Chapter 4
Chapter Four
Bexley
I t was just a house. Houses existed everywhere.
So why couldn’t I just walk up to it? I had the keys in my hand and knew how to unlock a door—
“You doh,” a deep voice with what sounded like blocked sinuses said behind me, making me jump. “Dust pud the key in de lock and open dit.”
Turning, my jaw dropped when I saw Logan. His face was pink, but it was his eyes. Holy shit, they were swollen and bright red.
Instinctively I reached out to touch his face, then turned it to the side to look more closely at his eye. “What the hell happened to you?”
Pulling a tissue out of his pocket, he blew his nose loudly. “A kid wid pepper prays.”
“A kid with pepper spray?”
With his sinuses cleared slightly, it was slightly easier to understand him. “Yeah. Dey dot it wad a fog bomb, but pigged up da wrong oned.”
“Jesus,” I breathed, watching his eyes start watering again. “How many did they throw? ”
“Dree, in a smalled room.”
“Three?” I winced when he nodded.
I’d been downwind when an old lady maced a guy she thought was trying to steal her purse, and that shit was no fun. Three of them in a small room? Damn!
“Have you seen a doctor?”
Taking pity on him with how hard he was squinting, I pulled my pink mirrored Ray-Bans out of the neck of my t-shirt and passed them to him. He didn’t even think about it, he just popped them on his face and sighed.
Not waiting for an answer to my previous question, I pulled my phone out. “Stand still. I want a photo of someone wearing them whose face matches the color of the lenses.”
Humor—it was what we used to have all the time, and I was hoping the awkwardness between us would go away if I brought it back. And, because I was slightly twisted, I really did want the photo, so I took it with him giving me the middle finger.
“Now that’s one for your Christmas cards this year,” I snickered, holding it up so he could see it too.
The grin he flashed would’ve made me sigh, even with the bad juju hanging over us, but the small line of snot making its way out of his nose made me cringe.
“You might wanna…” I pointed under my nose, staring at the patch that was growing.
Why wasn’t it dropping down ? Surely gravity would do that ?
Pulling out the tissue again, he wiped, but on the wrong side. “Danks.”
“No, the other side. Dear God, Logan, catch it before it goes in your damn mouth!”
The most puke-worthy thing happened then. He wiped the correct side, but a string attached itself to the tissue and followed it.
My stomach compressed at the sight, making a “ hurgurt ” noise come out of me at the same time as I covered my mouth.
Turning his back to me, he blew his nose loudly and then turned around again and shrugged. “Dorry. It’s liked my dinuses are workinged overdime.”
As gross as it was—and as someone with a weak constitution when it came to stuff like that, it was hell—it’d defused the emotions I was feeling at the prospect of knowing I was going into Pops’ house for the first time since he’d died.
“Are they going to be like that for long?”
“Only ‘til my deyes dop watering and my dose dops’d doing da snod ding.”
“Did they give you any idea how long your nose would take to stop doing the snot thing?”
Shaking his head, he tried breathing through his nose and grimaced when that ended up with snot going into his mouth. Remembering how sick stuff like that made me, he held his hand up and turned away again to do whatever he had to do. A six foot three inch tall man blowing his snotty nose was still as gross as a kid doing, and I’d argue my ass off if anyone said otherwise.
Enough. I couldn’t stand and watch this for much longer, or I’d throw up. Head colds were torture for me because of this, and when we were at school, I’d had to leave to be sick when someone had one a lot. Don’t even get me started on when I had one myself. It was pure hell! I liked to think I’d outgrown it, but this was proof I hadn’t.
Glaring at the front door, I made my choice. “Okay, I’m going to do it. I can do it.”
A large hand gripped my shoulder comfortingly and also gave me strength. “Wand me do comed wid you?”
Glancing over it, I smiled gratefully at him. “Would you mind? I’ll understand if you’re not up to it.”
Pointing at the pink glasses still on his face, he shook his head. “I’m good, dese help.” Then, looking around us, he frowned. “Where’d Doyle?”
Smirking at how much Pops’ dog hated him, I winked. “He’s at home with Mom and Dad, so you’re safe. I didn’t want to upset him by bringing him here just yet.”
When he rolled his eyes, I squared my shoulders and walked up to the door, and somehow managed to get the key into the lock even with a shaking hand.
The smell of him and a million memories of being here with Pops hit me at once, and it was like losing him all over again. I felt pain and happiness, and like I wanted to cry and laugh at the same time.
None of it felt real, even the funeral.
I just wanted him back, and it sucked that it’d never happen.
