Chapter 29 – Harper
TWENTY-NINE
HARPER
Jeremy
You need to come get your things.
The text comes before I’ve even had my first cup of coffee, before Wes has been able to convince me to roll out of our warm bed, so I see it while I’m still lying on his chest, my hand ungracefully batting at the side table to grab my phone. Then I’m squinting at the screen with half confusion, half all-consuming irritation.
It’s been nearly two months since we broke up, and he’s just now asking me to get the few things I left at his house? Most of which I’ve already replaced or forgotten about, so unwilling to talk to the man who fucked me over, I decided they just didn’t matter enough.
“Is it from him?” Wes asks, looking at my phone over my shoulder, his voice a soothing, deep rumble against me. I’ve read that the purring of a cat has been proven to ease anxiety, but I think they should do a study on Wes’s morning voice because some of my irritation eases just with those words. “I wasn’t looking, but you got all tight and annoyed, so—” he starts to explain, but I shake my head, quickly putting him at ease.
“It’s fine. I have nothing to hide from you. But yeah. It’s him. He wants me to pick up my things.”
“You have stuff at his house?” I shrug.
“I grabbed what I wanted most when I left and found it wasn’t that much. I replaced a lot of things when I left because it wasn’t worth dealing with him to get it.”
Wes shrugs behind me. “Then tell him to toss it. If none of it has sentimental value and can’t be replaced, tell him to go fuck himself.”
Another message comes in, a photo of a beat-up brown box on the kitchen table piled high with my things, and then another text.
Leave your key when you leave. I’ll be gone until five today. If anything else is missing, I will be filing a police report.
My molars grind when another comes through.
I don’t think they’ll let you off so easily a second time.
I prepare to tell him to go fuck himself as Wes suggested when something catches my eye in the box.
“Fuck, ” I say low, zooming in on the photo until my concerns are confirmed. “Shit.”
“What is it?”
“It’s my grandmother’s book,” I say, setting the phone aside and curling into Wes. Maybe if I do, the rest of this will just melt away, and I can restart the day without this nuisance.
“What kind of book?” Wes asks gently as he pushes my hair back over my shoulder. He’s always a calming presence, his touch soothing.
“Her modeling book. My family isn’t super close, but my mom’s mother was a model before she had her. She used to show me her modeling book, the portfolio she’d bring to casting calls of her previous work. It’s…” I groan, realizing I’m going to have to go over to Jeremy’s house today. “It’s what made me want to start designing.”
I remember setting it on the bookshelf in Jeremy’s office once in an effort to make things feel less divided in our home and forgetting about it completely. Things have been so crazy, my life so up in chaos, that I’m sure there are more things I’ve left behind that one day, I’ll miss.
“You’re going to have to go there today, aren’t you?” Wes asks, and I nod and roll to my back, throwing an arm over my eyes and letting out an irritated sound.
“I really don’t want to. What if he’s there?” I don’t know if I can handle a confrontation right now, not when things are finally settling in. Can’t I just have one week where things don’t go sideways?
Since Wes and I finally got together, it’s been perfectly blissful. I sketch and design all day, work on dresses for clients, or even a few times, take interviews Leo set up for me to promote my work, while Wes practices or records over at Riggins’s house. We’re both usually home by dinnertime, and cook together before spending the evening together. It’s been perfect, everything I didn’t know I wanted or needed, and now it feels like Jeremy has popped that little bubble we were living in.
“If he’s there, it will be fine because I’ll be there too. I don’t want you going alone, but only if you want me to.” Despite my irritation, my chest warms with that, with Wes’s desire to come with. “Or, if he’s there and you don’t feel comfortable going in, we call the police, and they can escort you inside. Minimal contact, and we keep everything documented. Actually, screenshot those texts and send them to me.”
We’ve slowly been creating a file of any evidence I have of Jeremy’s blackmail, any help I’ve given him that was used without accreditation, and, of course, the original designs I still have, post marked and unopened.
I don’t plan to use any of it, but Wes suggested we accumulate it all just in case, and it made sense to me. I tap my screen, taking photos and sending them to Wes.
“I don’t know, maybe it’s not that important. Maybe—” I start, but I’m interrupted by Wes taking my phone from my hand and putting it on the bedside table then rolling us so he’s hovering over me.
“No, Harper. He does not get that. He does not get to win like that, not anymore. He doesn’t control you and doesn’t get to hold anything above you.” I sit there in awe, a strange mix of warmth and joy and a bit of panic rushing through me as I process his words and the ferocity of which he says them. He takes in my shock with a shake of his head and a small laugh before he presses his lips to mine one more. Then he rolls off before I can argue and puts a hand out to me. “Come on. Shower, breakfast, then we head to the asshat’s place.”
I take the change in conversation, grabbing his hand and letting him tug me up and out of the bed until we’re chest to chest.
“What, you don’t want to fuck me?” I ask with a smile.
