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I heartheir voices before I reach Remi’s property line, and I duck into a grove of birches, knowing it was risky to come in the day instead of at night.
It looks like they’ve just come down from the attic—Remi’s blinking in the sunshine, filthy with dust, cobwebs in her hair.
“—and that’s all it takes,” Tom says.
“Easy peasy!” Remi laughs.
“Yeah.” Tom grins. “Just a quick hundred hours of work.”
Hundred hours?I knew it. This fuck is drawing it out as long as possible so he can skulk around her house for weeks.
“It won’t really take that long, will it?” Remi’s eyebrows crimp in concern.
“Not if you can help me. Hot out today,” Tom remarks, pushing up the brim of his cap to wipe sweat off his forehead with the back of his arm. “You want a drink?”
He hops up in the cab of his truck, dragging forward a large and filthy cooler. He flicks the latch and pulls out two bottles of beer.
“Thanks.” Remi takes the drink and gives her bottlecap a sharp downward rap against the truck’s gate so it pops off and goes flying into the uncut grass.
“Cheers.” Tom clicks his beer against hers.
They each take a long pull, drops of melted ice sliding down the brown glass bottles.
The late September sunshine is golden, bits of chaff floating through the air. Remi’s tan glows bronze, her black eyebrows making funny shapes as she chats with Tom.
Tom’s lazy smile gets wider. He leans back against his truck, arms resting along the gate. He’s shucked off his plaid shirt to show off the undershirt beneath and his brown, freckled arms.
It’s a moment I could never share with Remi, and not only because it would turn my face as red as Tom’s hair to stand in the sun. Remi looks calm and relaxed, like people never do around me. Even half my patients are afraid of me. Probably more than half, but they don’t have a lot of options after 6 p.m.
Most of the time, that’s exactly how I like it.
But right now, when Remi’s lit up like a sunset, golden skin and violet hair, dazzles of silver in her nose and across her full lower lip, when she throws her head back and gives her cackling laugh, it’s almost enough to make me want to trade places with Tom.
Especially when she lets her hand rest just a moment on his arm.
Almost, but not quite—‘cause Tom’s a fucking idiot and I’m going to get exactly what I want out of Remi.
I decide it for certain, right there in that moment.
I’m going to taste that mouth again. I’m going to feel her firm little body in my arms. And I’m going to make her respond to me exactly how I want.
And Remi—my messy, stubborn, rebellious little treat—is going to look up into my face with so much more than calmness. She’ll look at me with the kind of desire that makes her legs go limp and her thoughts melt out of her brain.
* * *
10
REMI
From what I can tell, Tom’s doing a pretty good job on the electrical work, though he does drink six or seven more beers over the same number of hours’ work. He rigs a couple lamps to Jude’s generator so he can continue working well past dark, and he’s still going hard at eleven o’clock when Jude finally putts into our yard astride a battered gray moped.
I’d just been about to drive out looking for him. He never answered my many texts and phone calls asking when he wanted a ride home. I wasn’t in full panic mode quite yet—Jude frequently forgets to charge his cellphone even when we have proper outlets, not just battery packs—but I was definitely in that state where my mind was creating a thousand horrible imaginings of my baby brother beat up in a ditch or drowned on the beach. He’s not a strong swimmer.
“Jude!” I run out to hug him. “Where have you been? And what the hell is this?”
“My new wheels.” He tosses back his pale hair, damp with the exertion of holding the chunky moped upright. “Now you won’t have to drive me around.”
“When did you learn to ride a moped?”
