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“You’re right.” For all of Mina’s grandiose hand gestures and her breezy chatter, she was solid and stable. She wouldn’t have been able to have gotten her PhD and now to teach, all while writing her comics, if she didn’t have dedication and a strong work ethic. All that stubborn desire to succeed underneath the fluff was one of the things he liked about her. He wasn’t so mistaken as to think that he saw a side of her no one else did, but their relationship meant he got to see the multiple facets of her personality in a different way.
They waited in silence for what felt like several minutes but was probably only one or two. Echo continued to chew on her thumbnail, and Levi tapped his foot until the dog pounced on his boot.
“Noodle!” Echo yelled, giving the leash a yank. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what came over him. He’s normally so friendly.”
“We’re all nervous,” Levi said. He looked down. There were countless numbers of reasons for the dog to be shaking; nervous was only one of them. He crouched and stuck his hand out for the dog to sniff. “It’s okay, Noodle. Mina will be fine. We’ll break into her house, and she’ll be mad at us, and this will all be done.”
Noodle—a ridiculous name for a dog, but the dog was pretty ridiculous—sniffed his fingers, then stuck out a pink tongue for a tentative lick. He patted the dog on its head, then stood back up to face Echo’s open mouth, her surprise giving her thumb and her teeth a break.
“You know, Mina said you were less of a grouch than you appeared to me. Well, to everyone in the neighborhood. Maybe she was right. I was pretty sure you hated my dog.”
The dog looked like a kindergartner had cut out pictures from a book on little yappy dogs and glued them to a piece of construction paper. At Levi’s stare, it sat. Its body was so long and its legs so short that its sitting didn’t look that different from its standing.
“My wife had wanted a dog like that.”
“Like Noodle?” The dog’s winglike ears perked at Echo calling his name.
“A small dog.” She’d brought up the idea before her last depressive episode, and, like a jerk, he’d argued with her. When she’d gotten sick again, he’d offered to go to the shelter and pick out any dog she wanted.
But by then she hadn’t been interested in a dog any more than she’d been interested in eating. Every time he’d seen Echo and her dog walk past, he thought about that failure until he couldn’t see the dog without being sick to his stomach.
Now it didn’t seem to matter. The failure still existed, but in his past where it couldn’t hurt him. Mina was in his future, and she liked the dog.
“Any response?” Mina’s HIV was not the same as Kimmie’s depression had been, but thinking about those last couple of weeks with Kimmie reinvigorated the ache of worry in his joints that he thought he’d worked through since his wife’s death.
Echo checked her phone. “Nothing.”
He nodded and opened up his lock pick set. It had been a long time since he’d had to pick a lock, and his skills were rusty, but he got the lock undone after several tries.
Mina’s purse was sitting in its usual spot on her table, and it looked like she’d kicked off a pair of heels as soon as she’d walked in the door.
She didn’t come running at him and Echo, either in greeting or with a pot in her hands for protection.
“Bedroom?” he asked, raising his brow at Echo.
Nothing would be wrong. For sure, nothing could be wrong. Mina was healthy, with a low virus count and high T-cell count. Plus, HIV wasn’t something people dropped dead of. It was a chronic illness she could and did manage.
And God would not be so cruel as to take another woman he loved away from him.
Echo and Noodle, who was insightful enough to figure out that he should be silent, followed him to Mina’s bedroom. They all stopped short in the doorway. Mina was in bed, but she didn’t look like she had been resting. The overhead light was still on and what covers weren’t wrapped around her body and constricting her movements were puddled on the floor on top of her clothes, which she must have taken off right before climbing into bed. She’d left on only a pair of panties. And Echo now knew the color of Mina’s nipples and how her ass curved because Mina was twisted in a way that made Levi’s back hurt just looking at her. Her skin was an unhealthy pink color and shiny with sweat.
