Pretty Thing (Naughty Things 1)

“Are you there?” Kali asks.

“I’m here.” I sigh. “Just… not really here, if you know what I mean.”

“I do,” she whispers. “It’s got to be hard to go down to the shop and not see him there.”

“It is,” I say. Because it really is. “Is everything OK?”

“No.” She sighs. “It’s not.”

“Yeah, I get it.”

“But I wanted to see if we could meet up for lunch on Friday before the reading of the will.”

“Shit,” I say. “I forgot about that.”

“We could skip it,” she offers.

But we can’t. Not after we skipped the reception. People forgive you on funeral day. You get a pass for being selfish and self-absorbed. But they expect you to pick yourself up and move on and that includes showing up for the will reading when your business partner dies.

“No, we should go.”

“Yeah,” she agrees. “We should.”

“So yeah,” I say. “I’d love to have lunch. Wanna meet me here on Friday?”

“What time?”

“Kali,” I say. “Any time. There is no time when it comes to you. This place is yours as much as it is mine.”

“I’m not sorry,” she says.

“I’m not either,” I say back.

“See you Friday, then?”

“See ya Friday.”

We hang up and as soon as I throw my phone down on the couch I have an urge to call her back. Tell her how I really feel. Tell her all the things I never could.

But Kyle is in my head warning me. Warning me to stay the fuck away from his sister.

So I just slump over and go to sleep instead.

The rest of the week pretty much goes just like that. Sleep until some weird hour—usually about the time the guys downstairs are going home. Then get up, shower, microwave a burrito and eat it on the way down to the shop. Make coffee out of habit, even though it’s evening and not morning. Then work on tearing the Jeep down. By Thursday night it’s pretty much a skeleton with an engine and I realize I have nothing left to rip apart.

But I don’t want to stay up all night thinking about it because Kali will be here tomorrow and I don’t want her to see me looking like a walking, talking, sleep-deprived maniac.

So I take a sleeping pill. It’s an old bottle, well past the expiration date, but I take two to make up for that and then jump in the shower to wash the day’s car filth off me, and climb into bed.

I wake up mid-morning to the sound of the compressor downstairs as the guys work on… whatever the fuck they’re working on. I don’t even know what jobs we have going right now.

But it’s finally Friday and Kali will be here soon. Since it’s the reading of the will I need to clean up for real. So I shave for the first time in a week and then realize I only own one suit and it’s still on the floor of my living room from when Kali and I had sex.

So… no suit today. I put on a pair of newish dark jeans, a brown button-down shirt, and my good brown boots that don’t have oil stains and metal flakes all over them. Then I look in the bathroom mirror, run my fingers through my hair, and tell myself it’s gonna be OK.

Which is funny, in an ironic way. Because I said that last Friday too. But I think I really believed it last week and this week I don’t. I thought painful things got better with time? Maybe there’s some in-between stage I never knew about? The stage when things get worse and worse before they get better.

Rock bottom, I guess they call that.

I don’t want Kali to be my rock bottom. I really don’t.

“Knock-knock,” she calls from the living room. “You here, Aiden?”

“Yeah,” I say, turning away from the mirror, then flicking the bathroom light off as I exit into the hallway.

And then I see her. Kali. Standing in my front room, wearing cream-colored wide-legged linen slacks and a matching button-down blouse tucked in with a gold belt. Her dark hair is shiny and smooth, falling in waves over her shoulders like a waterfall.

She looks like… summer. And that reminds me of all the summers we spent together growing up. Just her, and me, and Kyle. Building forts in the woods or just wandering around like wild animals. Except Kali was always wearing a dress. Something summer-y and usually white. With flowers on it, or maybe polka dots. I was forever worried she was gonna get dirty because she was such a pretty thing. And Kyle and I were always in jeans or shorts. And our t-shirts always had mud stains or food stains on them.

Still, Kali was pretty. And she always knew who was growing strawberries in their garden every summer. She always had a plan for stealing the forbidden fruit.