Chapter 39 Moving to Bolivia with my corneas
Moving to Bolivia with my corneas
Gage
Zo? What the hell are you doing? It’s three a.m.,” I complained from the doorway to Zoey’s office/dining room.
She was naked except for a pair of fluffy slippers, and she was sitting on the floor, pawing through multiple stacks of paperwork. Nana was sprawled on her back against her, snoring like a chainsaw.
“Nothing. Go back to bed,” Zoey said without looking up.
“This isn’t nothing. You look like you’re gonna start ripping the drywall from the studs.”
“I’m just looking for something. It’s not a big deal.”
The panic in her tone told me it was a very big deal.
On a sigh, I joined her on the floor and picked up a stack of mail. “Tell me what we’re looking for.”
She shook her head, manically paging through a folder. “It’s just an envelope. It’s nothing.”
“What kind of envelope?”
“The kind of envelope with all the cash the Kick Dominion’s Ass committee stupidly entrusted me with.
I thought I put it in my Don’t Lose This pile, but it’s not there, and it wasn’t in my Upcoming Stuff I Need pile.
It was almost four hundred dollars that I was supposed to use to pay for the live band during Reader Weekend, and now I can’t find it.
And I don’t have four hundred dollars in my account to spare, and I can’t sell any of my clothes fast enough to make up the difference.
And why didn’t I tell them I couldn’t be trusted with something like that? ”
I ran the calendar calculations in my head and kept the obvious answer to myself. “Here’s what we’re gonna do. We’ll look together. And if we don’t find it tonight, I’ll pay the band this weekend, and we’ll look again after it’s all over.”
“This is my mess to clean up. I’m responsible for losing the money,” Zoey said.
“I hate to break it to you, but your messes are my messes.” That didn’t have her looking any less panicked, so I tried again. “If I was worried about something that you could help with, you’d want to help, wouldn’t you?”
“Not at three a.m.”
“I guaran-damn-tee if it were Hazel or me with a problem at three o’clock in the damn morning, you’d be there.”
She shrugged a shoulder. “Maybe.”
“Definitely. Now go put on a robe. I’ve been distracted since I walked out here and haven’t looked at a damn piece of paper yet.”
With the faintest smile on her lips, she leaned over and kissed me on the cheek. “Thank you.”
“For what?”
“For not making me feel worse.”
“Nobody gets to be an asshole to my girl. Not even you.”
Zoey groaned from her prone position on the floor twenty minutes later.
“I must have thrown it out. I went on a cleaning spree a couple days ago and threw out a bunch of things.” She had her head on Nana’s belly.
“Who does that? Who grabs an envelope full of cash and thinks this is clearly garbage?”
“You’d be amazed at the dumb shit we all do. It’s just no one goes on social media to tell everyone about it,” I said, replacing the mouse pad and blotter on her desk.
“Here. You can check my purse. I went through it twice, but that doesn’t mean it’s not in there,” she said, dropping her bag on the desk in front of me.
“You sure?”
“Oh my God, Gage. It’s not like there’s a bear trap in there. There’s nothing but tampons, receipts, and candy wrappers.”
“Speaking of tampons, how much trouble am I going to get into if I point out that you’re getting close to your period and maybe the end-of-the-world sense of doom is related to a hormonal shift?” I asked as I gamely dug into the purse.
She leveled a dangerous look at me. Invisible fire blazed out of her eyes in my direction. In that moment, I knew two things for sure.
1. I was in danger.
2. I was absolutely, beyond a shadow of a doubt in love with Zoey.
It wasn’t a slow, steady knowing like I had always imagined.
It was a sucker punch to the face. Of all the women in the world, it had to be this one.
The one who couldn’t use a calendar to save her life.
The one who made me go skinny-dipping in the freezing cold.
The one who knocked me off a roof with just one glance.
“Shit,” she muttered.
I silently concurred.
“I didn’t realize it was coming up. How did you?” she asked.
“I keep track of things.” Except apparently what my fucking heart was doing.
“Of course you do,” she grumbled, climbing off her dog pillow and returning to a pile of contracts.
I decided to keep my inconvenient romantic epiphany to myself for now and tried to focus on the task at hand.
“Did you know you’re missing your driver’s license?” I asked after I went through her wallet a second time.
“Are you serious? Fuck my life!” Her face was stricken.
I immediately regretted mentioning it. “Let’s focus on one crisis at a time.”
The interior of Zoey’s purse gave me a glimpse into her inner world.
Her wallet was open, spewing cash and cards everywhere.
