Chapter Ten #2
He looks like he wants to say something else, and for some reason, I find myself wishing he’d tell me to stay in here with him, but he doesn’t. “Get some sleep so you can heal up. I hope you feel better when you wake up. If you need me, let me know.”
“Thanks, good night,” I say.
“Night.”
I watch him for a moment before turning toward the door. As I walk through the hallway and down the stairs, I can’t help but wonder what he had been wanting to say to me. When I reach the living room, I see that Mick has the couch pulled out into a bed and is tossing blankets onto it.
“I put a change of clothes in the bathroom for you. Do you need anything else?” he asks.
“No, I’m good, thank you,” I say as I head to the bathroom.
By the time I come out, Mick is gone, and the dog is staring at me with his sad brown eyes.
I give him a pat on the head as I pass by.
He jumps up to follow me. I walk over to the pullout bed and slowly lie down on it to keep from angering my bruises.
The dog is still staring at me, so I pat the bed, but he doesn’t jump up next to me.
The room is so orderly that I feel like I’m already making a mess by leaving the sweat outfit on the floor next to the couch.
There is a large, flat-screen TV facing me with shelves along both sides.
The bed is comfortable, but the sheets smell like they had been in the closet for a while.
Mind buzzing, I lie there and stare at Copper who is lying on a rug near the couch.
Suddenly there’s a bang, and I jump, before realizing it was probably someone out on the street.
But my heart is pounding as I stare at the locked door because what if it was someone else?
I get up and walk up the stairs as Copper follows me.
I continue down the hallway to Lane’s door. I knock once before letting myself in.
“Lane?”
“Is something wrong?” he asks as he sits up.
I realize the bedroom lights are still on and turn them off.
“How well do you know Mick?” I ask as I walk up to the queen-sized bed. Lane relaxes as I crawl up onto the bed and sit down next to him.
“I’ve known him for close to a year, but we didn’t become partners until a few months before the accident,” he says.
“There’s something about him I don’t like,” I admit.
He raises an eyebrow. “You’ve known him like two hours. He bought you breakfast and made you a bed on his couch. Why don’t you like him?”
“When I was a kid, I rarely stayed in the same house for very long. My mom would drag me off to whichever boyfriend’s house she was staying with at the time.
Or I was tossed between foster homes…and I learned that you can judge the personality of a person by how their animal acts around them.
One of the guys my mom stayed with had this mixed breed dog.
It was always walking around like it was walking on glass.
Always dodging and ducking everything. I thought it was because the dog was timid and didn’t know me.
But soon enough he was beating on the dog and would smack me around whenever I didn’t do something perfect enough.
I started judging the homes I went into by how their animals acted because if a person is bad, they’re generally worse to their pet. ”
“I don’t…really get what this has to do with Mick.
You’re talking about how Copper acts? He has always acted timidly.
He was part of the K9 unit, but he was too timid to be used, so Mick adopted him.
Trust me, Mick is not a bad person. I’m sure your childhood wasn’t a good one, but you can trust people sometimes.
Alright? I promise that I will keep you safe. ”
I debate saying more, but I know that I’m not always the best at giving people a chance. “Yeah…you’re right…I’m just tired,” I say. “I should go back downstairs.”
“I want you to sleep in here,” he says.
I look at him in surprise. “You sure? Won’t Mick find it weird?”
“Oh well,” he says, so I push the blanket back and crawl under the covers. “Felix…I’m sorry all of this happened to you. I’m really sorry you were hurt because of me.”
“I’m fine, really,” I assure him.
“Okay,” he says as he reaches out to me.
I press myself up against him and he wraps a strong arm around me. It feels like safety and I have to remind myself that Lane is just a person I work for. That I shouldn’t allow anything between us because he’ll leave me just like everyone else does. But that’s alright because I am fine alone.
“Are you sure you’re alright?” he whispers into my hair. “You’re acting surprisingly calm for having been beaten up, held at gunpoint, seen a man get shot, steal a car, get arrested at gunpoint, and get interrogated.”
I press my face against his chest as I close my eyes. “It’s just because you can’t see. If you could see my expression right now, you’d realize that I am freaking the fuck out.”
He laughs, and it makes me smile. “I’m being serious.”
“I’ve actually been held at gunpoint before by a drug dealer my mom was beating with her purse.”
