“Mr. Smith!” Gracie yelled, jumping up and down and waving. “Mr. Smith! Mr. Smith! You live next door to me!”
And frankly, the only consolation at all was that Wilder looked as horrified at that godawful revelation as I felt.
CHAPTER 5
WILDER
Cash got home from his double shift just before midnight. We were all still up except for Gracie. Cash stood in the doorway of the living room, looked at us, looked back the way he’d come, then looked at us again.
“Yeah,” Chase said. “He moved in last night. I’ve only seen one guy.”
Cash thought about that for a moment and then shrugged and made a beeline for the recliner.
Cash didn’t talk much. He could, but he didn’t. Chase, his twin, did all his talking for him. Probably why he didn’t talk much. He didn’t have to. It worked for them.
Danny drained the last of his beer. “A whole house for one guy?”
“Maybe the rest of his family’s coming later,” Chase said. “The fuck are we, anyway? Neighborhood watch?”
“It’s just him,” I said.
Mr. Smith wasn’t married and he didn’t have a partner. I’d tried not to know that, but throw a young male teacher at a bunch of kindergarten moms? Even I couldn’t avoid hearing the gossip.
“How do you know that?” Danny asked.
“It’s Gracie’s kindergarten teacher,” I said. “Saw him pulling in earlier when we got back from Walmart.”
Danny laughed. “Why the hell didn’t you say anything when Chase was speculating?”
“Was not,” Chase lied. “I don’t give a fuck.”
“You said nothing ever happens in Goose Run, and maybe the new neighbors would be cool.”
“That’s not speculating,” Chase said. “That’s stating a fact.”
“Oh hey, and he’s cute too,” Danny said, grinning. “I’ve met him.”
That caught Chase’s interest. “Cute by regular standards or cute by Goose Run standards? Like, here it’s kind of like closing time at a bar, right? You take what you can get.”
“Regular cute,” I said, and where the heck hadthatcome from?
“Stop telling yourself you’re straight,” Chase said.
It was an old joke, but it didn’t hit the same as usual, and I wasn’t sure why. Probably because while I’d always been able to admit some guys were cute or hot—totally objectively, of course, because everyone knew what society as a whole agreed were attractive qualities—I’d never actually given a lap dance to any guy I’d thought was cute before. And as much as Avery and I had agreed we were never talking about it again, I couldn’t stopthinkingabout it.
“Is he, though?” Danny said.
“What?” I’d lost the thread of the conversation somehow.
Danny shoved my shoulder. “Is Mr. Smith straight?”
I shrugged. “He was wearing a rainbow lanyard on the first day of school.”
“There’s a lot of crossover between gay and kindergarten when it comes to rainbows, though,” Danny said.
Chase grinned. “Nowwe’re speculating!”
From the recliner where he was tucked under his blanket, Cash snorted.
