Chapter Twelve
I thought Sawyer was exaggerating.
I should have known better; he really wasn’t the type to.
But I had figured no one could truly conduct business in a pigsty.
I was wrong.
Barrett Anderson could and did.
Sawyer also wasn’t exaggerating about the size.
It was a tiny place with a dark desk, shelves to one wall, and about a hundred different sheets of paper pinned on the other wall.
Then, of course, there was the mess. And I did mean mess.
There was disorder too, with piles of paperwork everywhere.
But I was really more concerned with the endless coffee cups and the to-go containers and the awful possibility that I might find rats or roaches or maggots somewhere because of them.
Barrett, while having a similar face to his brother, was nothing like him.
Where Sawyer had mostly neat hair, his brother’s looked like he perpetually ran his hands through it.
There was forgetful stubble on his face and big, hipster-esque glasses on his nose.
Where Sawyer generally seemed to prefer jeans and tees, his brother had on some giant old man sweater with elbow patches. Yes, elbow patches.
There was a similar detachment with Barrett too, but I got the impression that Sawyer’s was from a dark past in both the military and his private practice; I felt that Barrett’s came from a superior intelligence.
“Not that,” he demanded for about the tenth time when I picked up what I was sure was a random piece of paper stuffed in a forgotten corner.
“This is not going to work if you don’t let me actually do any cleaning,” I said, rolling my eyes as I looked down at it.
Sawyer was being honest about the Polish thing too, but he had either purposely left out or forgotten to tell me that not only was it all in Polish, but it was in code.
I had a piece of paper in my pocket that I needed to use to decipher the ten or so words of Polish I had picked up that day.
“You can clean the coffee cups,” he offered, not looking up from whatever he was writing.
“All seventeen coffee cups are soaking on the counter in the bathroom.”
Yes, seventeen.
I got the distinct impression that when he ran out of clean cups, he simply bought more instead of washing them.
“Then maybe you can file…”
“Yes, but to do filing, the actual paperwork has to make its way into a file,” I informed him in a somewhat strained voice I had heard parents use on their children.
He looked up at that, lips twitching, a look that was becoming very familiar to me, and I suddenly wanted to see Sawyer do it again.
“Careful,” he offered, eyes light. “This will be going in your employee evaluation.”
I laughed at that, as I was sure he intended.
We had come a long way in a matter of hours.
Earlier, we had almost gotten to yelling over some stupid jotted notes that were so old the print was half-gone, which he didn’t want me to shred for some reason or another.
A coffee cup had been broken. He had bitched about me to, I assumed, his brother and threatened to send me home at five on the dot.
But then five-thirty rolled around, and suddenly a delivery man was standing there.
When I looked over at Barrett, he shrugged, getting up to hand the man money and take the food.
“We have to eat. Plus, it gives you something else to clean up,” he added, putting the food down on his newly mostly clean desk. “I know how much you love that.”
“Oh, yes, I live for taking leftover takeaway boxes to the dumpster. So what’d you get?” I asked, moving across the room, my stomach grumbling over the fact that Barrett seemed to forego lunch and, therefore, so had I.
“Pepperoni pizza, hot wings, fries, and mozz sticks.” When my lips turned up and my brow raised, he smiled back. “Cheese and grease are pretty much my main food groups.”
You wouldn’t know that by looking at him. While he didn’t appear to have the same tight, ex-military build, he seemed fit enough under his old man sweater.
“Your heart must love that,” I said, taking the top from the wings container he handed me to use as a plate and putting a little bit of everything on it.
While, unlike him, I couldn’t eat like that on the regular and expect to not gain weight in all the places I didn’t want, I could indulge every now and then.
“Eh, if my heart is going to give out for anything, it’s going to be all the caffeine I put in my system. Oh, look who it is…” he said, and I didn’t know what he meant for a long second because when I looked to the door, no one was there. But then Sawyer was pulling the door open and stepping in.
“How did you…” I started to ask, mouth agape.
