’d gone to the bulk supply store and had bought every single fucking can they’d had. There’d been fifty on a pallet, and he’d bought the whole damn pallet—just in case.

  “Sorry, but it’s killing me,” he said. “I can no longer feel my face.”

  I grunted out a reply.

  “You should be on the receiving end of it,” I muttered darkly. “I’ve been nauseous for the last hour.”

  Honestly, though being sprayed by a skunk sucked balls, I was glad that it hadn’t happened to Jubilee. If it’d happened to her, she might’ve started to puke.

  She was very sensitive to smells and always had been. Smells also sent her into a downward spiral that usually ended up with her being sick as a dog with a migraine for days on end.

  “Here goes,” Liner muttered.

  Then the first large can of tomato sauce was poured over my head.

  The sauce coated me from shoulders to chest and then started to fall down to my feet where I was standing in the middle of a kiddy pool.

  I started to rub the sauce into my skin, trying to be very thorough in my application.

  “Should’ve got a woman over here to do this,” Liner muttered. “It’s fucking weird as hell, a grown man rubbing another grown man’s back, spreading in tomato sauce.”

  I agreed.

  Yet, I didn’t have anyone else to help me, so I was taking what I could get.

  “Appreciate you doing this, Liner,” I muttered darkly. “I didn’t know who else to call that wouldn’t be either working or on their way to work.”

  Liner worked for the power company as a lineman. He was on call twenty-four seven, three hundred and sixty-five days a year since he was the supervisor of supervisors. However, those days that it wasn’t raining, he was at home sitting on his ass being fat and happy.

  When a big storm rolled through, though, even the big boss got his hands dirty.

  It helped that his father owned the power company. Technically, if he didn’t want to get out in it, he wouldn’t have to. His father didn’t any longer. But Liner never missed a day when he was needed.

  Kind of like right now.

  He may not have appreciated the smell—the hilarity of the issue he definitely didn’t miss—but he was there because he knew he was needed.

  “Don’t forget to rub it into your hair,” Liner noted when he reached for the next can.

  The next turn I had it in my hair, running down my face, and curling around my ears.

  “Your hair’s gonna be red, man,” Liner noted.

  I grimaced. “Maybe nobody will notice.”

  ***

  “Your hair is a nice strawberry blond,” someone said from behind me.

  I turned to see Jubilee standing there, looking too smug for her own good, wearing a slight grimace at the smell that still clung to parts of me.

  It was better than it was, but still pretty bad.

  They said that the more baths that you took in the tomato sauce, the better it got.

  Since I’d only had two in the shit before I’d been required to be at the funeral, I knew I fuckin’ stunk.

  And it was all because of the woman standing in front of me.

  I narrowed my eyes at her and let her know that I wasn’t happy with her.

  “Go away,” I muttered. “Before I force you to do something you won’t like.”

  Her brows rose. “I’m fairly sure you’ve already forced me to do something I didn’t like at some point in my life. In fact, now that I say that, I can think of two right off the top of my head.”

  I crossed my arms over my chest and glared at her. “Name them.”

  She flicked up her finger and said, “Number one, the night that I was going to go to eat with my prom date and you wouldn’t let me leave. You forced me into your car instead and drove me home even though I didn’t want to leave.”

  “That prom date was taking you to a hotel, not out to eat. And he had roofies in his pocket to ensure that he got what he wanted, something that you’d been quite vocal about not sharing during high school,” I felt it prudent to point out.

  She gave me a level look.

  “What I fail to see is why you sent me home.” She pouted. “I was trying to have fun, and you ruined it.”

  “There were six guys there that had already spiked the punch. You’d drank like six glasses of it in less time than it took most of them to drink one,” I continued.

  She shrugged. “Whatever.”

  “What was the other instance?” I asked almost reluctantly.

  Her eyes narrowed.

  “Why are you talking to me anyway?” I asked. “You’ve talked to me more in the last week than you have in the last sixteen years.”

  That was true.

  I had.

  And I also couldn’t tell you why.

  Something was just telling me to seek her out, and I had no other recourse but to do my brain’s bidding or risk causing my brain to fuck up.

  It’d already messed with my ability to make rational decisions such as sitting at the track for two hours watching her run instead of going back to my comfortable chair and sitting in the warmth.

  “The other instance?” I pushed.

  She sighed.

  “When you kissed me in second grade,” she answered.

  I remembered the instance perfectly.

  Sometimes she just made me so fuckin’ mad, though, that it was either kiss her or strangle her.

  My ten-year-old brain had decided that kissing her was the way to go, especially since her father and mine were standing right beside us at the time.

  We’d been at a school awards ceremony and Jubilee and I had been chosen for awards. Though we’d both been in different grades, it’d been for the same award.

  Needless to say, when we got on stage, I’d been reluctantly watching everything Jubilee did—it was a habit bred into me, to protect. Jubilee had been dancing back and forth, unable to stay still, and had almost walked her ass right off the front of the stage.

  I’d caught her just as her foot had started to go over, and just like that, I’d lost my patience.

  And I’d kissed her.

  My dad liked to say that Annmarie hadn’t been the one for me, that Jubilee had, but I’d never agreed with him.

  Annmarie was like a calm, cool wind rolling off the shore of a lake.
A nice, refreshing breeze in the middle of a summer heatwave.

  Jubilee, though?

  She was like the riptide, ready to pull you under when you least expected it. Or the four o’clock sun of the hottest Texas day.

  “I see that your ex is here,” Jubilee continued.

  I didn’t bother to look over at her. I’d clocked Zuri the moment that she’d arrived with her new man.

  “Noted that,” I muttered, arms crossed tightly over my chest. “Fuckin’ BJ is here, too.”

  Her head whipped around to start scanning the room. “Where?”

  I raised an arm and hooked my thumb over my shoulder. “That way, near the mayor.”

  “Huh,” she said, sounding amused. “Can’t have that, now, can we?”

  Then she was gone, heading purposefully in the direction of the three individuals.

  I rolled my eyes.

  Jubilee really did hate Zuri, and Zuri hated Jubilee in kind.

  I really did know how to pick them, because Zuri had hated not only my MC, but my jobs. All of them.

  She hated that I worked for Life Flight. She hated more that I was a deputy for the county sheriff. And don’t even get me started about my ‘stupid garage tattoo studio.’

  “Since when do you have red hair?”

  I turned to see Jubilee’s best friend, Turner, staring at me with curiosity.

  “Since I saved Jubilee from a family of skunks today only for them to make a home underneath my truck and wait for me to come back. The moment I got to my truck, they sprayed me. That shit’s gonna smell for years.” I shook my head. “Luckily the bitch is old.”

  “You or the truck?” Turner asked.

  I snorted.

  “Why are you here?” I asked. “I thought you were sick?”

  She shrugged. “I get that way sometimes,” she admitted. “I had stomach surgery when I was a teenager, and it goes through bouts of being finicky about what goes into it.”

  I nodded once in understanding.

  “Not that I really needed to give you any reason as to why I was here,” she countered.

  I rolled my eyes.

  Turner and Jubilee were so much like each other sometimes that it hurt.

  I’d unwillingly gotten another person to take care of when Turner had moved into Jubilee’s life.