Half of the paper I pulled out from the depths was crumpled-up to-do lists.
I neatly flattened each one and lined them up on her desk in case there was anything on them that was still relevant.
Tasks included things like Talk to Felicity about Reader Weekend live updates and Follow up with Cosmo on Hazel’s excerpt and Send that guy’s kid a gift card for birthday. Also look up kid and guy’s name.
There was an expense report with handwritten notes all over it paper-clipped to an accounting firm invoice, one pair of pantyhose, three of Hazel’s signing pens, and two planners—one of which had never been used.
Loose on the bottom, I found a health insurance card, three pizza coupons, and nine business cards for plumbers, publishing professionals, influencers, a massage therapist, and a veterinarian specializing in birds.
I spread them out on the desk next to the to-do lists.
I was going to buy this woman a digital scanner, and then I was going to send Declan up here for an afternoon to organize her life for her.
“Tell me about the piles,” I said when she started muttering under her breath.
“Huh?” She looked up, eyes still wide with fear.
“You organize in piles. How does that work?”
“Obviously, it doesn’t. I just need to keep important things out in the open where I can see them or…”
“Or what?” I asked, sliding her cards back into her wallet one by one.
“Or I forget they exist. You’ve heard of ‘Out of sight, out of mind’?
Well, my brain takes it literally. If I don’t leave it out where I’ll see it every day, I’ll forget about it completely until I wake up in the middle of the night weeks later in a panic.
” She waved her arm out to encompass our current situation.
“Makes sense,” I said, already mentally redesigning her pile space.
“It must be amazing to have a brain that functions the way it should,” she said, then sighed.
“It does make things easier,” I admitted as I returned the last now-neat stack of papers to the credenza on the wall. When I set them down, I noticed a gap between the table and the wall.
“I bet you’ve never thrown away four hundred dollars,” she said.
I dropped to my hands and knees and peered under the table. “Gimme your phone.”
“Why? So you can memorialize the moment you realized I was too much of a disaster to have sex with anymore?”
“No. So I can use the flashlight.”
“Did you find something?” she asked, perking up. Nana lifted her head too, tongue lolling out of her mouth.
I gestured for the phone, and Zoey slid it across the rug to me.
“I found two somethings,” I announced, reaching under to pull out both items. “I found your driver’s license in a photocopy of your driver’s license and an envelope of cash.”
Zoey tackled me while I was still on the floor and rained kisses over my face and neck. Nana joined in on the celebration by licking us both.
Feeling like a hero, I laughed and righted us.
“Thank you thank you thank you!” Zoey said, wrapping her arms around me when I sat up. “I don’t know how to make this up to you, but I’m going to figure it out. Do you want your own disco ball? Of course you don’t. Maybe a fancy power tool?”
Maybe it was the fact that she made me feel like a hero. Maybe it was the sleep deprivation or the sex we’d had before falling asleep in each other’s arms. Whatever it was, I decided to be spontaneous. “Can we talk?” I asked.
“How about we go back to bed and sleep for a hundred hours and then you tell me you don’t want to have sex with me anymore?”
“Zoey, there’s something I want to talk to you about.”
She looked like she was trying to decide which door to run out of.
“It’s nothing that would put that look on your face. But we don’t have to talk about it now,” I promised.
She wrinkled her nose. “Yeah. Here’s the thing.
If we don’t talk about it now, I’m going to be thinking about whatever it is nonstop until I’ve blown it up into something catastrophic, like your illegal gambling ring is about to get busted by the FBI and you’re going to steal some of my internal organs to fund your life on the run in Bolivia.
Are you moving to Bolivia with my corneas, Gage? ”
“I think we have a shot.”
“A shot at what? Running from the FBI?”
“I think you and I have a shot. At being together.”
Her mouth dropped open, and I held up my hands to hold off whatever verbal barrage she was preparing.
“I know it’s early. I know we’re new. I know we both agreed we weren’t going to go down this road. But, Zoey, I love being with you. I can see us having a future. I want to know if you can see it too.”
She shook herself out of her freeze. “Huh? What?”
“You aren’t breathing,” I observed.
“Oh, right. Yeah. Oxygen. That’s kinda necessary,” she said on a strangled laugh before taking a shaky inhale.
“I freaked you out.”
“No. What? No! Not in the least. Not at all,” she squeaked.
“You don’t have to answer right now. I just…need to know sometime.”
“Gage, you know I can’t have kids. It’s medically impossible. Would you really want to throw that goal away just for me?”