When we weren’t hanging in the office we texted, and once I went out for drinks with them while Buck was busy, and he picked me up when he was ready to go home.
The good got even better in the sense that I was bonding with Gear.
He was a good kid and he didn’t make any bones about liking me and liking me with his dad.
The second weekend he showed without Tatiana, which was a bummer and something I knew Buck felt, though he didn’t say a word.
Then, when her weekend alone with her mother and Knuckles didn’t go well, Tatiana decided she’d put up with me and came down the next weekend.
It was clear she took my advice and she didn’t throw attitude like she did that first weekend, at least not around Buck.
It was also clear she didn’t intend to extend the olive branch of best-friend-dom anytime soon.
For my part, I didn’t push, but I was unwaveringly nice and made it clear I was open to the olive branch whenever she felt like pointing it my way. Even when she and I were alone and she let it show she didn’t like me by slipping into her pouty, juvenile brat mode, I kept it up. I kept it up for Buck and for Tatiana. She didn’t have it good at home, and I wanted to make it as safe as it always had been for her at Buck’s.
I made this clear, left the rest up to her and hoped.
My start with Buck didn’t change, except after he broke the seal on sex, that was a frequent and extremely welcome addition to our lives.
Being with him was easy.
If we were home in time, he always cooked dinner, I always cleaned up. In the morning (after sex), I always made coffee and toasted the Pop-Tarts (unless it was Saturday or Sunday). And I nearly always fell asleep with my head on his thigh in front of the TV.
Sometimes he’d shake things up by having sex with me on the couch before he carried me to bed, and once I’d kissed him on the way to bed and we had sex on the landing (that was awesome).
But we settled into an us quickly and easily.
He fit me into his life like I’d always been there, and it was a life where I liked to be.
Last, and the only bad (outside Tatiana), Tia had not been found.
This was causing me distress, but I was trying to take a page from Buck’s book and not stress out when I didn’t know if there was anything to stress out about.
She could be lying low someplace safe.
And this was a possibility because Buck reported they’d learned she’d sold her wedding rings and some other jewelry as well as hocked some stuff of Esposito’s. She’d done this the day after we made our plans to go on the run. She’d also braved going to the bank and withdrawing five thousand dollars as well as done the maximum cash withdrawals at an ATM for three days, the day we planned to leave and for two days after.
But no one had heard from her or seen her after that second day.
So she had her car and a good amount of cash.
That fact made me feel better.
What did not make me feel better was, the longer it took to find Tia, the more wired Buck became about it. I noticed this every time I asked (so I’d taken, of late, to letting it lie—if he had something to tell me, he would, it was just, there was no news).
He didn’t even know her, and he told me himself not to worry until there was something to worry about.
But as the days slid by, his calm faded to impatience, his impatience ratcheted to extreme impatience and now he seemed pissed. Which made me think he was worried (this because anger came out when he was worried about Tatiana), and I didn’t think Buck worried was a good thing.
But he promised to have my back, he’d promised to find Tia and have hers, and he’d done everything else he’d promised, so I clung to that knowledge and trusted him to find her for me.
I turned my attention back to the phone call from Mrs. Jimenez.
“Have you—?”
Mrs. Jimenez cut me off, but she did it gently. “No, mi amor, no word.”
She called every afternoon to gab like we used to be able to do whenever we wanted, seeing as I had no job and lived next door.
She also called to report whether she’d heard, or hadn’t, from Tia.
And she hadn’t heard.
Dang.
“How’s the packing going?” I asked.
“Now I know why I haven’t moved. I got a lot of stuff, Clarita.”
I smiled at the phone, knowing she was right. She had enough stuff packed into her little apartment to fill three.