Only just holding back the tears, I walked into the living room and saw his chair, the one he’d sat in since way before I was born. The cushion had the two indentations in it from his ass cheeks, his book was still on the floor where it’d fallen when he’d had the heart attack, and his empty mug was on the end table with his glasses next to it. It was like he’d just left it, not like he’d been gone for almost two weeks.
“How—” I croaked, reaching up to rub my throat. “How am I meant to live here?”
Hearing Logan blow his nose again, I almost laughed. “You hold ondo da memories, and you creade newd ones.”
“Nude or new?”
“Dew.”
“I always wanted him to tear down the wood paneling from the walls. There’s even some on the ceilings in a couple of rooms. I hate it,” I whispered. “I also don’t like the dark red in this room or the bright yellow in the bathrooms. The old appliances in the kitchen need to be updated…” I stopped and thought about it. “The whole kitchen needs to be updated if I’m honest. I just don’t know if I can.”
I was overwhelmed by it all, but then he offered, “I can’d help’d you.”
“Where do I start?”
Grabbing my hand, he tugged me toward the glass doors that led out to the large yard at the back. “We go droo id droom by droom and make a lisd.”
So that’s what we did. We went through each room in the house apart from his bedroom, listing what needed to be changed. I knew this was what Pops wanted me to do, so I pushed down how uncomfortable and wrong it felt and went with it.
If I took it on one room at a time, it might make it easier. But I couldn’t touch his bedroom yet. I wasn’t ready for that.
What made it easier was that Logan never let go of my hand once. It was strange, and it didn’t feel like it used to, but something about it helped keep me sane.
We had a long list of stuff to do by the end, and my eyes were almost watering at how expensive it was going to be. I was going to turn part of the basement into a laundry room and just redecorate the rest of it once the wooden paneling was down. I had a preference for light colors, so I was going to paint the whole house white.
I wanted to restore the old fireplace in the front parlor and keep a lot of the original features, but I kind of just wanted it all to be a blank slate that I could add to when I decided on things.
Something else had happened while we were doing it all: Logan’s eyes and nose had stopped running as badly, so he was back to talking normally and not sniffing or blowing his nose constantly. He still sounded nasal and was wearing the sunglasses, but I was relieved I didn’t have to hear any more snot production in his sinus farm.
Sitting down on the couch in the living room, I nodded once, my decision made. “Okay, so, rip shit out, paint it all white, get rid of stuff I don’t want to keep, make a list of shit I want to restore, and then separate the work I can—”
“ We can,” Logan interrupted, passing me a beer from the fridge with a discreet sniff. My parents had cleared out the food, but I knew for a fact the booze would still be in there and in the freezer. “I’ll help as much as I can, your parents will, too, and so will mine. This house is yours, and we all want you to feel comfortable in it.”
Smiling at him, I took a mouthful of beer and thought it over. Help was cheaper, and it also added extra sentimentality to the place. I liked the idea of that.
“Okay, so we’ll make a list of what we can all do, then I’ll get bids for other stuff.”
Rolling the bottle between his hands, he focused the full weight of his stare on me. “Have you thought about when you’re going to move in here?”
“Yes,” I replied immediately, then backtracked. “No. I mean, yes, I have, but at the same time, no, I haven’t.”
Raising his eyebrows, he smiled wryly at me. “That sounds like a whole lotta mess going on inside your puny brain.”
Here’s the thing, I had a small crush on Logan when we were kids. It wasn’t the type where I doodled hearts and wrote Mrs. Richards out, but I got a thrill spending time with him. I thought we had a special bond, something that meant something to both of us, but he’d been paid to make me feel like that.
It wasn’t that my crush had broken my heart after it all came out, it was that something special to me had been a total lie. So why was he being so nice to me now?
I wanted to believe in him and his offer to help, but I just didn’t trust his motives for it all.
Leaning forward in the seat he’d taken on one of the armchairs, and bracing his elbows on his thighs, he tipped his bottle at me with a frown. “That looks like some heavy thinking going on over there. Want to talk about it?”
No.
Yes.
No, definitely, no .
But did my brain listen? “Why are you being so nice and doing all of this? Last time it was money, what are you getting this time?”
He flinched visibly and dropped his head to look at his feet. “ Bex, I never looked at the money I was getting as payment for spending time with you. I admitted to myself back then that I loved doing it and I was always looking for stuff we could do together so that I could spend even more time with you. Hell,” he straightened to look at me as he threw his arm out, “I spent more of the money on shit we did together than anything else. That’s why I did it even though I told myself to avoid you.”
Looking to the side, I had to concede on his point. “We did do a lot of stuff together.”
