Текст книги "Near and Far"

Автор книги: Nicole Williams

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Текущая страница: 5 (всего у книги 20 страниц)

GIVEN THE HEALTH food madness rampant in America, a doughnut shop whose specialty was a bacon maple bar should not have been thriving. Especially in Seattle, where people rode bikes to work and ate kale chips for dinner. We should have had hoards of picketers out front preaching about how Mojo Doughnuts was clogging arteries in the Greater Seattle area and spreading diabetes like it was going out of style. I would have thought the whole food extremists would have burnt the place to the ground before allowing their children to enter a building where, no kidding, I got a sugar high just from sniffing the air.

But Mojo Doughnut was alive and well—it was Seattle’s dirty little secret.

Alex had hooked me up with the job. She’d worked at Mojo through high school, and when she saw me filling out applications for the million and a half coffee shops in town, she uttered a Hell, no, ripped the stack into pieces, and basically dragged my butt to Mojo. She didn’t ask the boss, she told the boss that I was working there. The boss, Sid, hadn’t argued. He didn’t even bat an eye. He told me I was starting that night.

Sid was a cool enough guy, I suppose. He was one of those rich Seattle people who paid a lot of money to look like they lived out of a tent. He lived in one of those modern condos down on the water and drove a brand new Volvo. He wore a lot of hemp, smoked a lot of pot, and his dreads were longer than my hair by a solid six inches. For a guy who sold close to four thousand doughnuts every day, he looked like he’d never eaten one. He wasn’t scrawny, but if he lost ten pounds, he would have been.

Despite the I’m-homeless exterior and the fact he smelled like pot masked with patchouli, the guy was like damn catnip to women. Thankfully, not my kind of catnip. Even if I didn’t have Jesse, if that was the brand of dude I was attracted to, I would have needed an exorcism.

Too bad my roommate didn’t have the same opinion. Neither she nor Sid advertised their relationship—they were basically one relationship ring above fuck-buddies—but they sure as hell didn’t do much to hide it, either.

As Alex, whose eyes were focused on Sid’s closed office door, could confirm. I didn’t mind working the late nights at Mojo, but I did mind closing with Sid and Alex. I shouldn’t have to worry about feeling like a third-wheel at work . . .

Alex sashayed up to a life-size cardboard cutout. “Oh, Chewy, make wild Wookie love to me.” Wrapping her leg around it, she gyrated against the cardboard to the beat of the disco music in the background.

I groaned and cleaned out the display cases of the remaining doughnuts. Whatever we didn’t sell that day got tossed out. Every doughnut was made fresh that day.

“Chewbacca? Really?” I scanned the room that was as eclectic and strange as the doughnut selection. “You’ve got Luke. Han. Hell, even Vader”—I pointed at a few of the other Star Wars cutouts staggered around the room—“and you choose Chewy as your main squeeze?”

Alex couldn’t have looked more offended. She draped her arm around the cutout that was a good foot taller than her and gave me a Your point? look.

“He doesn’t even talk. He . . . roar-growls . . . or something like that.” I’d seen Star Wars once and, after working at Mojo, I knew I’d never, ever want to watch it again. Sid was a hardcore movie paraphernalia collector—his favorite being Star Wars. I felt like I was living Star Wars thirty hours a week.

“He doesn’t have to. His eyes say it all.”

“Sure, they do.”

Alex flounced by me, her outfit concocted of so many metals rings, grommets, and snaps she was a one-woman orchestra every time she moved. “You’re lucky you make such kickass huevos rancheros or else you’d have earned the silent treatment after dissing my Chewy.”

“Lucky me.” I didn’t hide my sarcasm.

When Alex kept heading for Sid’s office door, I grabbed the remaining doughnuts double-time. Even with the disco music streaming through the place, I’d learned the hard way that I didn’t want to be inside the same building when they got it on. I’d even tried earplugs, but I’d come to accept that they only way to save my innocent(ish) ears from that “earful” was to shove out the back door and wait in the alley until they came to their screeching, cursing end.

