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She got off the bed to sit on the floor with us too. I wouldn’t have expected just the presence of a dog to ease so much of the discomfort in my soul, but it definitely did.
“I know you think I know all these secrets about him, and that I’m just being a bitch by not telling you all about this guy you’re in love with,” Memphis said quietly and laid her head against the dog’s. “But I never got to really spend time with him like you did.”
“Like I did?” I asked and laughed like a lunatic. “Memphis, he spent like two days just stuffing me into the trunk of his car. We fought each other. And I don’t mean we yelled at one another. Physically. We physically fought. Several times.”
“And you still feel closer to him than anybody else, don’t you?” She asked. “Something in you connected to something in him. I don’t want to make it weird. I really have no desire to be with him. I don’t want you to think that. I just — I don’t know. We spent so much time on the phone. All day, every day. Something in me always thought that, eventually, we’d get to be friends in real life too, but I only had minutes with him.”
“I think you already are real life friends,” I said. “He cares about you in a way that he’s never cared about me.”
“I think I could say the same about you,” she laughed. “Maybe when I’m not prone to constant crying, you could tell me what he’s like in person?”
“An asshole,” I said, with zero thought beforehand. “He’s an asshole.”
We stayed sitting that way with the dog in silence for a long time, until it was nearly dark outside. I told Memphis that we’d brought in the few bags that she’d packed before Nate’s people picked her up from her house. Then I warned her that I would plan to sleep in this room, but not to be surprised if I ended up on the floor next to her bed because this had been one disaster after another and being alone sounded daunting. When she disappeared down the hallway toward her own room, I took Dandelion back to the door. I’d seen the guesthouse somewhere out behind the detached garage, but I felt weird about just knocking on Kyle’s door to return his service animal and thanking him for letting us love her.
I didn’t have to do any of that anyway because he was sitting in a patio chair at the edge of a fire pit, watching the flames burn like he might find the answers to the world’s most serious questions in them.
“You know, when you said you had a dog, I imagined like a Rottweiler or a Doberman,” I said and sat in the empty chair next to him, with his dog between us. “You, a big scary former Marine man, have a goldie named Dandelion.”
“And I call her Dandy,” he said proudly.
“You have to be two of the weirdest guys I’ve ever met.”
“You’ve really only known him for a couple weeks?” He asked. “Hard to imagine him sending you to his safe house.”
“Did he tell you about his job?”
He shook his head. “Said he found work that could use his messed up talent and detached nature. He needed somebody to sit on this land and keep it nice. Not to talk to anyone around here about him.”
“And that was a good enough explanation for you?” I freaked out a little when he glared at me over that question. “I am in absolutely no position to be a judgey bitch about your decisions, dude. I was genuinely asking.”
“When it came from him, yeah. It was plenty explanation, dude.”
Another old guy to figure out how to tolerate.
Fucking eye roll.
For as much as I wanted anybody in the fucking world to tell me about the confusing heap of a human who was Vance Anderson, I’d spent a lifetime not trusting anyone. Even knowing that Jersey had trusted this person with his real name and tasked him with keeping his dropout house prepared, I didn’t know him. And if Jersey hadn’t told him anything about his fucked up job, there was probably a reason for that too.
“I’m out here every night,” he said with a chuckle after my silence was apparently noticeable. “Take your time getting used to me, honey. I’ll need just as much to get used to the two of you being here.”
“It was sweet of you to send Dandy in there.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
trista
I still cried when I made it back to Jersey’s room and had to go into it alone, but I opened the pink duffel bag that held his clothes and immediately changed into his sweats and his plain white T-shirt. I cocooned myself in that giant gray comforter right in the middle of his king sized bed and tried to imagine that he was the thing wrapped all the way around my body. I was also tired on a level that I didn’t even realize was possible, and I didn’t even remember actually closing my eyes to try to fall asleep.
The sun coming in around the edges of the curtains woke me up at some point the next day. I laid there in my bundle of warmth and tried to imagine what might need to happen next. Instead of coming up with anything useful, I ended up staring at the picture of Jersey’s wife and daughter that sat on the nightstand next to the bed, wishing he’d been in the picture with them. About the time that I felt like I might cry, fucking again, I forced myself to just get up. The bedroom wasn’t huge, but it was bigger than any space I would ever need. All six of the outfits that went everywhere I did in my backpack would easily fit in here with me. There was enough room for a giant padded bench that sat at the end of the bed, two overstuffed chairs in the corner with a small table between them, and two small bookshelves. I went toward them with every intention of being nosy but abandoned that endeavor just as quickly when I realized they were all photo albums. Someday I might work up the nerve to look at pictures of his life, but that sure as shit wouldn’t be today. I hadn’t thought about it before I went to the giant sets of windows on the far wall, but this room sat on a side of the house that I hadn’t seen from the outside yet, and when I opened the curtains, I was staring at an immaculately kept in-ground pool. This place came with a new surprise every fucking time I turned around.
Frantic knocking on the bedroom door had me jumping half way across the damn room. Memphis didn’t even wait for me to actually get to the door to open it myself before she came in to meet me right where I stood.
“Here,” she said and handed a piece of paper to me. “This is what I’ll still need. I was able to get quite a bit packed up before they took me. And he’s got a solid start for internet connection and the ability to secure it for this place. But I still need everything on there. I tried to be as detailed as I could be because I wasn’t sure how much you knew about these kinds of things. If you find the right store, any employee will know what all that is if you just give them the list. Just maybe don’t offer any explanation about what any of it is for.”
“Did you sleep at all?” I asked. Her hair was in a frizzy ball on top of her head, she was wearing the same clothes she had on yesterday, and she looked like she’d spent the night rage-crying.
“Yeah,” she said. “Wait, no. I took over his office. Think he’ll care?”
