"You forgot the vibrator thing," Lea added, making my brow quirk up. The vibrator thing?
"Right!" Fee said, sounding excited. "So I wasn't into the sex thing at first believe it or not. Long story. Next time you get a couple drinks in me, we will get into that. But anyway, I was trying to pretend I wasn't thinking about Hunter when I was... giving the hooded monk a back massage," she said, making a laugh escape me. "But that was shot to shit one night when he came over and found my vibrator in my bathroom sink."
"Shane and I don't really have any..."
"Um, shut the fuck up," Fee cut her off. "The gym bathroom thing? The oral while on his shoulders thing? Come on. You have some juicy shit to tell too."
Okay.
I liked them.
Was it possible not to?
Granted, there was a bit of a feeling of being an outsider because I didn't know all the little stories yet, but still, they were open and funny and accepting. What more could you ask for?
I figured that, given some time and story telling, they would be all too happy to have me in the fold.
"Oh, and we brought junk food too," Lea said.
"Thank God," Fee added, going into the bags and grabbing a bag of Reeces. "I mean, I love my kids. But I swear they can hear the sound of a candy wrapper from three miles away during a thunderstorm. I never get to eat my own junk food. And, well, they have several years until they start getting a period so they don't understand the struggle and need for chocolate yet, but when they do, I hope they remember all the candy they stole from me over the years and feel really bad about it."
"You taught kindergarten, right?" Lea asked, looking at me.
"Yeah," I agreed, nodding, accepting a Reeces when Fee handed one to me.
"Right here in town?"
"Yeah," I agreed, feeling a pang of loss yet again.
"A class full of twenty little Beccas or Izzys? How? Why?" Fee asked with a smile.
"I always liked kids. I was an only child. I liked the chaos."
"Fee, I think you just found a babysitter," Lea declared, moving off to the kitchen and going about making coffee like she had been in the place many times before.
"Seriously, if you ever want to be driven up a wall for a few hours, I am always looking for a decent sitter. To come here today, I had to pay three neighborhood girls to watch them for a few hours. Thirty bucks an hour because no single girl will take them on. They have that bad of a reputation."
"I'd be happy to hang out with them," I volunteered. "You know, once I am settled again."
"Yeah, crazy situation," Fee said, dropping down on the couch and propping her feet up on the table. "I mean, Lea might have you beat technically. But it's still nuts."
"Maybe she doesn't want to talk about that," Lea said, coming back as the smell of fresh coffee filled the air.
"Fine, then we can talk about how Shane took care of..."
Lea cleared her throat and they both shared a look that I didn't know them well enough to interpret.
But then Fee abruptly changed the topic of conversation. "This place is awesome, isn't it? No one stays here much but Hunt and I take it over on our anniversary for a long weekend every year. Charlie and Helen stay at our place for the kids. They have room service! Ugh, the luxury."
"Please, Hunter does most of the cooking anyway," Lea said, shaking her head.
"Well, only because I'm not good at it. We also have holidays here sometimes. Fourth of July we all show up because they do fireworks over the Navesink. It's perfect from here," she said, gesturing toward the windows.
Then, well, we all drank coffee and ate junk food and talked about light topics before things went serious and I learned about their pasts.
And I learned about Fee's screwed up childhood with a religious fanatic, abusive father in the woods and isolated from anyone but her father, mother, and brother. I learned about how she had run away to New York City and had to learn how the real world worked, with scars from her father both literal and figurative that made her struggle to keep sane without alcohol and cutting herself. Then, finding Hunt and finding someone who accepted her just as she was, she had slowly recovered.
Lea's story was no less traumatic, coming from a life in a bike gang where her father and brother did nothing to stop the club president from raping and abusing her for years. She escaped and he retaliated by abusing and killing a girl she once knew and hurting her brother and trying to guilt her into returning. On the run from him, she went to work for Fee and met Shane and, eventually, he got wind of the ex situation and 'handled' it.