Alex had just closed the door when I snagged the garbage with one hand and the box of leftover doughnuts with the other. My pace quickened when I heard a growl coming from behind Sid’s door. I couldn’t tell if it was Sid or Alex. Scary.

Once I made it to the back door, I kicked it open and hustled into the alley. I made sure to prop open the door with a crumbling brick to keep from getting locked out. I sucked in a breath of the cool, rain-soaked air and felt excitement bubble up. I’d be breathing different air tomorrow night. We’d just had the last day of the quarter, which meant spring break was in session. If I could have caught a bus right after my classes, I would have. Unfortunately, the earliest bus to Montana wasn’t scheduled to leave until the butt crack of dawn the next day.

Jesse. Willow Springs. One whole week. If there was a heaven, I was about to find it.

Snapping out of my daydreams, I heaved the bag of garbage into the dumpster. I was about to toss the box of doughnuts in when a strange and surprised sound came from inside the dumpster. A strange and surprised human sound.

Instead of running back inside Mojo, I grabbed hold of the rim of the dumpster and pulled myself up to peek inside. It maybe wasn’t the smartest thing for a young woman in a dark alley all alone to do. Whatever had made that sound wasn’t in a hurry to crawl out.

“Hello?” I called. The sight of the nastiness inside the dumpster was enough to level me, and that wasn’t even taking into consideration the smell. Toxic sludge. That was the only explanation. “Anyone in there?”

Right then, the bag I’d just flung inside of it flew back out at me. I dropped down from the dumpster to avoid taking a direct hit.

“Yes! Someone is in here,” a raspy female voice called out. “And where do you get off thinking you can just toss your garbage anywhere you want?”

With so many out-of-the-norm things coming at me all at once, I couldn’t decide what was the most odd. That someone was yelling at me from inside a dumpster, that someone had just used a bag of garbage as a weapon against me, or that I was accused of disposing of garbage in a . . . dumpster.

“Um, are you okay? Do you need a hand out or anything?” I wasn’t used to talking to people camped out in dumpsters. I wasn’t sure what common courtesies were customary.

“Since your hands are the ones that just dumped a sack of garbage on my head, no . . . no, I do not need a hand from you.” Finally, a head appeared over the edge of the dumpster. Even though the alley was barely lit, I could still see that the woman had not seen the inside of a shower in weeks. Possibly even months.

“Oh my god. Are you okay?” I’d just tossed a bag of garbage on a person. I’d had plenty of low points, but that was another one to chalk up on the list.

“Do you see anything about me or my situation that would lead you to believe I’m okay, Girlie?”

I wasn’t sure if she’d called me Girlie as a term of no-endearment, or because a few wires had been crossed and she thought that was the name on my name tag. That didn’t seem like the time to clarify. Or correct her. “Here, let me give you a hand.” I held up my hand and stepped closer.

“I don’t think so. You’ve done enough.” Then, in a not-so-graceful motion that had me biting my lower lip, she crawled up and over the lip of the dumpster. Her clothes were as dirty as she was, and they were really only hanging on by threads. Her canvas shoes were so worn her toes peeked through. Nothing about that woman, from her deep wrinkles to her emotionless eyes, said she’d lived anything but a hard life.

“Um . . . what were you doing in there?” My vocab skills were seriously lacking.

“Cleaning house,” was her clipped response.

My face fell as my stomach twisted. “That’s . . . that’s your . . . home?” I’d been tossing garbage in that dumpster the entire school year. The thought that I’d been depositing refuse onto the poor woman’s head for months did nothing to alleviate my upset stomach.

“Easy there, Girlie, before you pass out on me.” The woman stepped toward me. “That’s not my home; that was just my dinner reservation.”

