Chapter 13
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CORMAC
It’s six forty-five in the morning when I park in the driveway of my house, after having been on the road in the band bus for three and a half hours. The guys will have to get a one-way rental out of Atlanta, but I left Mick one of my credit cards.
I needed to get to Nora right away, and not just because she pepper-sprayed my seventy-two-year-old neighbor in the face. I had to see with my own eyes that she and Cookie are okay. And Nathaniel too, obviously.
If at all possible, I would also like to convince him not to press assault charges.
I barrel toward the front door, pausing only to shut the gate, but hesitate when I reach the stoop. This is my house, obviously, but should I knock? I don’t want to catch Nora by surprise and get a face full of pepper spray.
What’s the worst you could get for an illegal pepper-spraying, anyway? Community service?
I doubt Nathaniel will get litigious, but if he does, I’ll get her the best lawyer money can buy.
It nearly killed me when I had to hang up on her, but it felt more important to get someone over there to do what I couldn’t from all the way in Georgia. Boots on the ground are worth more than plans on paper, my grandfather used to say.
Ideally, I would have asked Liam to come over.
If Liam so much as looked at a raccoon, it would scamper in the opposite direction, but he lives across town with Briar.
Besides, almost everyone I know with a cell phone puts it on silent at night.
From past conversations with Nathaniel, I knew that he has unscientific beliefs about 5G and is only in possession of a landline.
I called it three times last night, pacing the hallway of the Hilton in Atlanta so furiously I probably permanently damaged the carpet.
When Nathaniel finally answered, I explained the situation, and he promised to “head on up there and give it a look.” I’m not the best at translating other people’s moods, but he sounded pretty excited about it.
I continued pacing for a long time after we hung up, my heart beating like a jackrabbit’s, needing the constant movement to keep from going insane. I was considering heading to the stairwell to run up and down the stairs when my phone finally buzzed.
It was a text from Nora:
Cookie is fine. At ER.
Three dots danced on the screen.
Panic flooded me, and I started mentally calculating how fast I could get to Asheville if I broke every single traffic law in existence. Which was when her next message came through:
I thought Nathaniel was a murderer, so I pepper-sprayed him in the face.
I swore several times. Then I headed back into the room to grab my bag, my guitar, and the keys to the van. Mick had fallen back asleep, so I left a sticky note and my credit card on top of his guitar case, where he couldn’t miss it.
And now, here I am.
Go in, you idiot, a voice in my head insists. I’m still considering it when the front door swings open.
It’s Nora. She looks tired and smells like coffee in addition to her usual ginger. There’s not a single trace of the red lipstick she’s worn since her sixteenth birthday. She’s beautiful, and perfect, and she’s okay. She’s going to stay okay.
Cookie vaults toward the open door, and when she sees me, she releases a high-pitched bark-whine and instantly starts pawing at my legs. I pat her head with one hand and then pull Nora to me for a hug with the other.
“God, I was so worried about you,” I murmur as I pull her closer. I bury my head in Nora’s hair, ignoring the knowledge that I shouldn’t be doing any such thing.
“Are you talking to me or Cookie?” Nora asks, her voice muffled. To my surprise, she’s holding me as tightly as I’m holding her. Her hands are even gripping the back of my shirt. I nestle in closer, needing this proof that she’s here and whole.
“Both of you.” I pull back to get another look at her.
“Oh my God, stop staring at me like that.” She covers her face with her hands, which is insufficient, because they’re much too small to hide her from me. “I slept for less than four hours last night, and I’m not wearing any makeup.”
“You’re beautiful.”
The expression on her face is proof positive that I don’t understand anything about women, because she seems slightly displeased. She told me she valued the truth, though, and that’s exactly what I’ve given her.
After a moment, she clears her throat. “You came back early.”
“Yeah. Technically, I stole Mick’s van.”
“You did what?” She leans out through the open door and takes in the mint-green VW bus parked in front of the house. “Does he know you have it?”
“I left a note, but he’s not much of a reader, so it’s possible he called the cops. You and I may both need a lawyer.”
Her unpainted lips curve into a smile. “I’m starting to think I’m a bad influence.”
“Only now?”
Her grin grows wider.
“I always thought you would be,” I continue, “but I’d hoped it would take longer for me to start committing felonies.”
