AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Wondering what the rules are for personal pets. Could I bring a dog with me, for example?He sent the text to Clarissa, hoping six-thirty in the morning wasn’t too early for her. She’d used the words “bright and early” herself, but Spencer knew that meant different things for different people.
“Spence, you in?” Luke asked.
“Yes,” he said, glancing up from his phone to take the jump rope from his friend.
“How’s Clarissa this morning?” Luke grinned at Spence, who quickly put his phone on the shelf where they had a Bluetooth speaker, water bottles, and weight gloves.
“I don’t know,” Spencer said, not trying to hide his irritation with the woman. He’d told Luke and the others all about his past with her, and yes, maybe he’d admitted that he could maybe try asking her out again. “She’s so formal with me.”
“You just gotta get to know her again,” Luke said.
“I’m trying,” Spencer said. Every time he’d tried to ask her about herself—how she liked her corn if everybody around the farm ate it, what she made for dinner on Tuesday nights for her family, what her favorite color was, how the cookbook was coming—she shut him down.
Really, she just stopped talking, which was the same thing. He hated her sudden text-silence more than anything, and he decided he would simply try to jump rope it all away.
“All right,” Luke said. “We’re going to do one-minute increments, with a thirty-second break for the first seven and a half minutes. Then we’ll do two-minute—”
“Wait,” Slate said as he opened the door and came in. “I want to jump rope.”
“Get ready, man,” Luke said, frowning at him. “What took you so long this morning? I waited on your porch for ten minutes.”
“Yeah, sorry.” Slate deposited his keys and phone on the shelf too, glancing around at everyone. He wore a look of delight in his thundercloud gray eyes, and Spencer couldn’t help smiling back at him.
“Jill’s decided we can find out if we’re having a girl or a boy.”
Everyone started congratulating Slate, though they’d all known Jill was pregnant. Spencer had been out with Jill a few times, and she was a fun-loving, if a bit eccentric, woman.
“Yeah, finally,” Slate said, accepting all their handshakes and hugs. “Now, I just have to work on her about the name. I mean, I don’t want a son named Blueberry or anything.”
Spencer burst out laughing with the others. Jill did like somewhat odd names, though she’d done just fine with their daughter, who they’d named Savannah. Totally normal.
“All right,” Luke said again, before the laughter had truly started to die. “Let’s go, guys. Daylight’s burning.”
And in the summer in Texas, if the work didn’t get done in the cooler parts of the day, it had to be done while the sun beat down and burned up.
Spencer wasn’t great at jumping rope, but he did what Luke drove him to do. The man had worked in a gym and trained as a boxer for years, so he knew how to get and stay in shape. Spencer wasn’t out of shape in any way, but jumping rope really got his heart rate going.
Thinking about Clarissa while he did it nearly put him in cardiac arrest. Finally, the twenty minute circuit completed, and Spencer reached for his water bottle and his phone at the same time.
Thinking about Clarissa fueled him to do a lot of things, which was as frustrating as it was commendable.
Orderly pets are acceptable, she’d said, and that only made Spencer roll his eyes so hard that he feared they might get permanently stuck up in his head.
* * *
“Just that dresser,”he said, pointing to it. Nate and Ted stepped over to the drawer-less piece of furniture and lifted it easily. Spencer’s bedroom was now empty of his personal belongings. He followed his friends out into the hall, but he turned back to survey the space.
It needed to be vacuumed and the shelves wiped down, but other than that, he’d left the bed all made up with sheets and blankets from the community linen closet. A few empty hangers hung in the closet, which seemed so huge and so gaping now that there was nothing in it.
“Spence?” Slate called, and he turned around.
“Yep, right here.”
“Just these boxes in the kitchen?”
“Yes.” Spencer arrived there and in one trip, Slate, Jack, Nick, and Luke took the kitchen items and food Spencer had packed the night before.
In all, they’d been working for about ten minutes. That was all the time it took for him to move his life out of the Annex where he’d lived for thirteen years, and he ignored the narrowing of his throat and the pounding of his heart.