“Dinner reservation?” I said to myself, but she answered by pulling a half-eaten granola bar, a brown banana, and an almost-empty bag of sunflower seeds from the pocket of her worn trench coat. On their own, the snacks would have turned my stomach, but knowing where they’d come from made me feel the burn of bile rising in my throat.

“Are you hungry?” I was asking and saying some super stupid things.

“If I wasn’t hungry, do you really think I’d be dumpster diving?”

“Probably not.” I don’t know if I was more bothered by her ironic tone or that I felt ashamed to have clean clothes and a full belly when people like her existed. My head dropped, and I noticed the box of marginally stale pastries between my hip and arm. “Here. Do you want these? They were made earlier this morning. I was just going to toss them.” I didn’t feel much better offering a hungry women a few dozen old doughnuts—what she needed was a balanced, nutritious meal—but it was all I had, and all of the fast food places within walking distance had closed a couple of hours earlier.

“What? Are those doughnuts?” The woman took a hesitant step forward, her eyes flicking my way every other blink. She almost reminded me of a feral cat, like she didn’t trust anything or anyone.

“Yep.” I held out the box.

Another careful step forward. “Are they . . . poisoned?”

The skin between my eyebrows creased. “No.”

“What’s wrong with them then?” The woman inspected them like every last doughnut was suspect.

I shrugged. “They’re almost twenty-four hours old.”

“That’s all?” She said it like she didn’t believe they were blemish free, but her hands were reaching for them.

“That’s all. I swear.”

When the box was about a foot from her hands, she lunged, snatched it right out of my hands, and dodged back toward the dumpster. She cradled the box like it was a baby and leaned into the dumpster. As she decided which doughnut to devour first, she kept one eye on me, watching, waiting, like it wasn’t a matter of if but when I’d do something underhanded to her. After settling on an apple fritter, she downed that sucker in three bites. She was on to her second fritter before I’d released the breath I’d been holding.

“If you’re going to stand there gaping at me all night, talk or something.” Chunks of doughnut shot out of her mouth.

“Talk about . . . what?” Dammit. I was seriously in the running for most moronic things to say to one person.

“Something. Anything. I don’t care. I don’t have conversations with a person on the other side that often, you know.” Two doughnuts down, on to the third.

“A person on the other side?” I might as well keep with the moron-trend. “What other side?”

“Disillusionment.” She actually stopped chewing to issue that show-stopper.

I thought over my response—I really thought it over—but one question kept sliding to the tip of my tongue. “And who’s the one on the side of disillusionment?”

“The one who’s convinced life can be a fairy tale.”

I was silent for a few moments. Maybe she mistook that as me deciding how to form my rebuttal.

“In case you’re trying to work out which one of us believes in fairy tales, let me tell you something, Girlie. Fairy tales have been dead to me since before you were even born.”

“I don’t believe in fairy tales. I believe in making my own damn tale.”

The woman laughed manically between bites. “You and every one of us at some time. It doesn’t last.”

“What doesn’t last? The idea or the reality?”

“Both.”

I suppose if our roles were reversed and I was rolling around in a dumpster for dinner, I might have been just as doom and gloom. Hell, I’d been a numb version of doom and gloom a year ago. I wasn’t that person anymore though, and I wouldn’t go back.

“And don’t get to kiddin’ yourself that because you’ve found a little patch of perfect that life’s going to keep on keepin’ on in the same way.” I’d lost track of her doughnut count, but it certainly didn’t look like she was slowing down. “Perfect isn’t real.”

“I’ve known that for a while. Perfect’s fake.” That wasn’t a revelation.

“Not fake.” For the first time, she lowered her doughnut and leveled me with a wild look in her eyes. “Just not of our world.”

That was probably the point when I should have smiled, waved good-bye, and left the woman to her doughnuts. As time proved, I rarely went with what I “probably” should have done. “Perfect’s not of . . . our world?”

She shook her head once, her eyes going up a notch on the wild scale.

“Then what world is perfect of?” It was official. I sounded like the newest member of the head-case club.