“This weird fuck knows the sound of my car,” Sawyer answered for him, walking in, his stupidly perfect body doing so with a kind of easy confidence.
The term “sight for sore eyes” came to mind, and I had to squish it immediately, embarrassed that I had even thought it for a second.
He walked right over, standing beside where I had a hip planted on the edge of Barrett’s desk, picking up a mozzarella stick from my tray and biting into it.
“Place looks good,” he said, nodding as he looked around.
I felt a strange surge of warmth flood my chest at the praise and was somewhat off-put by how much it seemed to mean to me.
“Only one coffee cup even. Fuck,” he said, smiling at his brother.
“Remember the endless shit Marg used to give you when she had to clean up your cups at the end of each day?”
“She thought the disposable cups would help,” Barrett said, nodding.
“Except that just meant they would sit there and get stuck to the papers you were working on. Or, on occasion, you would have some fun with it and start stacking them like a beer can pyramid.”
“She was fun to rile.”
Sawyer shook his head, taking my piece of pizza and biting into it.
“That was mine, you know,” I said with a raised brow.
To that, he shrugged and held the pizza up to my lips.
If I wasn’t mistaken, there was a challenge in his eyes.
Like he was daring me to turn it down. Well, I leaned forward slightly, opened my mouth, and took a healthy bite. His eyes seemed to light up at that.
“Did you get anything for me?” he asked his brother.
“Sent it over. It’s not what you were expecting, though.”
To that, Sawyer nodded, grabbing some fries and loading them onto our plate. He continued to eat while grabbing for his phone to, I imagine, look at the file Barrett sent over.
He let out a sigh a minute or so later, to which Barrett nodded. “Yeah.”
“Alright,” he said, piling a small handful of all the food onto my plate and taking it from my hands. “Let’s go,” he said, suddenly in a rush.
“Why can’t we finish…”
“We got some shit to discuss, and I don’t think it’s a conversation you want to have in front of your new boss.”
I resisted the urge to tell him that, seeing as Barrett obviously worked on the project, he already knew, and moved to stand.
It was one thing for him to know some of the details of my life.
It was a completely different thing for him to drag them out of their hiding places, air them out, then demand to know every detail about them.
“I’ll see you tomorrow, Barrett,” I said, giving him a tight-lipped smile.
“I would say I am looking forward to it…” he said, returning the smile.
“But you don’t want to lie,” I said as I turned and walked out the door.
“You take rudeness to a new level,” I informed him as I took the plate from his hand and climbed through the door he was holding open for me.
He slammed the door and went around the car, got in, and closed the door. Where I expected him to turn the car over and start driving, he simply reached for the plate and tossed it up on the dash, then turned to me fully.
“Care to tell me why you left one very vital detail about Michael Robinson out of your explanation of events?”
I felt my stomach twist at that.
I should have known it would come out eventually. I guess I maybe got a false sense of security when he never dug up information on Mike and my work before.
“Riya,” he said, his voice just a tad softer. When I didn’t turn to face him, his thumb and forefinger snagged my chin and forced me to. “Why leave that out? You already told me all the ugly details.”
“Exactly. So why does it matter that I worked with him?”
“Because shortly after you dumped him and outed his cheating ass to his wife, he quit. I need to know why.”
I winced a little; the memory a fresh one for me because it hadn’t been over a year ago, it had felt like it was just a couple of weeks to me.
“His wife came into work to throw a fit after I told her what happened. She embarrassed the hell out of him in front of all the employees, people who were supposed to respect him. He was…” I took a breath.
“He didn’t handle the break-up all that well in the first place, and then his wife made a stink about his… ”
“Wait,” he cut me off. “Back to the not handling the break-up thing well. Explain that to me better. What did he do?”
“Nothing really. He just kept trying to catch me alone at work and talk to me. Or putting his hands on me like he had any right to anymore. Little things…”
“A man touching you when he doesn’t have the permission is not a little thing, first of all. Secondly, did it escalate from there?”
