Chapter 8
Castaway, aka Social Distancing
A scant few days into shelter-in-place, and Sarah was losing her mind.
Scratch that. Her mind had already walked out the door, and she couldn’t go after it because the six of them—which included Archer and Hobbes—were in fucking lockdown.
In a tiny house that shrank by the second.
If Sarah had to listen to her brother and Lily through these thin walls one more time …
Shit, she knew waaaay more about her brother’s sex life than a sister should ever know.
Added to that awkwardness was a buzzing undercurrent of tension.
No one was barking at anyone—yet—but Daisy’s every sneeze seemed to send the household into a panic about her coming down with the coronavirus.
And man, that little girl sneezed a lot!
Sarah was trying her damnedest to summon her inner mother—which, apparently, was buried as deep as the Marianas Trench—but the girl’s misery was beginning to scrape Sarah’s already frayed nerves even further.
She was tip-tapping on her keyboard in the Pepto Bismol-pink bedroom—her room for the foreseeable future—engaging in another futile search for a new place when her phone vibrated.
“Just what I need,” she grumbled, expecting to see Wolf’s number. He continued calling and texting, and though she hadn’t responded, each of his attempts jolted her like a dentist’s drill without novocaine. She snatched up her phone and was instead delighted to see a local number.
Finally! A job! A place to live! Paige Miller needs a consultation!
She slowed her racing heart and answered in her most professional voice. “Sarah Nelson speaking.”
“Well, hello, Sarah Sunshine.”
Shit! “What do you want, Sparky?” Just like that, the words flew out quick and snarky. Not at all what she’d intended. Oh well. His overinflated ego would register the slight about as much as a buffalo would notice a ladybug landing on its hide.
He chuckled, which unsettled her even more. “Ah, see, that’s what I love about talking to you. You’re so warm and fuzzy. And your repartee is priceless. You’d be an awesome date.”
“Haha. Save yourself the trouble of asking because I am not going out on a date with you.”
“Say it isn’t so! My poor heart will never recover.”
“I’m sure you’ll survive, Romeo,” she snorted.
“Look, toots, even if I could take you out—which I can’t because of social distancing and your brother’s threats to kill me slowly—you’re the last person I’d call.
In fact, if we were stuck on a deserted island together, I think I’d prefer floating in the water as shark bait over rolling around in the sand with you. ”
Ouch! Okay, Sparky. Game on. She put her best I-don’t-give-a-fuck attitude into her voice. “Pretty sure the sharks wouldn’t want you either.”
“Were you an inquisitor in a former life?”
“You get funnier by the second, Hadley. As scintillating as sparring with you is, I’m in the middle of something important—”
“Oh? Sharpening your teeth?”
She made a rolling motion with her hand, even though he couldn’t see it. “Can we get around to the real reason for your call sometime today?”
A thunderous throat clear came through the line. “Yeah. About my offer the other night.”
“Offer? Um, are you confusing me with the puck bunny who blew you in your truck?”
A gargling noise came from the other end.
“Oh my heavens!” she gasped in an over-the-top voice. “Did you offer me the chance and I missed it somehow? Damn! I think I’ll fling myself into my niece’s baby pool and drown myself now. Good-bye.”
“As usual, I have no idea what the fuck you’re talking about.
” His voice grew muffled, as if he were covering his phone, but she thought she heard the words “swear jar,” and then he was back.
“The caregiver job offer. Remember? It’s possible you didn’t think I was being sincere when I put it out there,” he said dryly, “but I wasn’t kidding. ”
Huh? “Meaning?”
“Meaning, with what’s going on, I can’t hire anyone to come in and take care of Mom. And she likes you. And she also likes your dog. Not to mention, I have a huge-ass house with plenty of room to accommodate the four of us.”
He couldn’t be serious! Could he?
Her inability to speak gave him room to ramrod his way in. “Consider this. Gage and Lily are already crammed into their Cracker Jack-box house, and who knows how long we’ll all be sheltering in place? That’ll get real old, real quick.”
It already has. She opened her mouth to toss something back at him but stopped short, unable to muster a pithy comeback as she recalled the unending space in his big-ass house.
Instead, distractions, like the thought of being cooped up in a tiny house without soundproofing for weeks—months!
—were messing with her. Not to mention she was ten days into a one-month agreement with an ex-coworker in Seattle who’d been generous enough to let her cram her leftover crap in his storage unit. Those boxes had to go somewhere.