Clutching the doughnut box with one arm, she used her other to point at the ground. Her hand trembled.

“The asphalt? Perfect comes from the asphalt?” Yeah, I realized how stupid that sounded.

The woman’s head shook as she pointed more firmly at the ground.

“The dirt?” One quick shake of her head. “The seismic plates?” Another shake. “The molten core of the earth?”

I knew with each guess I was getting farther and farther off my rocker, but I wasn’t sure where she was going. For being such a chatty thing earlier, she wasn’t saying much anymore.

She stuck her finger at the ground one last time before letting out a long sigh. I was obviously hopeless. “The dark place. The place of eternal damnation.”

“Hell? Are you talking about hell?”

A nod. It was about time.

“Do you mean that in the figurative or literal sense?” I was almost afraid to have that question answered.

“Both.”

And that was my crazy tolerance point. I didn’t do the whole heaven and hell, saved and damned song and dance. She could keep up the conversation with the dozen doughnuts I guessed she had left. I was just about back inside Mojo when she spoke again.

“Just because you refuse to see something doesn’t mean it isn’t real.”

“And just because you think you see something doesn’t mean it’s real either.” I wasn’t racking up points in the let-crazy-be department, but something about her last words had unsettled me.

“At last, we agree, Girlie.” Her voice wasn’t shaking anymore. In fact, if I hadn’t seen her before, with my back to her, I would have guessed she was a sweater-set wearing mom of three. “Just because you’ve convinced you love and are loved in a way that seems like it will go on forever doesn’t mean it will. That’s not real either. There’s no such thing as expiration-free love.”

I was really regretting not escaping when I’d gone for it. Why did crazy people have to make so much sense?

Oh, yeah. Because the world was one sick, crazy fuck most of the time.

I WOULD HAVE thought each twelve-hour trek on the good ol’ Greyhound would get easier, or less traumatic at least, but the opposite seemed to be true. When I lumbered off the bus, I was half tempted to buy one of those reliable, five-hundred-thousand miles to the gallon cars Jesse had encouraged me to pick up at the beginning of the year. Anything to keep from cramming in between a couple of linebacker-sized guys who thought eau de funk was that season’s scent.

I wasn’t last off the bus, but I still received my share of stares. I didn’t get nearly as many sideways glances when I was getting off in Seattle, but out there . . . well, my funky, dark style hadn’t made its way east yet.

In honor of Montana, I had on the cowgirl boots Jesse had gotten me last summer. Since, wonder of wonders, the weather was almost summer-like, I had on a purple shift dress, the beat-to-shit motorcycle jacket I’d found at the Salvation Army last fall, and the denim ass purse (as I’d endearingly named it). After enduring two quarters of my natural hair color, I’d colored it darker again. Not black like before and not because I was trying to hide behind it. Because . . . well, I wanted to and I could. Jesse didn’t care what color hair I had so long as I had some. Actually, he probably wouldn’t have cared if my hair fell out. He was all noble like that.

I was the second to last person to step off the bus—small victories—and took in a long, deep breath. Montana still smelt a bit like cow shit, but nothing beat the feeling of stepping onto Montana soil and breathing its air while knowing my favorite people in the whole world were within arm’s reach.

“There’s a pair of legs a man could never forget.”

Okay, some of my favorite people in the world. And some of my not-so-favorite.

“And there’s a face a woman wished she could.”

“Rowen Sterling,” he said with his dark smile. In his dark clothes. With his dark ways.

“Garth Black. Minus the enthusiasm.” I made sure not to return his smile. Garth and I had made some serious progress in the friendship department, but it was kind of a contest to see who’d blink first. Instead of blinking, the loser was the first one to smile . . . and not that curved-at-the-corners one he flashed most of the time. The emotion behind that was the opposite of a smile. We were talking about whoever cracked a real, honest-to-goodness smile aimed at the other person first. “Where’s Jesse?” He’d always picked me up. He’d always been the first person I saw when I stepped off the bus. He would beam and wave, with a new white tee and still fresh from the shower. It was actually one of my favorite sights: Jesse Walker in all his glory waiting for me.

