Chapter 32
THIRTY-TWO
LEO
The hangover wakes me right before the doorbell does.
It sits behind my eyes like a hot coin—press, throb, press. When the chime goes off, it punches through that coin like a gong, pain ricocheting around my brain.
I peel one eye open and immediately regret it, tasting last night on my tongue—whiskey, toothpaste, and… why do my nostrils burn? Did I throw up and shoot whiskey out my nose?
The doorbell rings again.
“It’s Saturday,” I croak to no one. “Cease and desist.”
I grope around for my phone, don’t find it, shove off the blanket that’s acting as my warm, fluffy hiding place, and swing my legs out of bed. Boxers, that’s it. No T-shirt, no socks. My mouth is dry as a desert and the floor is so cold my arches rise in protest.
The bell goes again. Long press this time.
“All right,” I mutter, staggering down the hall. My head does the thing where it pulses in time with my footfalls, like there’s a subwoofer buried under my hairline.
I smear the back of my hand over my mouth—drool, fantastic—and catch sight of myself in the hall mirror. Bedhead like I’ve been electrocuted. Eyes the color of bad coffee.
I squint at my reflection and, out of long habit, deadpan, “Still a sexy motherfucker,” and then open the door.
Stephanie.
“What the fuck,” I say, not even bothering with hello, “are you doing at my house at this ungodly hour on a Saturday?”
I’m standing in the opening to my house, hand resting on the knob and forearm on the frame, so when she attempts to step in from the cold and I don’t budge, Stephanie stops and stomps her foot like a petulant child.
“Leo,” she huffs. She’s bracing against more than the weather, hands shoved into the pockets of a long coat, cheeks pink from the air. “I need to talk to you.”
“Not right now, you don’t.”
I start to shut the door. She plants a palm against it and leans in.
“Leo, please.”
Great. Now I’m a half-naked asshole wrestling with his ex-wife on his own stoop at six in the morning. The neighbors are probably peeking through their blinds, judging the prick who won’t let that poor woman inside from the cold.
Who am I kidding? Nobody’s watching this. They are all asleep. Like normal people, this early on a Saturday.
I pinch the bridge of my nose, which does nothing helpful for the coin behind my eyes, and inhale air so cold it scrapes.
“Look,” I say, exasperated. I just need this woman to leave, right now, so I can go back to sleep.
“I promise, we’ll talk. We can talk about whatever the fuck you want to talk about.
Just not at six in the morning, on a Saturday, when I’m hungover and my head has a pulse and I’m in a terrible mood and I don’t even have any fucking clothes on, okay? ”
Her gaze slides down my bare chest, lingers a fraction too long at the waistband of my boxers, then zips back up.
“Right. You’re right.” She takes a small step back. “I’m sorry. I should have called.”
“Yeah,” I snap. “You should have. And not until after nine. Because, Saturday.”
“I’ll go,” she says, voice small, apologetic. “I’ll… I’ll go.”
“That’s probably for the best.”
She turns, starts down the steps, and that’s when a Kia Telluride I know all too well jerks to a stop at my curb like God heard my prayer for more sleep and laughed.
Because of course Victoria Foster would show up at my house at 6 a.m. when my ex-wife is leaving and I’m standing at my open door practically naked.
The driver side door flies open. Tori barrels out. And damn, she’s hot. Not like, good looking hot—which she is, because she always looks amazing—but like, fucking angry hot.
Stephanie startles like she’s been shot at.
“Are you fucking kidding me?!” Tori yells, and the sound of it hits my porch, my chest, my stupid, hungover brain.
If the neighbors weren’t awake before, they probably are now.
Stephanie freezes, looks from Tori to me and back. “I was just leaving,” she says, and hustles toward her car like she’s outrunning a storm.
Tori rounds the front of her SUV, hands waving, eyes burning with fury. She points at me like I’m a dead man.
“Your ex-wife, Leo? You couldn’t even stick your dick in some random Tinder twat to get yourself off? You had to go and sleep with her?!”
She punctuates that statement by jabbing a finger toward the street where Stephanie is fumbling with her keys.
“Wait,” Stephanie asks. “Who are you?”
“That is none of your damn business, Champagne Problems,” Tori snaps. “Now go the fuck home.”
I laugh. I can’t help it. She’s so sexy when she’s angry. And—ouch, fuck, my head.
“You think this is funny?” she shrieks. “She’s married, Leo. MARRIED.”
I shrug because I’m stupid, and also because why does she care?
Which reminds me.
“I thought you went back to Moraine?” I toss out. “Back to your husband.”
