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“I’ve always been afraid to take the tour myself,” I said. “But now I have three strong yard-workers to protect me from the evil spirits.”
“Two strong ones anyway,” Kade smirked. “Valerio needs more time in the gym, if we’re being hones—”
“Oh yeah?” Valerio challenged. “Think so?”
He lifted his shirt and half-turned in his seat, revealing a magnificent 8-pack of hard, ripped abdominals. My eyes shifted and stayed glued to them, the entire time he kept his shirt up. I almost ran off the road.
“Put those things away and let’s do some curls,” Kade grunted. He slid one giant arm over the back of the passenger seat and flexed a potato-sized bicep. “Then we’ll talk.”
It was unbelievable, the amount of raw testosterone surging through the car. I would’ve laughed if I hadn’t been entranced. If I wasn’t already imagining the three of them with shirts off, and my hands roaming freely over their naked bodies.
Shit. Maybe Ishould’vebooked a room…
“You boys done posting up on each other?” I chided them. “Because we’re here.”
I pulled into the newly-paved parking area and killed the engine. It was a little comical, cramming these big guys in the smallish back seat of my pickup’s cab. But they’d let me do it. After all, I was takingthemon a date, not the other way around.
“Look, I know this probably isn’t the most exciting way to spend a Friday night,” I said. “But I’m a little bit of a freak for this kind of stuff, and I appreciate you humoring me.”
I pointed upward, to where the giant Gothic towers loomed. From here they looked even more imposing.
“So stick it out with me,” I told them. “Humor my little ghost-hunting antics, just for now. And later on, for the second part of the date…”
Eye to eye I scanned them slowly, flashing each of them my most sultry, promising look.
“I’ll make sure you boys getwellrewarded.”
Sixteen
SLOANE
We ended up at their place, which I thought we might. It was a gorgeous craftsman-style house on the east end of town, at the end of a long, historic street. Like most of the houses around it, it was run-down and dilapidated. On the outside, anyway.
On the inside however, it was cozy and beautiful.
“So you’re fixing this place up?”
It was a rhetoric question, because the answer was evident by the sheer amount of construction projects all open at once. Half the floors were covered in tarps. Most of the lathe was broken away from cracked plaster walls, and wires sprouted forth with thick yellow caps where outlets were supposed to be.
“Been fixing it up for half a year now,” said Brock. “All three of us.”
Valerio chuckled. “If you think it’s bad now, you should’ve seen what it looked like back then.”
Despite everything, certain parts of the house were not only livable but actually done. Other than finish work, the kitchen was passable. The cabinets and even the appliances were all installed, even if they weren’t stained or lacquered. There was a wood-paneled living area that looked nearly done also, and I could tell it was the focal point of the house. There were mismatched couches there, and a television hung across from them.
“It’s cold in here,” I said, holding my arms.
“Not for long,” Kade grinned.
He moved to the other side of the living room, where a coal stove marked with the word ‘Wellington’ dominated the center of one wall. It already glowed with dull embers, but once Kade began stoking it everything turned bright orange again. After hooking and lifting the trapdoor on top, he poured three scoops of coal into the hopper.
“Give me five minutes and you’ll be taking that coat off,” he announced proudly. He shook the hopper with one big arm and the stove glowed brighter. “Give me fifteen, and you’ll be stripping off everything else.”
I was given the grand tour of a house I learned once belonged to Brock’s uncle. He sold it to his nephew dirt cheap before moving down south, rather than go through the trouble of trying to sell it.
“It was too big a project for him,” Brock said, as we walked the old halls. “He’s actually lucky we took it off his hands.”
“Youalllive here?” I asked, only mildly surprised.
