Chapter 11 A Man Wearing a Literal Boa
A Man Wearing a Literal Boa
“Nee-Nee?” the man asked, three cases of beer in his arms. His mouth was agape, like a lake trout on a fish hook.
“That’s not my name,” she corrected, her jaw stiff.
“I know. I just remember…You used to have a hard time with the L sound.”
His implied familiarity with a version of herself she couldn’t remember made her skin crawl.
“That was a long time ago, Tobin.” She tried not to look at him too closely. She didn’t want him to misinterpret this run-in in the back of his bar as anything more than a chance meeting.
Well, the chances had been high, because, again, this was his establishment.
Snake Man—Monty as he introduced himself in the handshake deal with Elliot—had already gone out the back door toward the alley to “see a man about a van.” Tobin, on the other hand, was staring at Lainey like a ghost.
“Do you need help with those?” Elliot asked, pointing to the beer in his hands.
Tobin shook his head and then set his load on the desk, revealing an Alice in Chains T-shirt.
The last time she’d seen him, he’d been wearing a green bowling shirt, and the time before that it had been a Scarface graphic tee.
It was odd knowing someone’s personality exclusively by what they wore. “What are you doing here?” he asked.
“I’m not…We have some turtles we’re looking to sell. That’s the only reason we’re here.”
Tobin exhaled with either relief or disappointment. Possibly both. “You shouldn’t be doing any deals with Monty. The guy’s sketchy as fuck.”
“Well, so is everyone else here, so…” At that, he looked wounded.
She felt Elliot hovering protectively behind her. It took everything she had not to collapse into him. Seeing Tobin wasn’t meaningful, she reminded herself. There was a fifty percent chance he wasn’t anyone to her. Just a man her mom used to know.
They all stood there in awkward silence, waiting for Monty to walk back into the room.
“I’m Elliot, by the way.” He extended his hand to Tobin. It did nothing to break the tension.
“Tobin Collier. I’m a friend of Lainey’s mom.” The word friend sounded strangled.
Elliot nodded, then pressed his hand firmly to her lower back. She was grateful to feel his support, even if the man in front of them didn’t matter to her. Or possibly, it was the other way around, but she had little interest in following that thread to its natural end.
Finally, the heavy security door swung back open.
“I’ve got a guy with a cargo van who can meet us behind the Pick ’n Save in an hour and a half,” Monty announced. She’d never been so relieved to see a man wearing a reptile in a public space.
“The Pick ’n Save,” she repeated, dragging Elliot through the door without glancing back at the man in the faded black T-shirt. “Music to my ears.”
She couldn’t get out of there fast enough.
Sixty-ish minutes later, they were parked next to the Pick ’n Save loading dock. Elliot’s truck bed was packed with red coolers, each filled with warm water and the tiniest, most precious little turtles Lainey had ever seen.
“Stop!” she whined, like their collective cuteness physically pained her. “We seriously can’t keep them?” Each was roughly the length of Lainey’s index finger and waddled around like baby sea turtles in search of the ocean.
“Don’t play with them.” Elliot’s voice was stern, but she could tell he was equally as charmed. It was impossible not to find the tiny things adorable. “You know they’re crawling with salmonella.”
“Worth it,” she told him, setting the last of the thirty-three turtles into the water-filled cooler and drenching her hands in Purell.
“So…” Elliot’s voice went up, like he had no clue what was about to come out of his mouth. “Who’s Tobin Collier?”
Her head pressed into the headrest. They’d been in the car for a while. She had to give him at least a little credit for holding out this long to ask about their supremely odd interaction in the back of the Shell Station.
She grumbled under her breath. She really didn’t want to talk about it. She didn’t talk about Tobin with anyone, not even Bree. But she’d brought Elliot to his bar, hadn’t she? She’d known they might see him. Tobin was the dreaded plan B.
“He’s the number-one suspect for my dad,” she said.
Elliot’s face twitched. He’d clearly expected something silly or embarrassing, like she’d lost to him in a town log-rolling tournament or accidentally mowed him over with a tractor.
Instead, he was getting a front row seat to her very own Mamma Mia!
situation, but with way less singing and much more casual infidelity.
“My mother had a boyfriend in high school, this guy named Cameron, who cheated on her constantly. They didn’t break up, but to get back at him, she started seeing Tobin at the same time.
