One Last Time (Loveless Brothers 5)

He stands, brushes his hands together, and heads for the door.

“And in the meantime, don’t be such a dick our employees,” he says.

“You’re not even gonna help me find the beer?” I ask, still seated.

In the doorway, he turns back. Then he points at a keg a few feet away from where he’s standing.

It’s the Scottish Ale.

“Good talk,” he says, and then leaves.

In protest, I stay there for another five minutes.Chapter Twenty-NineDelilahI drive with my left hand and shake out my right, opening and closing my fist. Most of my day today was spent putting a huge, abstract piece on the thigh of a man with lots of patience and a high pain tolerance, and who told me he’d prefer to get it over with in as few sessions as possible.

Fine by me, though now my needle hand feels weird, not to mention the shoulder cramps. Even though afterward I grabbed dinner with Beau, who gave me the latest updates on Nana’s Squirrel Adventure, I’ve still got knots.

Finally, my driveway comes into view. My house is a hundred feet back, a stand of forest between my driveway and the road, the house itself barely visible through the trees. I thought about buying a house in town, but this one had a sort of charm it’s hard to describe — an odd, lofty, open-feeling farmhouse that seems equally suited to canning in the kitchen, vintage oddities in the living room, and naked dances around a bonfire in the back yard.

I haven’t had a bonfire yet, nor danced naked in the back yard. Someday.

I pull in, turn my car off. Contemplate the darkness for a moment. Massage my right hand with my left, which helps, but not all that much. The cold is already starting to leach in from the window, and I take my scarf from my passenger seat, wind it around my neck even though it’s a short walk to my front door.

I get out, shut the door, and a black shape unfolds from the steps to my front porch.

I scream and bolt back into the car, slamming the door shut. I hit the lock button about a dozen times in a row, my heart pounding and my mouth dry, suddenly freezing inside my coat.

Oh fuck there’s a murdering Bigfoot on my front porch fuck fuck where are my keys I had them one second ago this is why Vera wanted me to live somewhere with a gate —

I finally pull the keys from my coat pocket, and with the cool metal in my hand, I finally take a deep breath.

It’s not Bigfoot, I remind myself, and finally brave a look out my window.

The murdering Bigfoot… waves?

And the wave is very familiar?

I flop my head back against my seat and take another deep breath, my heart still pounding but now for an entirely different reason.

“What the hell?” I mutter to myself, and open the door again.

“I thought you were Bigfoot!” I shout.

“Sorry to disappoint,” he calls back.

“What are you doing?” I call, walking up the path through my front yard toward him, adrenaline still shivering through me. “Are you just sitting on my porch steps in the dark? The porch steps of a woman who lives alone?”

From the look on his face, he hadn’t considered that part of the equation.

“I’m sorry,” he says, and he actually sounds contrite.

I take a deep breath, still trying to settle my nerves, rub one hand over the back of my neck.

“I have a phone,” I point out.

“I needed to talk in person,” he says, and suddenly the rattle in my veins is replaced by an empty spot in my chest and I notice, for the first time, that there’s something in his hand.

It’s a basket. There’s a cloth draped over it, and the empty spot blossoms into dread, dark and shiny, echoing the last time one of us showed up at the other’s house with an offering.

It’s working, isn’t it? Our agreement?

“I don’t know how to talk to you less,” I say, just staring at this basket. “My life’s here. My family’s here. I have to go out in public —"

“I didn’t wait on your porch steps in the cold for an hour to say we should never speak again,” he says.

A cold breeze rustles through the leafless trees, tugs at the strands of hair not stuck in my bun and wafts one across my face.

“Then what did you bring a fruit basket to tell me?” I ask. “If you want to bribe me to leave town and let you be, that’s not —"

He flips the cloth off and holds it out to me.

It’s… scones?

“I like you,” he says, simply, and it feels like my heart sticks to my ribcage, forgets for a moment that it should be beating.

I watch Seth, waiting. I don’t take a scone. I wait for him to finish the sentence, to tell me the real reason he showed up at nine at night with baked goods. To deliver the blow we both know is coming.