7. “Cranes in the Sky” #2
But he did.
“They were looking for something. They couldn’t know when you’d show, so they had to work fast, and because of that, they weren’t careful.”
That made my tears stop, since he seemed really in the know about this kind of thing. “Have you searched someone’s house before?”
“Once or twice.”
Hmm.
“Did you break anything?” I asked.
“I never did it stupid. I always had a lookout.”
Interesting.
“The key is not to let them know you were looking, or if you luck out and find what you want, not to let them know right off the bat you found it,” he went on.
“Oh,” I mumbled.
“I know this won’t help much, but they didn’t do a lot of damage, outside the mushroom. Just a rush job, leaving a mess.”
“I guess that’s good,” I continued to mumble.
“We’ll get you another mushroom,” he promised.
“I’m not sure they have them anymore,” I told him despondently.
“We’ll take a look.”
God, he was being so nice .
It was time to get to the nitty-gritty. “Someone broke into my place, Javi.”
He started to stroke my back. “I know, baby.”
“At the Oasis. With Linda, Patsy and Martha in the courtyard.”
His hand slid around me, and he gave my waist a reassuring squeeze. “They were never in danger. Whoever this was got in through your window in your bedroom, so they came in from the parking lot.”
That made me shiver.
Feeling my shiver made Javi frown.
Seeing Javi frown like that was a little scary.
“This is what’s going to happen,” he declared.
I just stared up at him, so he kept talking.
“The guys are gonna go in, see if whoever this fuck was who violated your space left anything behind we can trace. They’re also, right now looking at the camera feeds to see how we missed someone breaking in when we got an angle on your back windows.
We find out who it is, we locate him and let him know how we feel about him fucking with one of our women. ”
One of our women .
I was about to shiver again, but Javi wasn’t done, so I decided instead to pay attention to what he was saying.
“We don’t find out, we’ll still find him and share our displeasure.
It’s obvious that Trev fuck was up to something even worse than what he was doing through dating apps.
He was probably being watched, they saw him with you, they’re clearly desperate about whatever this is, and they took a shot with your place.
They didn’t find what they wanted, because you have nothing to do with this guy.
Though, we’re gonna make sure to communicate you have nothing to do with this fuckin’ guy. ”
I really wanted that communicated.
Really .
And I, for one, did not mind in the slightest that the NI&S crew were going to wade into this mess.
I will reiterate.
Someone broke my cute mushroom.
And someone else was dead.
“I don’t want to talk about this anymore,” I announced. “I want to nuke my pad thai and eat it, and then maybe eat all your ice cream. Do you have ice cream?”
“No.”
Drat.
I tried again. “Chocolate?”
His lips twitched. “Sorry, lil’ mama, no.”
“Cookies?” I asked, maybe a tad desperately.
He smiled at me, let me go, leaned to grab the bag of food, handed it to me, and ordered, “You warm this up. I’ll order some sweet shit to be delivered.”
Oh my God!
How nice!
Still, I said, “You don’t have to. I probably shouldn’t self-soothe through food.”
Though, there wasn’t any “probably” about it. This very fact had been drilled into my brain what felt like all my life (hi, Mom!).
“You’ve had a rough night,” he stated. “So I’m gonna get you some ice cream, chocolate and cookies.”
Oh yeah.
Totally nice.
But the blazing question of the night was…
Why?
Lamentably, as this brought us full circle, it made me ask, “Why are you being so nice?”
I thought it was a pertinent question, considering all he’d said to me the night before.
What I wasn’t ready for was him leaning deep into me so his nose was not even an inch from mine, doing this framing my face with his big, calloused hands, and his deep voice dropping to a rough, heady whisper.
“I was a dick last night and spewed a bunch of shit I shouldn’t have said for reasons I’ll explain later.
Things are too heavy for you now to get into the heavy of all that, and I’ll warn you, Harlow, it’s heavy.
But I’ll explain. We’ll work it out. And then we’ll figure it out.
Just not now. Now is about food and me getting you to a place where you feel safe after what you saw done to your apartment. ”
I didn’t hesitate even a second to say, “I don’t think it’s possible not to feel safe when I’m with you.”
After I said that, the next instant, I didn’t know whether to pull away and run as fast as I could or throw myself at him and hold on as hard as I could, because the burn seared into me from a fire that raged deep in his eyes.
This happened at the same time his hold on my cheeks tightened, just a little, but it was there, and it was meaningful.
Then his hands glided down to cup my jaw.
In doing this, his fingers were so long, they snagged in my hair.
Liking both, my nipples pebbled, then somewhere south pulsed as he dipped his head and scraped his evening scruff against my cheek so his lips were at my ear (and…
yeah, another pulse and a harder pebble!).
“But we’ll clear one thing up right now,” he said softly there.
I was listening so hard, I feared my eardrums would explode.
“I like you, Harlow.”
What?
“But, why?—?”
I stopped speaking abruptly when his whiskers scraped back across my cheek, and now he was so close, the tip of his nose brushed mine.
I couldn’t help it, that felt so nice, and all I could see was so beautiful, I let out a little sigh.
“My head’s fucked up about something,” he whispered.