My second favorite sight? The view later that night when everyone else was asleep.

“Emergency.” Garth lifted a shoulder and snagged my giant black duffel from the storage compartment.

I froze. “What kind of emergency?” So many different kinds of emergencies could crop up from the kind of work he did that I’d started having recurring nightmares. Getting stampeded by the cattle, getting bucked off a horse over the edge of a cliff, and the most gruesome one of all gave away that I’d seen way too many horror movies in my lifetime—Jesse tripping and falling chest-first into a pitchfork. I woke up in a cold sweat whenever I had that one.

“Relax, señorita. No emergency involving Jesse or any part of his body you like to get freaky with.”

His reassurance, pithy as it was, unfroze me. “What happened then? Who was involved? Are they going to be all right?” I slid up beside Garth and matched his pace into the parking lot.

“Don’t know.”

“You don’t know.”

“Nope.”

“You didn’t think to ask?” My eyes were scanning for Old Bessie. When I realized that would be the first drive from the bus station to Willow Springs I’d taken without the ancient rust-can, I felt a little . . . sad.

“Nope.”

“Really?”

“Nope.”

“Anything other than nope you’d like to add?”

“Nope,” he replied, his eyes gleaming.

I groaned. Of course I’d be stuck with the most cryptic cowboy ever created when the words Jesse and emergency had come up. Again. It wasn’t the first time those two words had been joined. Even though it didn’t involve him directly, I hoped I’d never have to hear them combined again.

“Listen, before you go and start ripping out that once-again dark hair of yours, here’s the deal. Jesse called me a couple of hours ago, said there’d been an emergency and he might not be able to get here soon enough to pick you up. He asked if yours truly,”—Garth stuck his thumb into his chest—“would swoop in, save the day, and pick you up. End of story. Any questions?”

I felt a little better. If the emergency Jesse was a bystander in could be fixed in a couple hours, lost limbs, pints of blood loss, and bullets wouldn’t have been involved. I hoped. “That’s all he said? There wasn’t anything else?”

We stopped at the tailgate of an older Ford pickup. From the color, I had a pretty good guess who its owner was.

“Yeah. There was something else.” Garth lifted his brows and waited.

“I’m dying here, Black.” I crossed my arms and leaned into the truck.

“He said to keep my hands, booze, and cock to myself or he’d rip me a new one.”

I crossed my arms tighter and gave him a stern look.

“Fine. He didn’t say cock. Only a real man with a legitimate one uses cock when speaking about what swings between the knees. I think Jesse said little willy or wee one or something like that.”

“Anyone ever tell you you’re way too fixated on what you wish swung between your knees?” I lifted a brow at him.

He lifted two at me. “Here’s a secret, Rowen. All men, every single one, are fixated on their johnsons. Anyone who tells you they aren’t are full of bull—” Garth stopped himself, bit the inside of his cheek, and seemed to be working out something. “Full of it. Yeah, they’re full of it.”

“Thank you, edited version of Garth Black.” I shot him a curious look. “If there’s nothing else you’d like to add to this scintillating conversation, mind if we head out?” I started for the passenger door when Garth dramatically cleared his throat.

“Actually, there is something I’d like to add.”

Of course there was. “What?”

“Wanna repeat that night of booze, lawn chairs, and moaning over an almost kiss?” His smile was so wide, his teeth lit up the night.

“Wanna keep your testicles?” I smiled a just as fake and overdone smile as the one coming at me.

“Only on days that end in y.” Garth chuckled and tossed my bag into the bed of his truck. It didn’t make the thumping sound I was used to hearing when my bag was tossed into the bed of a truck. No, it made something more muffled, almost noiseless. I peeked in the back as I stepped up inside of the cab. Well, that would explain it.

“Dost my eyes deceive me or is that a mattress in the bed of your truck?”

