That was a miracle in and of itself.
Which was why I was curious.
So fuckin’ curious.
What the hell was going on that she was acting like a decent human being for once?
Which was the reason I was now on my back deck, staring in Tara’s bedroom window.
I’d learned really early on that I could do this. When I’d bought the house next door, it was because the house was too close to mine. I hated people being that close to me, but I’d wanted my house. It’d been my grandmother’s, and I’d grown up in the house. But as I’d grown older, and life had happened, I’d started to get an aversion to people—especially when it came to my domain.
After having one too many asshole neighbors in the rental next door, I’d made the owners an offer they couldn’t refuse.
Needless to say, I’d seen my fair share of weird shit off of my back porch—hey, it wasn’t my fault that the neighbors never put up blinds—but what I saw when I looked inside her windows wasn’t what I expected.
She was just sitting there, on her bed, crying.
Not loud, wracking sobs.
Silent tears that coursed down her cheeks like tiny rivers, slow and steady.
I felt my heart pinch, and I hated that.
Hated that I felt sorry for the woman. Hated that I even cared.
Usually, I didn’t.
Tara’s attitude was bad enough that most of the time I didn’t have to work at hating her at all.
Only, now that I was sitting there watching her cry? Yeah, that was a tough thing for me to accomplish at that moment in time.
And when she looked up, eyes of vivid blue.
I’d never in my life seen eyes that blue.
That brilliant.
They almost seemed unearthly as they shimmered with tears and seemed to be locked directly on me.
Even though it was highly doubtful that she knew that I was there. I was deep in the shadows of my porch, and there was no way in hell that she knew I was staring at her.
Yet she got up, wiped her eyes, and walked directly toward the window as if she did know.
She pressed her forehead against it, then closed those ghostly inhuman eyes and continued to weep.
I’d never in my life wanted to go to someone more than I did right then.
But I didn’t.
I did, however, watch.
And only when her phone beeped, and she nodded her head, looking sick to her stomach, did I stop looking.
But that was only because she disappeared into the house and didn’t come back.
And the next day, when I saw Tara taking out her trash, I made sure to look at her eyes.
They weren’t blue at all.
They were brown. And soulless.Chapter 1Porn gives people an unrealistic time frame. There’s no way in hell a plumber shows up at your house that fast.
-Liner’s secret thoughts
Liner
Present day
“Josiah!” my father called loudly from his office. “There’s a storm rolling in!”
I groaned low in my throat and sat back in my office chair.
I’d literally been sitting in it for less than two minutes, tops.
I’d just come in from replacing a few power lines in a section of what we called the ‘swamp.’ The swamp was a part of the area that literally always flooded. It didn’t matter if we had six inches of rain or a tenth of one, that area was going to flood. And it’d stay flooded for a month even if we didn’t get any additional rain in that time.
Needless to say, I’d been slogging around in shin-deep stagnant water for the better part of eight hours, and I wasn’t in a good mood.
My calves were burning, and there wasn’t a single thing I wanted to do more than sit on my ass and allow feeling to come back to my feet.
Feet that were shoeless because my socks had gotten wet about an hour into the day thanks to a leak in my waders.
“When, what area, and how bad?” I called back.
If it was three days or less, I’d get up and start planning with him. If it was next week, he could just wait until my feet were aching less.
“Big fuckin’ storm,” he said. “They just named her Blessamy, and they expect her to be a goddamn super-motherfuckin’-storm by the time she makes it to Texas.”
I closed my eyes and counted to ten.
“Son of a bitch.” I groaned and stood up. My feet ached terribly, but I made my way into the office that my dad occupied when he was there—which was getting fewer and fewer as of late.
He was slowly starting to transfer the business aspect of it all over to me, and it was a blessing and a curse.
It was a blessing because the old man had worked hard over his life, and it was time for him to slow down. It was a curse because taking over my father’s duties meant that I had to also stay in the office a whole lot more, and that meant a lot more paperwork and a lot less action.