At first, Tori looks like I slapped her. Then the rage returns.
“I did,” she fires back. “To get divorced, you dumb idiot.”
All the air goes out of my lungs. I swear it’s like someone just kicked me in the chest and I cannot breathe.
Wait. What?
I stand there in my doorway like a frozen gargoyle, mouth half open, nothing useful coming out.
Her expression morphs from fury to exhaustion. “I’m too fucking tired for this,” she mutters, turns, and climbs back into the SUV.
The next thing I know her door slams shut and she’s speeding away before my knees remember how to bend.
“Tori. Wait!” I call, and then I’m running down the steps, forgetting that I’m not wearing shoes. The porch is rimmed in frost and my entire driveway is a sheet of ice posing as concrete.
It’s ten degrees, maybe twenty if the sun is lying. My soles hit the porch steps and pain shoots up my calves from the cold. I make it to the sidewalk, flailing for balance, and by the time I hit the curb, her taillights are a pair of rubies shrinking into the gray morning.
Fucking dammit.
I pivot, sprinting back toward the house to grab keys, phone, anything. I must have pulled the door shut behind me when I launched myself down the steps.
My hand meets the keypad and… nothing. No little lights. No cheerful beep. I press again. Dead.
No. No no no no no. The battery. The one that’s been chirping for days. The one I kept telling myself I’d change “tonight” and then got distracted and said “tomorrow” and then got distracted again and said “later.”
Guess what time it is, Leo? It’s later.
I am now the living, breathing definition of fuck around and find out.
I punch the center button to reset it, get exactly zero response, and stand there, half naked, half hungover, entirely freezing, realizing I am locked out of my own house with no keys, no phone, no dignity, and no way to fix this situation without being the asshole who woke up his neighbors at 6 a.m. on a fucking Saturday.
I head back down the steps, trying the windows because I am nothing if not a man who prefers the obvious humiliation to the creative one. Every ground-floor latch is tight.
My alarm system is fancy, which means every sensible point of entry is sealed like it expects a raccoon army at dawn.
I could break a pane, sure, but the second I do, the siren will go off, automatically signaling the police while Lois follows up with a call to 911 and the HOA.
Then the HOA will send a sternly worded email about “seasonally appropriate attire on common-view porches,” and I will become the next viral Nextdoor post: Boxer-Clad Burglar Actually Just Hungover Homeowner.
My feet go from freezing to pain to that alarming numbness where you can’t tell if you still have toes. I hop back onto the porch, huffing steam like a dragon who regrets everything.
Options spool through my head and all of them are bad.
The only unsecured window in the entire house is the little one that opens into the weird bonus loft—a dormer tucked away over the side yard. It’s not really a second story; it’s a glorified treehouse someone slapped onto a cottage style house to make the blueprints more interesting.
The front dormers are ornamental—pure Potemkin village. But the side dormer? The loft? Real window. Real latch. And unless I’m wrong, I’ve never once told my alarm to care about it.
I glance at the pergola that frames the back porch. Snow crusts the top slats, weighty and white. There’s a bump-out of roof not too far from it.
If I can climb the pergola, use something to clear the snow, belly onto the roof, and shimmy across, I might be able to reach the dormer ledge. Would that be insane? Yes. Would it be a better option than freezing my testicles off on the porch while composing a note to Tori with icicles? Also yes.
“Brilliant,” I tell myself. “Let’s do the dumb thing.”
I pad gingerly around to the back, tiptoe-hobble-curse, and size up the climb. The pergola is solid cedar, anchored into brick, crossbeams spaced like a ladder if ladders were designed by a sadist.
The snow makes it slick, the cold makes it brittle, and I make it worse by being a tired, hungover idiot without shoes… or pants.
There’s a broom leaning in the corner by the grill, bristles stiff with old ash.
I grab it, knock off the crust, and test a foothold on the first crossbeam.
It holds. I reach for the next beam with my hands, palms stinging instantly, and do the thing rock climbers do where they pretend they’re not dumbasses with a death wish.
One rung. Two. My toes are screaming. I hug the post and rest my forehead against the cold wood.
“You’re fine,” I tell my entire lower body, which has decided to revolt. “We’re fine.”
I get another rung, plant my foot, shift my weight—and my arch slips. My right foot slides off the slick beam, my left knee slams into the post, and my full body slams forward into the ladder of wood with exactly one unfortunately positioned crossbar to break the momentum.
My entire universe reduces to a single, blinding point: I have just introduced the left side of my scrotum to a frozen piece of cedar at velocity.