Chapter 25
Chapter twenty-five
Clay
Seeing the camper in the light of day gives me the chills.
Lou stares at it in silence, then slips her arm around my waist. I pull her tight into my arms. Holding her leads to kissing her, and kissing her leads to hands groping through clothes and a quick dash back to the bar.
We don’t make it to the bedroom. I fuck her on a table in the bar until she forgets all about the camper.
Luckily, the camper is the only casualty at Gallo’s, but a couple of other trees came down alongside the one that took it out, and small branches litter the parking lot.
There are leaves plastered to the side of the bar that took the brunt of the storm.
Thankfully, we didn’t lose any windows, and the sauna is fine.
We spend the afternoon clearing the parking lot. Lou pulls an old water blaster out of god knows where and blasts the leaves off the building.
Not a soul drives by until late in the day. Turns out trees had come down across the highway in a few places, cutting us off.
Milo and Benji, who have been helping to clear the road, are the first to stop by. Happy Lake escaped with only a few lawn chairs blown over, but swaths of forest have been blown down between Havenwood and Isobel Township.
I don’t move to take Lou’s hand or give any other indication of the change in our relationship, as we haven’t negotiated how we’re going to handle this in public. Lou, busy with the clean-up and relaying the storm damage on her own property, doesn’t seem to notice.
Maybe we’re supposed to keep this thing between us a secret. I don’t know how I feel about that, but tension settles around my shoulders as the four of us walk past the gate to the meadow.
Milo takes one look at the camper and blanches, but his eyes don’t immediately go to Lou. He stares off at the still-standing trees instead. Thinking about Briar in his RV last night?
Since he has a chainsaw, I keep that little thought to myself.
We get to work, Milo on the chainsaw, Benji and I hauling the wood to a neat pile to be split and stacked later, while Lou drags smaller branches into another pile.
She’ll have plenty of wood to keep her sauna going this winter—or the next, Milo informs me.
Apparently, it will take at least a year to season.
Something uncomfortable slips in between my ribs. Will I even be here in a year? I love her, but will that be enough? The odds of forever aren’t great—they never are. My feelings about her don’t guarantee that she’ll continue to feel the same. What if she settles, and resentment grows between us?
If she finds out about the money, about the will…
Fuck.
Now is the only time I could tell her and even hope she’ll forgive me for keeping the will a secret. The longer I keep it from her, the longer we’re together, the more likely the truth will destroy us.
But I don’t want to tell her now, not after last night.
Milo manages to force a way into the camper. Lou is small enough to slip through and push most of her belongings out. We load it all into Milo’s truck and bring it to the bar.
There’s no time to move the money and no place to put it anyway.
I’ll reach out to the old college friend who was supposed to take it in exchange for a transfer to a shell company soon, and hopefully, we can arrange another handoff so I can get the bags out from under the bed before Lou discovers them.
Just tell her. She’s not going to steal it. Of that much, I’m reasonably confident. And unlike keeping the will a secret, the money has nothing to do with her.
But money has a way of changing things.
Changing people.
And maybe I don’t trust Louisa Gallo as much as my heart wants me to.