Then, nine months later, I arrived. At some point, she’d told Tobin he was the dad, but I don’t know if that was true or if she just wanted it to be true…
Cameron was set to go to Iowa State for football, and his parents were adamant that this was her problem to deal with. ”
Gran, by her own admission, hadn’t handled the situation very well.
To this day, she regretted how she prioritized her own anger and disappointment over her seventeen-year-old daughter.
She was too focused on the sneaking out, the lying, the all-around teenage behavior to fully support her when she needed it.
“The ‘problem’ being baby you.” Elliot seemed disturbed by the notion that Lainey’s existence could be a problem. Oh, the irony.
She shrugged. “Tobin was older. He had a job. It was at the Shell Station, but it was still a job. He probably looked like the better candidate. I’m not sure when it became her plan to drop me off with someone before she took off for the next place, but he was her best option back then. Which I get, in a way.”
Camille’d basically been a kid, too. More than ten years younger than Lainey was now.
“But then Tobin stopped showing up to help when he said he was going to. Wanted a paternity test—which, again, fair. But Camille refused on principle, and that was more or less the last I saw of him. Other than occasionally in passing.”
In a bowling shirt or a vintage graphic tee or one time in a suit. She imagined that day he was going to court or possibly the bank.
“You don’t have to rationalize everyone’s excuses for letting you down.”
The air in the truck tightened around her ribs. “I’m not. I just…I get it.” She swallowed. “I have to get it. If there’s someone in this world I understand, it’s Camille Davis.”
There was one person who belonged in Timber Creek less than Lainey, and that person was her mother.
And nothing bad had happened to Lainey. She’d had a nice childhood.
Gran always made sure she was cared for.
Camille had made her choice, and Lainey didn’t see the point in being angry with her about it for the rest of her life.
“And who knows? At seventeen, I probably would’ve done the same thing. We’re both people who don’t really play well with others.” She and her mother were birds of a feather in a way she didn’t always like to admit. Camille was as much a blueprint as she was a cautionary tale.
“I know I don’t know you that well,” Elliot said, lifting her chin with a bent forefinger. “But I have a hard time believing that’s true.”
She swallowed hard. His gaze burrowed into her, sending an unwelcome shiver down her spine and deep into her fingertips.
Heat pulled through her body, spinning through her chest and neck until it settled into her face.
His eye contact was relentless. He had this way of looking at her that felt like a challenge.
Like he’d never stop looking at her. Like it was her responsibility to bring them both back down to earth.
“Stop staring at me like that,” she said, her voice quiet, like she was telling a secret.
“Like what?” he asked. He lowered his hand, but he didn’t flinch.
Slowly, she tucked her feet under her. Their gazes stayed tangled as though they were touching. They might as well have been touching. She could feel his hands everywhere. On her neck. Her mouth. Her hips.
She rose to her knees, her lip trapped between her teeth as she slowly approached him. He froze, heat flickering behind his expression.
“What’s your angle?” she asked, cutting through the bullshit like a blunt instrument.
“What’s my angle?” he repeated, almost laughing.
“Your whole thing is that you think I’m shifty, and now I’ve got you sitting behind a grocery store, waiting for a man wearing a literal boa so we can illegally sell him exotic pets, and you’re looking at me”—she gestured to him—“with that face, like, ‘I have a hard time believing you’re a loner, Lainey.’ ”
“The voice you use to imitate me is offensive.”
She wrapped her hand around his wrist, as best she could. “Elliot, come on.”
His eyes went to the floor—the first inkling of retreat—then back to her face. “What? We can’t be friends?” he asked, like she was the one being ridiculous.
She snorted. “That was not a look of friendship.”
“Maybe I look at all my friends like this.”
Even with the radio going, it was as though someone had turned down the volume on the world until she could hear nothing but the sound of their breaths, feeling nothing but him looking at her like she was the only thing worth looking at.
Every cell in her body itched to move. But moving would be an admission that those eyes and that hair and that ridiculous chin dimple had any sort of effect on her.
Because of course, they did. Even those glasses had starred in more than one dream that, though not precisely sexual in nature, had carried a confusingly erotic undercurrent.
But he didn’t need to know any of that. This was business, and he was messing with her, which meant he was messing with her livelihood, and she would not stand for that.
“You’re a real piece of work, you know that?” he murmured, his voice a low rumble over the truck’s engine.