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Liner, who’d come with Rome for moral support, said, “Thought you hated it there.”
I did.
“I do,” I repeated my thoughts. “My ex-wife is there, not to mention every single bad memory I ever had.”
“Not to mention his ex-wife is a huge, gigantic bitch. He really doesn’t need to go up there and have to deal with her bullshit,” I heard from the doorway. “Plus, let’s not forget that’s where my sister and his brother died. It holds a lot of memories that are just better left repressed.”
That was the truth.
“Hey, baby,” I said as she walked into the room.
Rome shifted so that my phone wasn’t visible to Jubilee who’d walked up behind me and threw her arms around my neck, pressing her body up against my back.
I felt things below my belt start to stir.
“Hey,” she said softly, pressing a kiss to my neck before she leaned over even farther to get a look at Rome’s arm. “Wow, that looks amazing!”
“I still have some shading to do,” I told her and Rome, who’d lifted his arm and rolled slightly so that Jubilee could see his entire arm extending over to his back. “And then I can take you out to eat.”
“It looks amazing, like it’s real,” she whispered, her voice soft. “It’s so beautiful.”
I felt something in my heart stretch awake at her praise.
“Thanks, baby.” I gestured toward a chair across the room next to Liner. “Go have a seat. I’ll probably be another hour.”
She walked over to the chair next to where Liner had been propped up and sat down.
“Hello, Liner,” Jubilee said. “How are you tonight?”
“Okay,” Liner answered, sounding almost distracted. His face was in his phone, as it had been for the last hour and a half, and he was texting someone furiously, back and forth. His face would take on a thunderous expression every few seconds before it would soften back to neutral. “How about you?”
It was an absent question, I was sure. He hadn’t been expecting the full-on explanation of her bad day, because he stopped what he was doing and just looked at her as she unloaded on him.
Causing me to want to laugh.
“Well, I got all my dead people fixed up,” she started. “All put back together all nice and pretty. Then I got a call from my electric company. I called them about a week ago questioning my high bills. They got back to me and told me that I needed to check my house for answers. They told me that they saw a rise in meter activity about three months ago.” She sighed. “Then I got a call about my water bill. That’s up, too, and they’re threatening to shut it off because I didn’t pay enough this month to cover it. Usually I only send them thirty-five dollars. Whether it’s the right amount or not, because that’s usually enough to cover it. Only the last three months it hasn’t been.”
My eyes met Rome’s.
He was thinking the exact same thing that I was.
That whoever was making his home in her attic had appeared about three months ago based on her bills going up around that time.
“Since I had free time, I also tackled my internet people, too. My internet at home has been shit lately, and I wanted to call them and find out why, but apparently you have to be at home to do that for troubleshooting purposes. And then I came in here, and you were all talking about that woman, and it was just the cherry on top.”
Liner blinked. “That’s…unfortunate.”
Jubilee giggled, then turned her eyes to me. “Why are you talking about that horrid woman and Arkansas?”
I made a split-second decision. “My mom asked me to come home for a few days…and your mom agreed with her. They think since we’re already off of work and halfway there, that we should just come stay for the weekend.”
Jubilee opened her mouth and then shut it.
“I don’t want to go home,” she blurted.
I felt my lips twitch. “You’re really going to tell our moms no?”
She bared her teeth.
“Yes.” She looked away from me and focused on Liner, who was looking at her with amusement on his face. “No.” She scowled at him. “Shit.”
I snapped off one of my gloves and held out my hand for my phone.
I texted my father back one-handed, telling him to tell our moms what had just gone down, and closed it before shoving it back into my pocket.
“I have off until Monday,” I said to her before reaching for another glove.
“Fine,” she said stiffly. “But we have to stop somewhere on the way, first.”
“Where?”
***
Four hours and nineteen minutes later, in the last hour of our ride, she pointed to something.
It was a sign.
“You want to go to a haunted house?” I asked.
She looked at the billboard for the haunted house that we were passing and then shrugged. “Sure. I don’t get scared easily, though. Just for your information, in case you were going to try to scare the shit out of me.”