She gives me a searching look. “You must have left Atlanta right after you hung up on me. I thought…I thought you’d abandoned us.”
“Sorry about that. I hoped you’d forgive me for cutting out unnecessary pleasantries to save time.”
To my surprise, she leans into my chest again for half a second, burying her face in my shirt. My heart beats harder as she nuzzles against it. “I’m so glad you’re here.”
I wrap a single arm around her, letting my fingers brush the ends of her hair as Cookie renews her campaign of pawing at my legs.
Nora is not a hugger in general, from what I’ve seen, and she is definitely not a hugger of me.
Even though there are plenty of reasons why I shouldn’t want to hold her, the voice in my head insists I should enjoy the contact while I can.
With a sigh, Nora pulls back and says, “Come inside and have some coffee with Nathaniel and me. We made bucketloads.”
I nearly do a double take.
“You pepper-sprayed him, and now he’s hanging out with you?” I figured it would be a friendship deal-breaker. Then again, Nathaniel has always seemed lonely to me, like my dad was before he met Hannah and her crew.
I met Nathaniel when I attended the garden party he held the spring before last to celebrate Earth Day. He’d posted about it on Nextdoor at least a dozen times, and I felt guilty for ignoring him like everyone else seemed to. So I convinced the woman I was dating at the time to go with me.
We were the only people there, and within five minutes of our arrival, Nathaniel brought out a jug of fly larvae and gave us a ten-minute presentation on the life cycle of flies.
Rebecca kept making comments about our busy schedule and what a hot day it was—and when he finished the presentation and announced our next activity was compost making, she walked out.
I wasn’t particularly interested in making compost, but I felt bad for Nathaniel.
So I stayed, and he made me iced tea sweetened with his own harvested honey and told me about the career he’d just retired from: working at the WNC Nature Center.
He’d taken care of the animals there for years, and at one point he’d kept a pet raccoon—off the books, since it’s illegal to keep wild animals in the home in North Carolina.
Given his history with raccoons and his reliance on a wired telephone, he’d seemed like the most natural person to call in the middle of the night, especially since his house is right next to the greenway.
“Yeah,” Nora says with a luminous smile. “I guess I’m not entirely without charm after all. If I were, you would have had to get me out of the slammer.”
“You’re assuming I’d bail you out.”
“Oh, I know you would. But you don’t need to, because I’m surprisingly charming.”
“I knew you were good at talking people into things.” I point to myself. “You talked me into going on that fake double date.”
“I promise it’ll feel excruciatingly real.” She nudges my shoulder, the feeling a bigger jolt than the caffeine’s likely to be.
She’s smiling, and I know I’m supposed to smile back. Everything is all right now.
But last night could have turned out so differently. What if the racoon had been rabid, or some creep had been out there lurking in the woods?
She’s okay. She’s fine. Cookie’s fine. They’re all right.
“Go on into the kitchen. I’ll join you both in a minute,” I say, needing a moment to process everything.
As soon as she leaves, I get down on my haunches to properly greet Cookie, who’s grown more frantic for my attention. Bowing my head to press it to hers, I breathe her in. “You gave me a scare, girl. Let’s keep it in the yard, huh?”
She barks once in answer, licks my nose, then trots off in Nora’s direction.
I watch in amazement, because Cookie has never liked anyone other than me—
Until now.
Things are changing again, the world shifting beneath my feet. I take a moment to ground myself and then walk to the kitchen, nearly tripping over a misaligned floorboard when I catch sight of Nathaniel sitting in my tiny kitchen dining nook in his overalls.
His face is bright red except for pale circles surrounding his bloodshot eyes. “Oh shit, that looks really bad. What happened to your eyes?”
I gesture to the troubling circle pattern.
He chuckles, then winces. “My ex-girlfriend said my night-vision goggles were a waste of money. I’m going to write her a letter telling her she was wrong. If I hadn’t been wearing these, no telling what would have happened.”
Nora snorts as she fills a mug with coffee and thrusts it at me, the motion nearly forceful enough to slosh the liquid out.
A smile plays across my face, more for Nora and her forceful ways than for Nathaniel’s spend-conscious ex.
She smiles back at me conspiratorially, and I take a sip of the coffee. It tastes like battery acid.