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Frankly, I wanted to get out of survival mode too. For the first time in my entire adult life, I felt actual fucking happiness when I was with this girl, and right now, securing a future with her was the only victory I wanted to claim.
Wyatt tracked my gaze and a slow, knowing smile appeared on his face. “Alright, then. Message received. If we’re going to terrorize the neighborhood, we might as well do it right. What’s the plan?”
Before I could answer, Tasha came sprinting down the aisle toward us. “I found it, Holden. I found the holy grail!”
My brother and I exchanged a glance, then followed her through the maze of plastic skeletons to an open courtyard at the back of the building. Towering over everything else out here was an absolute masterpiece of holiday engineering, a thirty-foot-tall, LED-illuminated skeleton.
Its joints were motorized, something was pulsating in its ribcage, and its glowing purple eyes seemed to track movement. Alicia stared up at it. “Oh my God. That is magnificent. I mean, it’s ridiculous, but how cool is he?”
“We have to buy it,” Tasha said. “We’ll put it in the middle of the yard so poor Mr. Henderson has to look at it every time he leaves his house.”
“I’ll take it,” I said, glancing at a store clerk hovering nearby with a clipboard. “We won’t have space for it in the car, though.”
“I can arrange a flatbed truck to move it for you, sir,” the clerk said immediately. “Depending on the distance, delivery takes anywhere between one to three business days. I’ll just need your address.”
As I reached out to take the clipboard to write it down for him, Alicia’s hand flew out to stop me. “Holden, no. We were joking, for heaven’s sake. There’s no space in our yard for a thirty-foot skeleton. It’ll block out the sun for the entire block.”
“It’s a knife fight, wife,” I reminded her, feeling a slow smirk spread across my lips. “Mr. Henderson’s light show doesn’t stand a chance against a plastic colossus.”
Those blue-green-gold eyes held mine for a beat. Then she smiled and let her hand slide away. “Okay, then. We’re taking Gigantor home.”
The store clerk was practically brimming with excitement over the sale, shoving the clipboard toward me again while waving us—and our completely overstuffed cart—to the cashier. It took nearly another hour trying to figure out how to get all our stuff back to Chicago in a standard-sized vehicle, but in the end we duct-taped a bunch of stuff to the roof rack of my car while the rest of the boxes took up the whole trunk as well as the space between Tasha and Wyatt on the back seat.
When we finally got back home, the sun had already set. Tasha checked her phone and groaned. “Alright, lovebirds. As much as I want to stay and help assemble all this stuff, I have a statistics mid-term next week and my study group is calling an emergency meeting, so I’m out.”
She disappeared into the house and came out before Wyatt and I had even finished unloading the trunk, her backpack slung over her shoulder and her phone in her hand. “I’m calling an Uber. Where do you live? I don’t mind sharing if you don’t mind me being dropped off at the library first.”
For a second, I frowned, thinking she was talking to me, but Wyatt suddenly spoke up from my side and I realized then that she’d been focused on him. “Yeah, that sounds good. I need to get going anyway. Hot date.”
“What?”
He winked. “Some of us aren’t married. Yet. I’m still squeezing the life out of being single, thank you very much.”
A few minutes later, a car pulled up and Wyatt and Tasha both disappeared, leaving Alicia and me to haul our Halloween explosion into the house by ourselves. Once we were done, I reached into my back pocket for my phone, wanting to call Isaac for some advice, but before I could even unlock the device, Alicia’s hand wrapped around my forearm.
“You need to cool it with the decoration war for tonight,” she said quietly, looking right into my eyes. “I love that you’re taking this so seriously, and I love that you want to win so badly, but Tasha mentioned earlier that you have a massive paper due in a couple days.”
“Yeah, it’s for my thesis advisor, but I can write it tomorrow night.”
“No,” she said firmly, her fingers tightening around my arm. “Go upstairs, get your laptop, and work on your paper tonight. Halloween and the contest aren’t for a week yet. We’ll have time to get back to it once your paper has been turned in.”
The simple, casual way she was touching me sent a jolt of energy sizzling through my veins, my heart doing a strange, flopping kind of thing between my ribs. I glanced down at her fingers, wishing that what she’d said wasn’t true, but it was.
While I wanted her to keep touching me, and to spend the rest of the night working on the decorations together, and banishing that awful woman from her mind for good, that paper was too important to half-ass.
Letting out a long sigh, I finally lifted my gaze back to hers and nodded. “Yeah, okay, but if Mr. Henderson launches a preemptive strike with his pumpkins tomorrow, I’m holding you responsible for our early losses.”
“Deal.” She laughed, genuine warmth filling her eyes as she held my gaze for another beat before turning toward the kitchen. “I’m not worried about a preemptive strike. As soon as that skeleton gets here, we’ve got this in the bag.”
“Plus the werewolves,” I said.
She chuckled. “Let’s not forget about the werewolves. Now, go get your stuff, Thayer. I’m going to throw together some pasta for dinner. Then I’ve got some work to do myself.”
As she headed toward the kitchen, it was like I could still feel her touch against my skin, and while I knew I wasn’t going to get much done feeling the way I was right now, I jogged upstairs to grab my stuff anyway.
If she had work to do, I wasn’t going to be responsible for keeping her from doing it.
CHAPTER 30
