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He managed to get the door shut, the car started, and he rolled forward over the cement parking bump, not giving a shit if it scraped the undercarriage. He watched her continue to stand there, looking like she was crying, though there were no tears on her cheeks. Then, he pulled out onto the main road, and only after that did he let the nerves hit him and his body start to shake apart.
CHAPTER FOUR
Hudson skippedthe office parking lot and instead went through the drive-thru to grab a burrito and a drink. With his straw clenched between his teeth, he told his phone to call his second in command, and he sucked on his fizzy soda until Eli picked up.
“Code bitch,” he said when Eli answered.
Eli sighed. “Where’d she get you today?”
“PT. She waited by my car, then she tried to grab my chair,” Hudson complained. He let go of the wheel for a second to set his drink down, then used his left hand to press harder on the gas. All he wanted was to be home, even if his new place was still in disarray. “I had to leave my walker with Dan.”
“Want me to swing by and pick it up?” Eli asked.
Hudson breathed out a small sigh of relief because he wasn’t ever the kind of man who would ask, but he also wasn’t going to tell his friend no. “It’ll be helpful when I start unpacking my kitchen. Half the cupboards are way too high for me to reach with the chair.”
“Can do. I’ll stop by on my way over.”
Hudson let himself feel the pulse of gratitude for his best friend, even as he felt a small surge of humiliation that he couldn’t handle his own shit. “Sorry I called for this. I could probably just swing back myself.”
“Dude, no. It’s no worries. I was going to call you anyway. We got a shipment delay, so I sent Aspen and Rain home. Everything’s tied up in this delivery so there’s no point in hanging around the office doing nothing.”
Aspen and Rain were siblings with a best friend who had passed from ALS. Prior to him passing on, they’d concocted a few ideas for kink toys and had run into Hudson on an online forum. Before Hudson’s surgery and subsequent bitterness after his divorce, Rain had been the kind of man who could have used his big Bambi eyes and thick hips to get a man like Hudson to do anything.
As it was, Hudson still had trouble telling him no. It was just lucky that both twins had a good eye for both business and design.
“I think I’d be annoyed by this if my fucking mother hadn’t just ambushed me,” Hudson admitted as he took the turn that led toward his new place. “I’m going to go eat a burrito and pretend like I don’t have a whole house to unpack.”
Eli snorted. “Sounds good. You meet your neighbors yet?”
“As far as I’m concerned, I don’t have neighbors,” Hudson said simply. He had no idea who the person was living next door, but if he could wager a guess, it was some lonely old granny. The air constantly smelled like baked goods and cinnamon the way his gran’s house always used to.
The last thing he needed was someone fussing, so he planned to keep his whole situation as private as possible. The first time he had to explain what he did for a living, the whole HOA would start calling him a deviant.
Or worse—they’d start calling himbrave.
He couldn’t stomach either.
“I’ll be by in a couple hours,” Eli said. “I’m going to finish up this pile of invoices, then forward everything to Rain so he can get on the shipments.”
“Put another ad up for shippers,” Hudson said. They were making enough now they could afford a couple more employees. “With the new line going out, and with that fucking viral TikTok video, we’re going to be overwhelmed.”
“You got it. See you soon.”
Hudson hung up, appreciating that Eli rarely ever argued with him, and when he did, it was always for a reason. He also took Hudson’s moods with a grain of salt—one of the few people who never took his snark personally. Hudson knew he should be better to the few people in his life who cared about him without toxic love involved, but well, a tiger couldn’t change its stripes.
Maybe that was a shitty excuse, but he was sticking to it.
Pulling onto his street, he eyed the shared driveway, but there was no sign of another car. The neighbor’s garage was closed, and he quickly opened his own, pulling in and shutting the door seconds after he turned the car off. His SUV filled the room with exhaust, but he was out of the car and in his chair, rolling toward the door with his burrito bag clenched between his teeth.
Eli had helped him install the ramp up, so he wheeled inside without having to tip backward, and when the door shut behind him, he let out a breath of relief. His place was still a little bit like an obstacle course, but he maneuvered around boxes until he was in his living room, and he set his drink and burrito down.
Before he could get comfortable, he noticed that the alert for his doorbell cam was blinking, so he pulled out his phone and turned on his app. He’d silenced notifications because he really didn’t give a fuck about people coming by to welcome him during the day, and all of his mail either went to his PO Box or the office.
He pulled up the recorded video and watched a grainy image of a younger man—thin, maybe tall, Asian, long dark hair pulled into a bun—ring the bell, then set something down on his porch.
A flaming bag of dog shit maybe, or a package for the former dead owner?
His curiosity overwhelmed him, so he pulled the front door open and blinked in surprise when he saw a large white plate holding cling-film-wrapped muffins to the side of his ramp. He had just enough reach to lean over and snag them, and he noticed there was a large post-it hanging off the side, slightly soggy from the rain earlier that morning.