“It paid for gas for us to go places, entry to the waterpark, food at the diner, snacks, going to the movies. Every day when I got home from school after dropping you off, I’d look up new releases at the movie theater or announcements for shit happening near us so that I could spend time with you.”
Narrowing my eyes at him, I pointed out, “I always tried to pay, but you’d either put the money back in my bag or point-blank tell me no.”
“Because it was my job to pay, Bex,” he thumped his chest lightly with his fist, grimacing when he must have hit what I knew were bruises from today because he’d told me about it earlier.
“Which made no sense because you were dating Renna.”
Groaning, he placed the bottle on the floor and lifted the glasses so he could tiredly rub his eyes with the palms of his hands. “Can we talk about that part of this another time? Please?”
Rubbing my lips together, I nodded, forgetting he couldn’t see me with his hands over his eyes until he moved them and looked at me expectantly. “Yeah, that’s probably wise.”
“Bex, please don’t think that I didn’t care about you or that it was a hardship spending time with you because that’s so far from the truth. I never meant to hurt you, and it’s eaten away at me every day that I did. When you cut me out and then left town, it felt like part of me had just disappeared and it was my own damned fault. Having you back now makes me feel whole again.”
I could understand that because I felt the same way .
I was staring out the glass doors at the garden, thinking about what he’d said and wondering how we could move forward when he moved and sat down next to me.
“It’s going to take time to earn back your trust and even a little of what we had before, but I really want to work on getting us there. Do you?” He blew out a breath when I nodded at him. “Okay, how about we work on the problems like Renna a chunk at a time. We start with us,” he motioned between the two of us, “and trust and whatever other shit comes with that. Then, when we hit a stage where it’s not so tense and awkward, we tackle something else from the past until it’s all been dealt with.”
“I think that’s a good idea.” Then, I snickered and asked, “Once we hit the end stage, do we go out and get best friend t-shirts, bracelets, and shit like that?”
Pursing his lips, he thought about it. “What about bestie tattoos?”
Squealing, I clapped my hands dramatically. “I know, we’ll both get half of a butterfly on our wrists so when we put them together, they make it complete.”
Here’s a cool fact about Logan Richards that few people knew. Growing up, he had quite a few bad encounters with butterflies that’d left him with a bit of a phobia.
“That’s mean,” he hissed. “You know damn well those fuckers hate me more than even Doyle does.”
“If you fall asleep in the sun with your mouth open, something’s bound to happen. Just feel lucky a bird didn’t poop in it.” Granted, if I’d almost swallowed one and then had to watch it die, I’d be pretty scarred by it.
“And the one that sent me to the emergency room after it tried to blind me?”
“Sunglasses, my dude. Why do you think I have so many pairs?”
In all honesty, he didn’t know that I was a whore when it came to the things, so he couldn’t answer this. I already had three other pairs in Pops’ car, mainly because I kept forgetting I’d put them down in it, though. I just had enough backup pairs in my purse to keep making it possible to do.
“I don’t think they let you wear those in fourth grade, Bex. I don’t remember any other kid wearing them during recess, including you.”
“Look,” I snickered. “You ran into the butterfly—”
“It flew into me.”
“—and it left behind a couple of legs and some wing in your eye because instead of smacking it away from you, you crushed it into your eye.”
“I panicked,” he ground out. “It was instinctual. Plus, my eye was swollen and infected for over a week thanks to that bad bastard.”
It had been. His eye hadn’t reacted well to having the butterfly pieces in it, but it’d been made worse by him using toilet paper and the rough paper towels from the machine in the boys' bathrooms to try and get it out.
“You put those scratches on your cornea yourself.”
“Because I was panicking,” he cried. “I had butterfly body pieces in my damn eye.”
It was incidents like this that’d led to him freaking out whenever he saw a butterfly. By the time he turned thirteen, whenever he saw one, he’d crouch down and shut his eyes tightly with his lips pressed together.
“So,” I drawled, “does this mean we’re not getting a butterfly tattoo?”
His expression was serious as he shook his head, but then it was replaced by a smirk. “What about a Black Widow tattoo?”
“Like the character?” I asked hopefully.
“No, like the spider. Or a Huntsman. Maybe something tropical that’s bright and pretty. Half on you, half on me.”
“You’re such a dick,” I hissed, leaning away from him and looking around the room to make sure there weren’t any. “Why would you say that? Did you see one? ”
“No, but do you still leave your open soda can unattended while you do stuff?”
“Never,” I replied solemnly. “You only make that mistake once.”
