Chapter 9 A Very Legitimate Business Arrangement #3
He kept bringing that up. That they were eventually going to live together someplace else.
Something about the idea made her hands sweat.
It was weird enough that he was living with her in her house, but at least here they had separate bedrooms. Relocating to a second place with Elliot—one where there was only one option for sleeping—had her, understandably, concerned.
“Can I borrow your handsaw again?” he asked.
Elliot had barely been holding it together with his renovations at the Shore Thing.
He’d immediately picked the wrong horse, opting to start work on one of the cabins that was nearly inside the lake.
At every turn, he ran into drainage issues and rotted wood.
“You know you can,” she replied.
“It’s for the floors,” he clarified, not for her benefit, but his.
Doggedly determined to renovate the whole property armed with nothing but a Home Depot credit card and YouTube videos from some guy called the North Shore Grump, Elliot had yet to directly ask for her help.
Instead, he borrowed her tools the way a nervous golfer requested clubs from their caddy.
Instead of a “yes,” he wanted a “no” accompanied by sage wisdom and a nudge in the right direction.
She didn’t have the heart to tell him the item he required was a stick of dynamite.
Her eyes surveyed the tools in her carport, as though pretending to consider what was obviously a lost cause. “You don’t want a saw. You can’t just replace the boards that are rotted. You have to pull up the whole floor and address the root cause.”
“This guy on YouTube said—”
She folded her arms over her chest. “Did you tell the guy on YouTube that water seeps up through the cracks every time it rains?”
His jaw stiffened. “YouTube is more of a one-sided medium.”
She closed her eyes and counted to three before speaking again. “It’s just going to keep happening, Elliot.”
“We need to live somewhere while we’re renting out Forest’s Bridge, and cabin four is the biggest one.”
Slowly, she turned on her toes and walked back to the porch. It seemed as though she’d be the one making coffee this morning. “I’m never living in cabin four unless you airlift it from the shoreline and address the mildew problem.”
She heard him suck in air through his teeth behind her. He could hardly tolerate the burden of explaining his poorly-thought-out plans to her. “We don’t have a ton of options. Cabin three has an inch of standing water.”
“What about the big one with the deck that smells like raccoon piss?” she asked, leaning her back against the front door to face him again. She’d invest in deodorizers if it meant a bedroom above sea level.
“Cabin one is a one-bedroom.”
“There are these things called air mattresses.”
“And it has tanks of turtles living in it.”
“Okay…So get rid of the turtles.” She was failing to see the issue.
He pulled his glasses off his face and wiped the lenses on his shirt sleeve. “I can’t. They’re too small to sell legally—I looked it up—plus, there’s, like, thirty of them.”
She’d figured those deals between Gil and the mustachioed men always coming and going from those cabins weren’t on the up-and-up.
Their mustaches were not the sexy Tom Selleck kind but rather, the thin, John Waters variety.
An amalgamation of several wispy men with pencil-shaped facial hair, sporting leather chaps and Looney Tunes sweatshirts, drifted through her mind on a parade float of creeps.
“You can’t exactly wait them out. Turtles have famously long lifespans.”
“It’s not like I can just put a listing up on craigslist,” he argued.
She scoff-laughed. “Oh no, you definitely can’t do that. You’re already on Trent Bauer’s shit list.”
He pinched his eyes shut, like he was almost too scared to ask. “Which Bauer is Trent?”
“The sheriff. You seriously have to stop shopping at that gas station. You’re basically a known associate.”
“Had I known that in this town a bag of chips was capable of triggering John Wick levels of unstoppable vengeance, I might’ve made different choices.” He massaged the space between his eyebrows.
Lainey looked at his pale, worried face and felt her insides tie themselves into a dainty bow. She knew a solution, or at least the beginning of a solution, even if she wanted nothing to do with it. Why did he have to stand there in her driveway looking like a giant, sad, abandoned puppy?
This, right here, was why she wished she could hate the unfairly handsome.
She pinched her eyes shut, unable to look at him as she offered a lifeline. “I might know a place where you can find some turtle aficionados. And sketchy people. Sketchy turtle people.”
She opened one eye. Elliot didn’t seem to know how to feel about what she’d just said. “Okay. Do you think they’ll have any leads on someone who will take the turtles off our hands?”
“Probably.” She was going to be sick.
“Will you call one of them?”
“They’re not individual people you can call. They’re a type of person that tends to gather at a specific place.”
“I’m too tired for riddles. Can you take me to the place and the people you’re talking about, or not?”
“I can…” But every fiber of her being was screaming at her not to.
She sighed. They needed a place to stay, and the only thing in their way was about thirty aquatic turtles. “Fine. Fuck it. Let’s go broker some baby turtles.”