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She gave me a look that I couldn’t quite place, and then said, “Thank you.”
“For what?”
“For… I don’t know. Being here.”
Pride swelled in my chest. I felt needed. Manly.
I felt like a hero.
And just like that, I felt it. IfeltSummer’s presence—whatever fucked up part of me she’d manifested from— shrink.
“You’re welcome,” I said, crossing my arms, trying to look like her comment didn’t affect me.
That she didn’t affect me.
“I wanted to talk about that pen, too,” she said.
“I have it on me. Do you want it?”
Her eyebrows came together. “I don’t think it’ll do any good. I don’t want to make things worse. I wanted to ask though—where did you find it?”
“Already told you. In the trash.”
“But…wherein the trash? A landfill? Out by the road? In a dumpster? Where?”
“Well, I run a design firm downtown—”
“Oh? What kind of design?”
“Software,” I answered. “We do computer shit. Anyway, we just opened like a year ago. I was walking around the space, making sure everything was getting set up right, according to plan. We were using some architecture firm downtown—”
“Glass Candy?”
I furrowed my brow. “Yeah, Candyland or some shit. Anyway, those bastards make everything out of glass, and it sounded cool as fuck to have this design office with all these glass desks and furniture and sculptures. But whatever, that’s not important. I got pissed off that someonedroppedthis big-ass multicolored chandelier while they were trying to hang it. Spewed fucking rainbows all over the floor like the goddamn Nyan Cat took a shit—”
Grace burst out laughing.
I chuckled.
“Anyway. Took forever to clean up that shit, then I walked out the rubble to the dumpster—”
“Swearing the whole way,” she said with a smile.
“You bet your sweet ass I did,” I said. “Threw that shit in the dumpster, looked down pissed off as all hell, and saw that pen on the ground.”
“Did it roll out of the dumpster?”
I shrugged. “I don’t fucking know. It was just there. So I picked it up, because I’m a scavenger. I’d been building this business and hemorrhaging money left and right. Pissed off as all hell… stepping over a dollar to pick up a fucking dime all week at every fucking turn—”
Grace giggled again.
I smiled beneath my beard. “I was fucking livid. But I saw that thing on the ground next to the dumpster, picked it up, and thought I could sell it or something. It looks like one of those expensive ones.”
“It does,” she said. “When I found it on the couch, I thought it was one of those collector’s editions.”
“Yeah, me too,” I said. “Tried to sell it on eBay. But every time I tried to post the fucking listing, the internet would take a shit. Tried Craigslist, too. Same thing.”
Grace sat up straight. “When I tried to show Ink-Grayson Real-Grayson’s Instagram, my internet didn’t work either—”