“I’ll never forget you taking a mouthful and then spitting it out with a Black Widow in it. You were so fucking lucky,” he shook his head with amazement. “I don’t leave mine unattended ever because of that, unless it’s a clear bottle or glass.”
Shuddering, I checked inside my beer bottle before taking a gulp from it. “That was one of the worst moments of my life. I just felt something hard in my mouth—” I ignored the chuckle from him “—and thought it was a leaf or something. When I saw that damn spider…”
Both of us went silent after I stopped talking. I couldn’t say for sure what Logan was thinking about, but I was remembering some of the funny moments we’d had together now.
I jumped slightly when he burst out laughing at something. “Do you remember when we got stuck on the roof?”
“Oh yeah, it was during a thunder and lightning storm as well. Thanks for that.”
What had we been doing on the roof—this roof, to be precise—during a thunder and lightning storm? Honestly, we were doing our homework. I was late with a project on the universe and stars, and he was testing gravity because he had a paper to write on Isaac Newton.
Neither of us had bothered to pay attention to the warnings of the storm, and roughly ten minutes after we left the adults talking about politics after dinner to climb onto the roof, the shit had hit the fan. We’d scrambled to get back in again, but the tiles were too wet for us to get to the window.
What was worse was that the lightning was close to us, and when the thunder shook the ground, we slid down the tiles and closer to the edge of the roof. We’d even screamed our heads off for help, but they couldn’t hear us over the noise of the rain and thunder .
“Yeah, I don’t want to repeat that ever again. I still have nightmares about it,” Logan cringed. “If Dad hadn’t gone to the bathroom, we probably would’ve fallen.”
“One day maybe we’ll be able to laugh about it properly.”
Raising an eyebrow, he looked over at me. “I doubt it. I can laugh at it slightly, but the full weight of what could have happened is way too real for me now.”
“I get you on that.”
“So,” he sighed. “I think we should move you in this weekend. You’ll get more of a feel for what you want done while you’re in it. Plus, if anything is faulty, you’ll find out sooner rather than later and can get it fixed.”
Looking over at Pops’ chair, I knew what to do to protect it. “I want to put his chair in his room and then lock the door for a while. I’m not ready to touch his stuff or change it in there, and I want to keep the chair safe. He was the only one who ever sat on it, and I don’t want anyone to ruin it.”
Not even waiting a beat, he stood up and moved over to it. “Let’s do it now, so you’ve got that weight off your shoulders. We’ll lock his room up tight, keep it all safe, and then you only have to focus on the rest of the place.”
Knowing he was right, I got up and took one side of it. There really wasn’t any need for me to do it because I knew full well he probably could’ve carried it himself up the stairs, but still.
When we got to Pops’ room, though, I took a step back. “Can you do it? Just put it in a corner or wherever there’s space.”
He didn’t even bat an eyelid at the request and took it inside, locking the door with the key when he was done.
As we walked back downstairs, he bumped my shoulder. “What are you going to do with the yard?”
I didn’t have green fingers. In fact, if I misbehaved when I was little, that’s what my punishment was. All the kids at school moaned about being grounded and having their phones taken away. Me, I’d moaned about mowing the lawn, weeding, pruning, and the hell that was gardening.
And the one that I now owned was fucking massive.
“Burn it all,” I muttered. “Get a flame thrower and just let rip.”
Bursting out laughing, he threw his arm around my shoulders and moved us to look out the window at it. The mean shit!
“Why don’t you think about what you’d like that’s easy maintenance, write it down or find photos, and give them to the dads to work on? They love gardening and yard work, so they’ll be all over that.”
Tipping my head to the side while I mulled it over, I knew he was right. And that meant I didn’t have to do it.
“I can’t believe I’m really doing this. It feels surreal.”
Squeezing me, he gave me silent support while it all hit home, and I was even more grateful for his presence.
By the time we threw our bottles out and locked up, I’d resolved myself to the fact I was moving home and was going to be living in the house. In a way, it was beautiful because I’d have my pops with me, seeing as how it was a part of him. But in more ways, it was heartbreaking. I had so many memories of him in that house, and I wanted more.
Death was final, though, and life didn’t always go how we wanted it to. You just had to make the most of it so you had no regrets.
I was just getting into my car when Logan called my name. “I heard from DB that there’s an opening for an English teacher going at the high school. There’s an application form online, so all you have to do is complete it and send it back.”
Chewing my lip, I thought about it. That was my passion. I loved being an English teacher and had dreamed about being one since I was a kid, so this position coming up right now felt like kismet.
Pops, if that’s you making sure I’m staying, I’m going to resurface your chair with bright pink leather.