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“Kelley is a douchebag,” I agreed. “But if that’s the only reason you have for not working there, it’s not a good one.”
She shrugged. “It’s not just him, though he is a problem and he needs to go. It’s also the fact that I don’t like working twelve-hour shifts. I like taking naps. I don’t want to work with my mother and sister, and I don’t want to work at all.”
My sister’s honesty was refreshing.
I laughed. “You don’t get a choice on the working bit. Unfortunately, you have to work to make money. Sucks but it is what it is.”
She sighed. “I know it. I’m just being a pretty negative Nancy lately. What are you looking at?”
I’d been standing at the window for a while now because a certain man had caught my eye.
Then, a second man had captured that attention, and I was too busy looking at him to return my eyes to the previous one.
“My stalker is outside washing his truck,” I murmured. “Shirtless.”
My phone buzzed on the coffee table and Phoebe picked it up and handed it to me as she took her place at my side so she could see the view, too.
“There are two,” she murmured. “Why does that big badass one look so familiar?”
“That’s the neighbor that hates me. He’s also the one that we got in that fight with when we were younger. Remember? The one that I yelled at his sister, and he lost his shit on me?” I reminded her.
I knew that Phoebe remembered. It was hard not to.
Phoebe’s eyes lit with understanding as she moved closer to the window with newfound focus.
“I thought he was going to kick your ass,” she admitted. “I remember breaking you two up, pushing you away from each other.”
If it hadn’t been for Phoebe, Bayou very well might have kicked my ass.
It was at a club party about eight years ago. Brielle—and the only reason I remembered her name was because the name was so pretty, and the woman was so nasty to me—had caught me eyeing a boy that she ‘cared for’ and didn’t like the way that I was looking at him. I’d, of course, gone out of my way to tell her that I hadn’t actually been ‘eyeing’ anybody, even though I had.
And when she’d called me a bitch, I’d gone off on her.
Bayou, Brielle’s brother, had taken offense to me crowding Brielle and had roughly situated himself between the two of us.
When we’d gone to club parties with the Benton Chapter, I’d, of course, seen the large, quiet boy that had turned into an even bigger, larger boy-man sitting in the shadows. It was hard to miss him. However, I’d never once seen him talk or do anything but sit in the shadows. It’d been painfully obvious that he was both shy and unwilling to even try to fit in, but whew, boy. All it took was me yelling at his sister and bam! No more Mr. Nice Guy, and he was more than willing to let me know it.
After that, I’d seen him at seven club parties total, and he’d gone out of his way to glare at me.
He was older than me, and likely knew better than to hold that kind of a grudge, but still, to this day, he didn’t forget the way I’d yelled at his sister.
And wouldn’t you know, I moved in next door to the hateful, never-going-to-let-it-go bastard.
“I remember him,” Phoebe admitted, sounding lost in her own memory of the time. “I really liked him.”
“You liked him?” I asked incredulously.
“Yep,” she said. “He liked reading the same stuff as me. He also hated going to those club parties as much as I did. How did I not know that you lived next to him all this time?”
All this time being about a year and a half.
“Because you never have time to come over here,” I pointed out. “And when you do, you and I are busy doing stuff. Plus, Bayou’s never home. Like ever. I think I see Hoax there more than I do Bayou.”
“Bayou has Asperger’s,” she said softly. “He told me all about it the day that you and Brielle got into it. When we learned about types of autism when we were in our third semester, I thought a lot about him as we were going over Asperger’s. He exhibited a lot of the signs and symptoms, but he’s definitely on the less-affected end of the scale.”
“I had no clue that you spent that much time with him to ever make those connections,” I felt deflated. I hadn’t even made the effort to spend time with him or get to know him at all, and here my sister was telling me that she had. And she’d realized that he was out of his element. “I don’t notice any of those signs or symptoms in him anymore, though.”