“I can certainly do that, little wife. Now come on. As you know, I’m great at multitasking.” I do as he asks with a giggle, and Wes does, in fact, prove what a good multitasker he is in the shower.
“Okay, so I don’t think it’s much, honestly, but I want to take a look around. I don’t want to ever step foot in here again if I don’t have to,” I say when we walk into Jeremy’s house. It’s nearly noon by the time we make it over here, and the brown box is sitting on the kitchen counter, untouched from when he took a photo of it.
I turn to Wes, who followed behind me as I walked up the once-familiar steps, noting with pleasure the grass is still rather glittery. But I stop in my tracks when Wes sets the bag I didn’t realize he was carrying down and bends to inspect it.
“What is that?” I ask when he pulls out a giant spray bottle filled with some kind of white liquid.
“A spray bottle,” he says matter-of-factly.
I nod my head and give him a tight smile. “Yeah, I got that. I, uh, what is it for? And what is in it?” I ask as he walks into the living room with the bottle in hand.
“Well, it’s filled with milk.”
I stop and stare, lips rolling in on themselves as I try and piece together what he’s saying. “Okay…and why do we have a spray bottle with milk at my ex’s house?”
“To spray things,” he says, and then shows me what he means by spraying it a few times on the cream-colored couch. “Is this the one he wouldn’t let you eat on?”
I stare open-mouthed as he continues to spray the fabric, leaving no visible trace of the milk he’s spraying. “What are you doing?”
“Number fourteen, I think. You said he wouldn’t let you eat on his white couch because you were too messy of an eater.”
I blink once, twice, three times, trying to understand his words before I nod.
“Uh, yeah. That’s the one.” I vaguely remember telling him that the night we made our giant list, when I started to get sleep deprived and silly.
“Consider it crossed off.” He then lifts the cushion and sprays the underside much more liberally than the top with the same vigor then replaces it, moving to the next cushion. I watch in utter confusion as he moves confidently, nearly completely forgetting why we even came here.
“I’m sorry, I don’t…I don’t quite understand.”
“This is going to dry in an hour, max. That’s the point of the spray bottle, it’s to give a fine and even application. He won’t know it happened by the time he gets home.”
“Okay…” I start, still not understanding.
Finally, he finishes the underside of the cushions and stands, facing me with a wide, devious grin. “But have you ever smelled milk after it sits on something for a few days and goes rancid?”
My stomach sours and I nod, the picture he’s painting starting to fill in.
“So Jeremy here is going to slowly have the most rank smell filling his house and not know where it’s coming from. He can wash the blanket,” he starts to spray the purely-for-decoration couch blanket I bought him for Christmas a year ago. “And change out the pillows.” He sprays those too. “But the couch will still reek.” Then he turns the nozzle to the carpet. “And the carpet. Next I’ll do the curtains and last will be his bed.”
“His bed?” I ask with a squeak, staring wide eyed at him.
“Even if he moves to try and escape it, assuming it’s something in his crawl space or walls or whatever, the stank is going to follow him when he brings his furniture,” he says with a sparkle in his eyes.
I understand it now, and even though it’s kind of genius, it’s a bit scary that he not only thought of this in the small time frame we had this morning, but followed through with it.
“I think you’ve been spending much too much time with Ava,” I say with a laugh and a shake of my head.
He steps closer to me, pulling me in tight and pressing a hard kiss to my lips. “This is the least of what he deserves,” he says, then steps back, continuing his dirty work. “Now go, check around, and make sure there’s nothing else you want or need from here. I don’t want to come back and have to smell this place.”
I let out a laugh before doing as he asked, feeling much more light-hearted than I ever thought I would be walking these halls again. I don’t see anything of mine around, so it was either tossed out or I grabbed it before I left.
I go back to the box, sifting through things to double check what he left, pausing when I see a plain envelope with Harper written on it in Jeremy’s handwriting. I groan internally, and decide I’ll handle that later .
When I enter the living room once more, he’s finishing up on the curtains, the bottle half empty. “Good?”
I nod. “I think all of it is in the box, so we can leave whenever you’re done,” I say, giving him a smile.
“Got it. Just have to do the last stop, his bedroom,” he says, then moves toward the room I pointed out.
It’s actually kind of hot to see, this big rock star of a man committing what could go down as the most sneaky, petty revenge on a man just because he treated me poorly.
He starts with the carpet in Jeremy’s room, the one I never slept in, the one he never fucked me in because he’d rather mess up my room than his. That should have been a sign, no? Never wanting me in his bed? Though, I suppose him never being that worried about my actually coming was also a sign I ignored. I’m thinking on that, watching Wes’s toned back move beneath his Henley shirt as he moves around with the bottle, moving to the curtains when I get an idea.
It’s insane, but I don’t know if one could call me exactly sane these days.
“Wait,” I say, as he lifts the spray bottle, his face looking at my questioning, but I smile and take a step closer to the bed. “What about one last revenge?”