“Your eyes dost not deceive you.” Garth slid into the driver’s seat.

“Why?” I asked needlessly, twisting around and fastening my belt.

Garth grinned into the windshield. “What do you think a guy like me would be doing with a mattress in the bed of my truck?”

My nose curled. “Filthy things, me thinks.”

“The filthier the better.” Garth waggled his eyebrows at me before peeling out of the parking lot. I might have missed Montana every minute I was away from it, but I did not miss the drivers.

A rare few minutes of silence passed. The dark roads and the truck’s gentle vibrations were lulling me to sleep. Since I’d closed the night before at the doughnut shop, I hadn’t gotten home until almost two in the morning. My bus left at seven, so that left three, maybe four hours of sleep time . . . which I had gotten maybe fifteen minutes of thanks to the crazy lady crawling out of the dumpster and saying bat-shit crazy things that kept me up all night.

“So? How are the nuptials coming along? Picked out your colors yet?”

I cranked the window down halfway. It was getting a little Garth heavy inside the cab. “So? How’s your right hand? Fed up with you yet?”

“I’m left-handed.”

I rolled my eyes. “How’s your left hand?”

“Truthfully?” He lifted said hand and turned it over, inspecting it. “A little neglected.”

“What poor girl are you seeing this month who’s going to get a restraining order next month?”

Garth swung around a corner at such a hell-raising speed, I checked to make sure we hadn’t lost my duffel. “You change that girl to the plural form, and I’ll give you a list of names. The ones I remember.”

“Wow. Someone’s really taken their exaggeration tendencies to a whole new level.”

Garth tilted his head back and laughed a few hard notes. “I don’t know what we do without you, Rowen. My confidence was almost back to its prior glory before you stepped off that bus and started firing insult after insult my way.”

“Someone has to keep that Zeus complex of yours from getting out of control.”

“Getting out of control?” Garth’s tone gave me the verbal equivalent of a nudge.

“Getting more out of control,” I clarified.

“Speaking of getting out of control, that reminds me . . .” I was already cringing. I’d learned that when “that reminds me” came out of Garth Black’s mouth with that level of sarcasm, nothing good could come of it. “Jesse mentioned a T.A. slash friend of yours who hooked you up with some last minute sweet art gig . . . show . . . rodeo . . . thing.”

“Art rodeo? Really, Black?”

“I don’t know what all you art people call your snooz-fest get-togethers. Give me a break, Rowen. I don’t speak Lame.”

“And I don’t speak Idiot,” I grumbled. Next time Jesse couldn’t pick me up and Garth Black showed up in his place, I was hitching a ride back to Willow Springs. Or hoofing it.

“Your eagerness to dodge the topic leads me to the conclusion that you’re uncomfortable talking about a certain T.A. slash friend.”

Oh, dear sweet Jesus. “Jax?” I twisted in my seat. “Are you talking about Jax?”

“Yep. That’s the one.” Garth snapped his fingers. “That’s the little fu . . .” Garth froze with his mouth open. The skin between his eyebrows came together. “Fu fu, fu, fu-fu-fu . . .” He was truly at a loss. It was a rare moment to witness with Garth Black. I was going to bask in it.

“Fu, fu, fu . . . fucker? Is that the word you were going for? Because that’s one of the few that always seems to be on the tip of your tongue.”

“That’s the one,” Garth said, able to form words again.

“And you were having a tough time saying it because . . .?”

After a few moments of deliberation, he hit the steering wheel. “Because Jesse and I made a bet.”

“A bet?” Oh, great. That ought to be good.

“Yes. A bet. We’ve been sitting a lot of night-watches in the fields, and I guess he was worn out on my proclivity toward profanity and I was bored as all fu—” He caught himself again but just barely.

“I don’t know whether to be more impressed that you haven’t said your favorite word in the past twenty minutes or that you just used—correctly—the word proclivity.”