“No. No. His wife embarrassed him, and that night he handed in his resignation. He, ah, moved with her out of state to work things out or something like that.”
“No, he didn’t,” he surprised me by saying. “By all accounts, his wife is still hanging out in their old house. But Michael Robinson is not with her, and neither of them ever left the state. He lives in an apartment.”
“Oh,” I said, brows drawing together. It didn’t surprise me, really. When a man lied to you about his marital situation, lying about moving was really not a stretch.
“That apartment is right across the street from your old apartment building, babe.”
That ‘stomach fell to the floor’ saying made a lot of sense right then. My belly felt like it dropped to my feet.
How was that possible?
“According to his records, he’s still there. I don’t think I have to tell you how suspicious that looks.”
I didn’t want to go there.
Really, my brain was just about filled up of awfulness.
I didn’t want to think that a man I once loved, a man I once shared my body with, a man I once thought loved me, would be capable of doing something to make me lose a year of my life.
“He’s a doctor,” Sawyer added, making me close my eyes.
Yeah, that kind of added up as well, didn’t it?
“You had pentobarbital in your system. Who the fuck else would have access to that but a doctor?” That was another pretty strong nail in Michael’s coffin.
“Hey,” Sawyer called when I didn’t look back at him. “Riya…”
I exhaled hard enough for it to be called a sigh. “Can we just go home?” I asked, shaking my head. “I just… I can’t do this anymore.”
The damn tears started to sting again, and I blinked them away as quickly as I could. But he noticed. He noticed everything.
His brilliant eyes softened, and his hand moved to settle on my shoulder, just a firm pressure for a moment before he used it to pull me forward, my body arching over the center console, his arms sliding around my upper back and pulling me in for a hug.
“Sometimes I forget it’s only been a few days. You’re still processing.”
“Literally everything has changed around me,” I agreed, taking a deep breath, closing my eyes at the hint of spicy cologne on his neck.
“You know, when Brock and I came back home, everything was different. All the stores and restaurants, the people, our families looked nothing like they did when we left. I get how disorienting that can feel. Your ideas of everything have stayed stagnant while they changed without you. It’s weird, and you feel like you’re scrambling, but before you know it, things will all be settled.
You’ll feel less like you’re playing catch-up. ”
That was exactly it.
I never thought of it that way, thought of how I wasn’t the only person who went through something similar.
There were people who woke up from comas, people who had amnesia or selective amnesia.
And there were people who were just away for long periods, and life changed without them.
Men like Sawyer and Brock, who were in the military especially.
Somehow, it felt a lot better knowing I wasn’t alone, that there were others out there who would understand.
Especially when one of those people had his strong arms around me, had my face tucked under his chin, and had a steady heartbeat underneath my ear.
I felt a small shiver work its way through my system.
“Come on, let’s get you home and warmed up,” he said, untangling from me, misinterpreting the tremor.
It had nothing to do with the cold and everything to do with the fact that I realized there hadn’t been anything in a really, really long time that felt as comforting, as safe, as being in his arms.
“Right,” I agreed as I sat back in my seat and took the plate Sawyer handed me so he could start driving.
We went home, me ignoring the fact that I was genuinely starting to see his place as my home as well. We ate in mutual silence, watching the TV, then we both went off to bed.
Nothing happened.
I tossed and turned in my bed, trying to convince myself that that was for the best.
—
The next day, I went to work, slowly but surely cleaning up Barrett’s mess and learning that he was a lot like his brother in that, even though they weren’t warm and snuggly in any way, shape, or form, their detachment and brashness still somehow grew on you.
Barrett drove me home. Sawyer and I washed dishes side by side; we talked about our days.
It was so damned domestic that it was almost natural.
The next day, he showed up at Barrett’s office with a box in his hands, looking like a kid on Christmas morning, rocking back on his heels as he held it out to me.
Brows knitted, I walked over and took it from him.
I pulled the top off to find my driver’s license nestled inside.
“Come on, babe, let’s see about getting some pieces of your life back.”