“She was trying to save you?”
“Oh God, no. He was trying to get her to back the fuck off and was using me as a hostage, but she didn’t much care.
I think when you grow up with a mother like mine, you just go along with everything life throws at you.
You’re like ‘oh, there’s some meth where the cereal is supposed to be? alright, push that to the side.’”
“When did you go into foster care?”
“When I was fifteen,” I say. “Because I guess you can’t hijack a policeman’s car. I mean, come on. How stuck up can you be?”
“You seriously broke into a police officer’s car?” he asks as he looks at me in disbelief.
I grin at the thought. “They came in and were raiding the house I was in, so I thought it would be fun,” I say.
“I was a dumb kid, alright? It definitely wasn’t the best thing I’ve ever done, but I did feel like a badass.
” For a short amount of time. But I didn’t care.
I was feeling something and sometimes that was all I needed.
“Did you have a foster family?”
“Not really. I was in juvie a while after that stunt, then kind of passed around a bit until I was eighteen and realized that if I didn’t want to end up like my mom shooting poison into my veins then I needed to do something worthwhile with my life.”
“You haven’t done it yet, so what are you waiting for?” he jokes.
I grin. Most people wouldn’t have turned this around to make fun of me, but I think he knows that I needed that.
Sometimes I feel like I am so close to falling into that pit of nothingness, where I feel like nothing matters anymore.
But this? This makes me smile. “Fuck off, you mean old prick,” I say. “Now I’m tired, so good night.”
“Haven’t you slept a ton? You sure your brain is alright?”
“It was never alright, Lane.”
“That’s true. Good night, Felix.”
His arms tighten around me, so his body is flush against mine. He kisses my forehead, and I’m slightly surprised by the gentle gesture.
***
“Are you doing alright?” Mick asks as I stuff my face with his delicious cooking.
Which probably isn’t a good thing because when I have to go back to eating the trash I make, it’ll taste worse.
It is kind of like when you’re freezing outside so you go inside to warm up, but then when you go back outside it feels ten times colder. That kind of thing.
“God yes,” I say. “This is so good. How’d you make this?”
“It’s my mother’s recipe. Pretty simple, really,” he says.
“Felix is just impressed because he can’t make oatmeal,” Lane says as he slowly walks into the room. He was in the bathroom, and I suppose I could have waited for him, but I really didn’t care to after I got a whiff of some bacon.
“Lane, you’re going to run into something, step to your right,” I say.
Lane, trusting me like the good man he is, steps to the right and bumps into the counter.
“Fuck,” he growls as I start laughing.
“That’s what you get for being mean to me,” I say.
“Oh, I’ll get you back for that,” he promises.
“You mean getting me arrested wasn’t enough?”
“I guess I’ll let it slide,” he says, and I laugh.
Mick is looking at me with wide eyes like he can’t believe I’d torture a man that’s blind. I just feel like it would be worse to treat him differently because he’s blind. Lane doesn’t want pity and he is definitely not going to get any from me. I think he secretly loves it.
When Lane reaches the table, he slowly slides the chair out and sits down cautiously, like he’s expecting another trick. Mick sets a plate in front of him.
“Lane, you mind talking for a bit after this?” Mick asks.
“Yeah, of course. I should probably go to the office at some point as well,” he says.
“Yeah, we can deal with that later,” Mick says.
“Whatcha guys gonna talk about?” I ask curiously.
“Does not pertain to you,” Lane says as he takes his first bite of the sandwich. “This is really good.”
“Thanks,” Mick says.
After they finish eating, Mick and Lane head to another room, leaving Copper and me alone.
Which just means that I have to try harder to eavesdrop.
So, I get up and creep down the hallway.
They’re in the last room on the left, but I can’t hear much of anything as I stand outside of the door.
No crazy secrets or spy talk that I can hear.
Disappointed, I eventually head back to the living room.
After they’re done with their super-secret meeting, Mick goes to work.
I leave Lane in the living room with the TV and head into the room Lane and Mick had been in.
It’s set up like an office with a desk in the middle and filing cabinets off to the side.
The moment I walk in, I start snooping. The desk is uneventful with its sticky notes, paper clips, and bills.
The closet is crammed full of boxes holding junk and the laptop is password locked.
“What are you doing?”
I jump and look up at Lane. “Why are you so sneaky?”