“Be impressed by it all. There’s plenty of it to go around when I’m close by.”

“Enough self-trumpeting. Get back to this bet.”

Garth sped through Willow Springs’s front entrance so fast I almost missed it. “What’s there to get back to? Jesse bet me I wouldn’t be able to give up cussing for a whole month, and I bet him that he wouldn’t be able to give up . . .” A lopsided smile twisted into place.

“That he wouldn’t be able to give up what?”

“That’s for me to know and you to find out. The important part is that I will be declared the victor come morning because there is no way Walker will be able to hold up his end of the bet tonight. The past couple of weeks, no big deal, but tonight? He’s totally fu—” That was getting old fast. “Foiled. Tonight he’s totally foiled.”

“Foiled? What the hell, Black? Who are you and where did the hick go?”

“Oh, Rowen, finally. My self-esteem is back in the sewer where it belongs. Thank you.” Garth slammed the truck’s brakes in front of the house. The porch lights were glowing, and soft yellow light streamed from all of the windows. Even the one at the top, next to the chimney. I smiled, remembering dozens of the nights worth remembering. “Oh, and thank you for real for being the reason I’m going to wake up the winner of this bet. I owe you one.”

“No, you won’t owe me one. Now that I know about this bet between you boys, I’ll do everything I can to make sure Jesse comes out on the winning side.” I threw open the door and set foot on Willow Springs soil. I had to fight the urge to get down and kiss it.

“Fine. Fight it together. Stand by your man. Doesn’t matter to me.” Garth snatched my duffel out of the bed and grinned—I swear he actually grinned—at the mattress that was growing who knows what before sliding up beside me. “Come morning, y’all are going to be chanting all hail the victor, or you and Walker are going to be cross-eyed and tortured. I’m going to be laughing my way into next week.”

“Two minutes. Quiet. Think you can manage?” Of course I already knew the answer.

“That’s a negative. Besides, you haven’t given me the juicy, illicit details about your relationship to the little Jax f’er.”

Never had I climbed the steps to the Walker household in such a state of irritation. “What? He grades my papers? Sometimes we talk about what we did over the weekend? If you consider that juicy and illicit, then you really need to get out more, Black.”

“Don’t play the coy card with me, Ms. Worldly. You and I both know a guy doesn’t ask a girl about her weekend if he doesn’t have some shenanigans up his sleeve. Guys, straight ones, do not keep girls as friends unless they’re hoping to get between their legs.”

I let out an exasperated sigh. We were a few feet from the front door, so close I could hear and smell the sounds and scents of coming home . . . and someone’s words were ruining the moment. “There’s so much wrong with that last sentence I’m going to mentally repress it—for the rest of my life—and walk through that front door like you haven’t been talking crazy all night long.”

“To further prove my point that you’re aware of Jax’s underlying intentions. . . I present exhibit number one.” Garth’s hand flashed up and down at me. “Overly emotional.”

“How’s this for ‘overly emotional’?” I waved my middle finger in front of his face.

“Proving my point even further.”

“What? Is that what Jesse said? That he’s concerned about Jax’s and my relationship?” I couldn’t really conceive of that. Jesse and jealousy lived on opposite ends of the galaxy.

“No, he didn’t say that. I did.” Garth’s dark eyes flashed. “Just because Jesse likes to see the best in everyone doesn’t mean I have to. He might not be concerned about the snake slithering toward his girl, but I am. I’m telling you, as a friend, as a guy, and as a fellow slithering snake”—I clapped a couple of times at his estimation of himself—“that this guy is up to no good. I’m not asking you to sock him in the jaw, I’m not asking you to twist his testes off, I’m asking that you have your guard up. Okay?”

Garth didn’t only sound concerned; his expression actually matched his tone. I wasn’t used to witnessing concern from Garth Black. It took me so off guard that might have been the only reason I agreed. “Okay. My guard’s up.” I smiled at him as I reached for the door handle. “Happy now?” I realized my mistake a second too late.