But surely she could find another solution besides living with this egomaniac, couldn’t she? Sarah was no masochist, and subjecting herself to Quinn Hadley twenty-four-seven would be masochism on steroids.
“You have plenty of time on your hands now. Why don’t you take care of your mom?”
“Well, besides trying to stay in game shape and take care of her in other ways, there’s …
woman stuff, and that’s … She’s my mom. But hear me out.
By you being here, you won’t be couch-surfing at Gage and Lily’s and comingling COVID.
Here, you’ve got plenty of room to spread out, and we can totally pull off the social distancing thing. ”
I’m not a couch-surfer! she wanted to protest. “Wait. Let me see if I have this straight. I’m supposed to take care of your mom while staying six feet away from her.
We’ll all live in our own wings. When we come into common areas, we’ll be masked and gloved.
Oh! And we’ll carry around drums of antibacterial wipes so we can disinfect everything, and each other, as we go. ”
“Something like that, but we can work out the details later. By the way, I don’t have that many wings, and after two weeks we can be as cozy as we want because we’ll either all have it or we’ll have dodged a bullet.”
Cozy. He didn’t have ulterior motives, did he? No. He hadn’t given off so much as a glimmer of that vibe. In fact, he’d made it clear he preferred to be shark bait. Which was perfect.
When she didn’t answer, he answered for her. “See? You don’t have a comeback because it’s a brilliant plan.”
Living under the same roof with Quinn, no matter if his house was the size of several ice rinks, ranked right up there with root canals. On the other hand, she did like his mom, a lot, and … Holy moly, was she really considering this? No way.
“Brilliant?” she guffawed. “A little full of ourselves, aren’t we?”
“I can’t get anybody else. Would you please help me take care of my mom?” he pleaded. The little-boy voice totally threw her. “I promise I won’t look at you or talk to you. And I’ll make it worth your while.”
Without censure, her mouth galloped away from her. “We’d better be talking cold, hard cash, Sparky. If it’s the same kind of ‘making it worth my while’ you use with your fan club, then you are barking up the wrong tree.”
“Whoa, whoa! Talk about being full of our ourselves. That’s not what I meant. This is strictly business. I was talking about cold, hard cash—lots of it.”
She hmphed.
Quinn barreled ahead. “First of all, Sunshine, even though your brother is my best friend, he’d separate me from my balls if I tried anything. I’m rather fond of them, and I have no desire to give them up. Second of all, and no offense, while you’re not bad looking, you’re not my type.”
“Well, thank God for that! I would never want to be confused with your type.” Whatever the hell that was. Oh yeah. Blond, busty, and skanky. In other words, not her. “Yeah, still not interested.”
He sounded like a deflated balloon on the other end. “Right. Okay. I’ll tell Mom I tried. Bye, Sunshine.” He hung up.
“Hello? Hey, Sparky?” She stared at her phone. Wait! That was it? That was all the fight he was gonna give her? Wuss!
Sarah fell into a restive sleep, punching pink pillows at every turn, though she couldn’t say exactly whose face she pictured as she punched.
There were any number of candidates: the virus, the people spreading it, the governor of Colorado, the president, Wolf, Quinn Hadley.
In her less agitated, more lucid moments, she admitted she couldn’t lay the blame on any of them, though she was surely tempted.
It was this merry-go-round of thoughts spinning in her head—along with the pins-and-needles sensation in her legs—that forced her from her bed.
Daisy’s bed. As a kid, Sarah had suffered from something they now called Restless Leg Syndrome, only they didn’t have pills for it back then.
Grandma would fix her a warm mug of milk and pull her against her pillowy body while she stroked her hair.
Before long, Sarah would drift off to sleep.
If only the drug manufacturers could turn that into a pill, the world would be a much happier place.
Though she no longer had Grandma’s comforting body to sink against, there was milk in the fridge she could heat—her go-to cure for her fitfulness even now. As she was stealing down the hall into the kitchen, she heard a grunt from the living room. A manly grunt. Followed by a heavy thump.
She stilled a moment, picking up a gruff “Son of a bitch!” Definitely not Daisy.
“Gage?” she hissed into the dark.
“What?” came her brother’s growl.
She tiptoed to the couch. “What are you doing out here?”
Her brother’s torso sprang upright on the couch. “Daisy’s sleeping with Lily.” She could practically hear the clench in his jaw.
“Wait. Why isn’t Daisy out here? And why aren’t you sleeping with Lily?”