“I took that out on you. It was uncool.” Another tip-of-the-nose brush, which elicited another sigh.
“And you did right, baby. You reamed my ass about it, in your way. I hurt you, and it wrecked me that I did, but you didn’t let me pull that shit.
Now I gotta work to fix it, and I’m gonna do that, mi pequena Lolita. I promise.”
Mi pequena Lolita .
Why were those the three most beautiful words I’d ever heard in my life ?
Not to mention the whole “and it wrecked me that I did.”
I didn’t want him to feel that, but about this, I also did.
“Okay?” he asked.
The whole truth?
Not really.
Although what he just said was lovely, and he was being even lovelier, he’d said some really mean things.
But in that moment, with the way he was looking at me, like the only thing in the world he wanted was that I say, “Yeah, okay,” adding this to the way he was holding me, the smell of him, the feel of his hands on me, the warmth of his body suffusing mine, I decided I could wait until later for him to share.
So I said, “Yeah, okay.”
The open relief that washed through his handsome face told me I’d made the correct decision.
He gave me a squeeze, let me go and stepped away.
“Warm up the food, I’ll get your treats,” he said, pulling out his phone.
I went for the bag, replying, “Really, you don’t have to. Like I said, I shouldn’t self-soothe through food.”
His next question arrested me.
“Who told you that?”
I turned to him, and instead of sharing I learned that from my mother, I educated, “It’s not a healthy habit.”
“What’s not a healthy habit is restricting yourself from having something you dig,” he returned.
I blinked.
“The more you tell yourself you can’t have it, the more you want it, the more you’ll abuse it when you break down and allow yourself something you should have allowed in the first place,” Javi stated.
“Then you feel shit that you let loose, which leads you to feeling more shit you abused it, and you’re right back where you started, wanting it, denying yourself, then taking it too far, only for that fucked-up cycle to repeat itself over and over. ”
I stood still and could do nothing but stare.
“It’s not a crime to eat ice cream,” he said, and with him making that simple statement, suddenly the fact that all my life I thought it was seemed ludicrous.
“You’re right,” I said.
He studied me and I didn’t move because I was caught in his gaze as well as still in the throes of processing this epiphany he’d led me to.
In a sweet, careful voice, he declared, “You got a beautiful body, baby.”
I felt my cheeks heat, my heart soar, and my mouth move.
“I’m pudgy.”
Oh God.
Why did I say that?
Worse!
Why did I say it to a guy I liked who liked me?
And it hit me he liked me . One could say you didn’t hold a girl’s jaw and scrape your evening stubble on her cheek if you liked her just as a friend.
I didn’t get to fully enjoy this world-rocking understanding, seeing as the cautious warmth vanished from his gaze and something terrifying entered it.
“Now who told you that?” he bit out.
“I-I think we might have a bunch of heavy to go over, Javi.”
“You’re not pudgy,” he proclaimed.
“Okay,” I mumbled disbelievingly.
“It’s entirely whacked, the idea a woman shouldn’t have curves,” he said.
“Well—” I started.
“Basic biology,” he grunted.
Oh dear.
Things seemed to be straightening out between us, so I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear Javi’s take on “basic biology.”
I didn’t get a chance to share my hesitancy.
“A woman’s part in procreation is to nurture a child in her womb and when it comes out,” he carried on. “How you gonna do that if you’re skin and bones?”
“Not every woman wants a child, Javi,” I explained.
“Nothing negates basic biology,” he returned.
“You wanna be trim, go for it. You don’t want a kid, your choice.
But the bottom line is, women are built to carry weight so they can nourish offspring.
Whether you want that offspring or not doesn’t factor, that’s the basic part of biology.
So you having the body you’re biologically meant to have is completely natural.
What’s not natural is this fucked-up idea that you gotta…
”—he flipped out a hand—“I don’t even know what the goal is with that skinny shit. ”
It was then it hit me, he was really angry that I thought I was pudgy.
It also hit me how incredibly sweet it was he told me he thought I had a beautiful body.
Which reminded me I thought he had the same, and unexpectedly—and in that moment, inopportunely—about one hundred of the thousands of fantasies I’d had about him crashed into my brain and something else hit me right between the legs.
“You over that shit?” he clipped.
I pulled myself back from my mental trajectory of deciding whether or not (and I was leaning toward whether) to jump his bones and asked, “What?”
“You over that shit about your weight?”
“I’m not sure a lifelong issue with my body can be cured in one short conversation, no matter how hot the hot guy is who tells me I need to get over it. And you’re the upper echelon of hot.”
Oh no.
Did I just speak those words out loud?
His eyes lit and lips curled up.
I did speak them out loud, and the humor and…
Lord help me…
Tenderness in his gaze made me not regret it, which was crazy.
But it was true.
“Nuke our food, babe,” he ordered, turning to his phone and murmuring, “We’ll get you over that body image bullshit later.”
He made this sound like he’d just jotted that as priority one on his to-do list.
Right, it was official. Enough was enough, I could endure no more.
For the rest of the night, I was taking it one step at a time.
Dinner. Treats. Then…whatever came next.
And one step at a time meant I was resolutely not thinking about whatever was going to come next.
So I found Javi’s built-in microwave and got to work.