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The blinding smile on her face when she’d turned and realized who I was…I would remember the look on her face until the day I died, because it was the look I’d wanted from her for years. She looked happy to see me–no, fuck that. She looked downright overjoyed to see me, like she was so happy she wouldn’t be able to keep it all in, and when I crossed the room to hug her my knees almost buckled when she tucked her face right into my neck.
It was at that moment that I died and went to heaven for about five seconds.
Since I’d made it very clear I would walk her home, the two of us trailed down the road with her arm in mine as I walked her back to Steve and Kennedy’s house, just a couple blocks off Main Street.
There was a single light burning in the entryway when we finally came up on the massive Queen Anne house Steve had spent the last eight years of weekends trying to restore.
“I’d invite you in…” Madelyn worked hard not to deliver the “but” blow. “Steve would be so happy to see you–I know you two have been really busy lately and haven’t had time to catch up, but…” There it was, cushioned inside a sentence filled with nice words. “Teagan’s teething again and she keeps the most God-awful hours. No one’s getting any sleep.”
I let my eyes drift to the window on the top floor, tucked in under the sharply sloped roof and her eyes followed mine.
“Yeah, I know. The irony isn’t lost on me: I’m back in my childhood bedroom–and believe me, I can hear the baby all the way up there.”
I remembered Steve buying the home from his parents years earlier, so they could move to some retirement village in the middle of Florida. It was actually named The Villages, if memory served, which stuck with you even without being snappy.
“We must have been out of our minds,” I mused out loud, realizing for the first time just how dangerous it had been for Steve and I to sneak in and out of his bedroom window on what was effectively the fourth floor. The drop from the rooftop had to be more than thirty feet.
“Yeah,” she chuckled, unwinding her arm from mine and I felt a little colder without her keeping the air of an early October evening off that side of my body. “Those really were the days, weren’t they?”
Well, they were and they weren’t, but I wasn’t about to admit to that. The last thing I was going to tell her was that by the time she turned sixteen, I’d started to feel like a creep for the thoughts I was having about my best friend’s little sister.
“I remember the last time you slept in this house.” She’d walked up the first two steps on the front porch and she turned slowly to face me, a slow smile spreading across her face.
Yeah, I remembered that too…
“It was a week before you two left for Fort Drum. You two went out for a big sendoff with some of the guys…”
I took a step closer, because I couldn’t help myself.
“You two were such a mess.” She laughed at the memory. “I heard you come in because I’d stayed awake waiting for you. I decided it was time for my grand declaration. I was going to tell my brother’s best friend that I’d had a huge crush on him for the last five years and maybe…” She trailed off and she shook her head, a sweet smile on her face. “I don’t know what I thought. Maybe I thought I’d get to kiss you goodbye or something.”
I cleared my throat uncomfortably. “Doesn’t seem all that long ago, and yet it seems like a lifetime. Funny how time gives you a different perspective.”
She hummed. “On most things, yes. There are always a few that stay the same.”
I wanted to ask her what those things were. I was sorely tempted to ask her if she’d ever thought about it again, because as far as I could remember, I had been fairly smashed. Still, I was certain I hadn’t kissed her that night.
“It was wonderful to see you again, Adam.” I was being dismissed. “I’ll let Steve know I saw you today.”
Why was I disappointed when she said that?
“I’m sure he’ll be mad that I got to spend time with you and he didn’t.” She grinned. “I’d expect a call or a text from him tomorrow if I was you.
“You stealin’ my friends now, Mads?” Her voice dropped lower in register to imitate her brother and I couldn’t help but chuckle. She sounded nothing like him, but the bluster came through loud and clear. “As if hehasany friends other than you.”
I gave her a two-fingered salute and waited for her to let herself in through the front door, then I turned and continued down the sidewalk toward my place. It was closer to the river, so I doubled back the way we’d come.
“Lucy,” I called softly as I shut the door behind me, rewarded by a sleepy trill in the darkness. “Where are you, girl?”
I dumped my keys and wallet in the dish near the door, shot the deadbolt and kicked off my boots before a little body wound around my leg. I leaned down to scoop her up, cradling the sleek black cat to my chest as I walked through to the kitchen to check on her food and water situation.
Lucy was short for Lucifer, which was hardly a female name, but the woman whose porch she lived under didn’t really give two shits about gender identification when it came to trapping the feral kitten under her deck. The cat was a vicious killer, she said, lying in ambush under the deck, waiting for the birds to come to the feeder or, preferably, the squirrels.
My friend Harlowe, the woman I’d been hopelessly in love with for three years, ran a dog rescue, so she knew a thing or two about strays. She’d come with me one afternoon to help me trap the kitten hiding under my neighbor’s deck and when we pulled all two pounds of the kitten out, I took Lucifer home with me.
Over the last few years, the time I hadn’t spent on duty had been at the dog shelter instead. I still spent a crazy amount of my free time there, but I’d scaled it back just a little. Anthony was running operations pretty smoothly and managing the volunteers and now that Harlowe was running a rescue on her farm, so I didn’t get to the rescue in Clayton quite as often.
Lucy was a hell of a lot more independent than a dog and while I’d have loved to adopt several of the sweet pits at the rescue, my working hours would have been hard on a dog. So I lived the life of a cat owner, because Lucy and I could peacefully coexist and yet I could disappear for thirty-six hours at a time and she didn’t give a shit as long as there was enough food in her bowl.
