Looking down at his boots, I tried to guesstimate how much shoes that big would cost. Surely with the extra acreage they had to cost more? I mean, it was a lot more leather than a pair in my size would be, and then there were the soles. I was a size seven, and he had to be a size thirteen or fourteen. Did that mean they put more holes for the shoelaces than they would on a pair in my size? If that was the case, more holes meant longer laces, too. Ergo they’d be more expensive – which was an argument I laid out for him.
This time he looked at me like I’d gone insane until a car behind us beeped to let us know – oh so kindly – that the light had changed to green. Figuring that we were best to ride the rest of the journey in relative silence, I turned on the radio and hit play on one of my favorite songs.
Leaning back, I closed my eyes and listened to the opening guitar part of it, smiling like I always did when I heard it.
“Is this Clapton, too?” Jarrod asked, ruining the silence part of my plan. Then again, I guess I’d said relative silence.
“No, it’s George Harrison.”
He listened a while longer, a smile breaking out on his face, too. “This song’s awesome, what’s it called?”
“It’s mine and Maude’s song,” I told him, smiling when he just chuckled and shook his head. “It’s called Cheer Down.”
Shrugging, he signaled to turn onto the road that the garage was on. “It suits the two of you. I’m a huge Harrison fan and I’ve never heard it.”
“Now you’ve heard it once, you’ll listen to it a thousand times and still not get sick of it. In fact, I bet you’ll be sitting with your guitar trying to figure out how to play it later on.”
Slowing down to turn into the garage, he shot me a look that made ‘little Katy’ twitch. “I’d play it for you a thousand times if you wanted me to.”
There was absolutely no way in hell or heaven that I’d ever say no to that. “You’re on!”
My happy bubble was back in place… at least until Cole and Ren spotted Jarrod’s head and then my car (which was how it went in my head when I played the scene out again later on).
“Holy shit,” Cole howled, holding onto the frame of the entrance. “Where’s the rest of your car?”
Seriously, his head did clear the top of the car!
“Fuck!” he growled, sounding so much like Geralt in The Witcher that I sighed and shifted in my seat. Realizing immediately, he shot me a glare that softened when he saw the happy smile on my face and then he just shook his head.
Getting out of the car was just as amusing as getting into it, and Cole and Ren got a show as he had to wriggle out from behind the wheel. What was even better was that Duke was in the back seat, and just as Jarrod bent over to stand up, his leg still next to the wheel, Duke jumped and landed on his back, using it as a trampoline to get out.
Realizing that it would be a good idea for me to get to the office, I skedaddled as quickly as my sore body would let me, and scurried past the two Townsend men who were still laughing. Just as I passed where they were standing, though, I whispered, “I’ve got a video of him trying to get in.”
Both men stopped laughing and then followed behind me to watch it.
And then the day went a bit weird when I went down to the forecourt and saw that creepy guy Shane again, standing with his arms crossed in front of him, watching me with a look on his face that didn’t exactly scream happy things. In fact, they were so far from happy things that I turned around to tell Jarrod, but when we came back out again he was gone.
Easy come, easy go, I guess!
Any thoughts of creepy Shane fled, though, when other members of the Townsend family turned up at the end of the day to watch Jarrod getting back behind the wheel of my car. That shit was totally going viral.One week later…
“You’d tell me if it was one of my brothers who kept moving my stuff around, wouldn’t you?” I asked him as I walked out of my kitchen with two plates of leftovers that Gloria had dropped round.
“Absolutely,” he replied with zero hesitation.
“You’d tell me if it was one of your brothers doing it, too, wouldn’t you?” I asked this time as I sat down beside him and passed him his plate.
“I’d kick their asses myself.”
Balanced on the edge of my plate was a pink plastic bowl with the same food we were eating for Elodie, and as soon as she saw it she came toddling up to me. I didn’t normally let her eat in the living room, but Jarrod had bought her a purple place mat to put on the coffee table and had spent the last week teaching her to eat sitting on her knees beside it. Initially, she hadn’t liked this because his plate was bigger, so now he had a blue version of her bowl in the cupboard and tonight was his first night as a big boy.