Chapter 2
TWO
A WIN WAS A WIN
“Get up. I have to go to work, and you have to stop hiding.”
Hearing these words through sleep, I opened my eyes and saw my sister bending over the playpen with some kind of organic spritz cleaner in one hand and a microfiber cloth in the other.
I was on her couch, where I’d slept after bawling, then letting the whole story leak out, then Dream’s clients came to get their kids while I texted the only text I sent (or read), one to Raye asking her to look after my French bulldog, Jacques.
After that, Dream force-fed me (not quite, but I wasn’t hungry, and she did get super bossy in making me eat) some vegan white chili (how could vegans eat that “cheese” she’d sprinkled on top—it was awful, though the rest of it was rather tasty).
She’d then DoorDashed a dozen gluten free, vegan cupcakes.
I ate six (yes, six, the love of my life was in a hospital bed, but even before that he was lost to me, what else was I gonna do?) and they were straight up tasty. Considering I thought that through heartbreak, that meant they were tasty.
I passed out on the couch while Dream nibbled a cupcake and watched Mississippi Burning.
Even so, the couch was the only choice I had since I wasn’t about to go home and be bombarded by Angels and their questions, seeing as we all lived in the same apartment complex, they all had keys to my pad, so avoiding them would be impossible.
And Dream rented a tiny, two-bedroom house in an okay neighborhood in central Phoenix.
It was one of those neighborhoods that, block-to-block, could garner anything.
Rows of houses with patches of dirt for their yards and not-so-great cars in their drives, and the next block could be lots that had been scraped to build perfect little houses with red or yellow front doors and firepits outside festooned with furniture and décor ordered direct from Frontgate.
So one room was hers, the other room was a kids’ wonder bedroom (my single, unemployed (at the time) sister popping out three kids in four years was not something I remotely considered a bright idea, but you couldn’t fault her mothering—she adored my nephew and nieces, Dusk, Feather and Harmony, (and yeah, I didn’t remotely think those were awesome names either, but they weren’t my kids)).
In other words, the couch was my only choice.
Because yeah…I was hiding.
I sat up and it felt like my whole body was one big kink.
I pulled my hair out of my face and arched my back.
“You have any coffee?” I asked.
“Do I look like a café?” she asked back, spritzing and wiping the pad in the playpen.
Okeydokey.
Seemed our sister bonding was an anomaly.
I could give up.
But I was me.
With Dream, or anything (save Knox, gluh) I didn’t give up.
“You want me to do that while you get ready for work?”
She straightened and turned to me. “I know you think I can’t tie my own shoelaces. But this is part of my job. My business. I don’t need your help.”
All right.
I’d just woken up, but I’d had a pretty shitty day yesterday. I wasn’t feeling her adding a split personality along with all the other baggage she laid on me.
I stood and stated, “I know we got up in your face not long ago about you taking advantage of—”
She headed to the kitchen. “I’d rather not go over it.”
“What I’m trying to say,” I said to her back, “is that Mom, Dad, me and Raye were over you blasting through boundaries and expecting us to kick in to help you deal with decisions you made, instead of asking us if we’d help.”
And that was the deal.
She used to borrow money on the regular, not a little, a lot.
She also used to dump her children on one or the other of us, also on the regular, and not for things like dentist appointments or job interviews, but for things like tarot readings and Reiki sessions.
And she not only didn’t have a job, at that time, she hadn’t told her baby daddies they were baby daddies, so she didn’t have any financial support from them either.
But to put a fine point on it, for me with my sister, this kind of thing had been happening all my life.
Dream was somehow persistently put out with me, like I’d done something, something horrible, inflicted some wound that would not heal, and I had not.
But that might just be my take.
I followed her to the kitchen and stood in the door.
She was stowing the cleaner under the sink.
“You know,” I began, “yesterday, you were really cool with me, and I appreciate it.”
“Whatever,” she mumbled, walking toward me.
I didn’t get out of her way.
When she stopped in front of me and sighed extravagantly, I said, “No really, I appreciate it. And I’ve said this before, but I’ll say it again.
You’re my sister. I love you. I want a relationship with you.
It’s not like I don’t want to be there for you, and I definitely love the kids.
So maybe you can park the attitude, and we can talk this out. ”
Her head tipped sharply to the side. “When’s that gonna happen? When I’m waitressing? When I’m pouring candles? When I’m dragging packages to the post office with three kids in tow? When—”
I cut her off. “That’s the point I’m making, Dream.
You don’t have to go from one extreme, thinking we’re all gonna cover you while you go about your life like you didn’t birth three babies, to doing it all on your own and in the meantime”—I threw up a hand to indicate her—“wasting away and wearing yourself down.”
“Oh, so now I look like shit too?” she demanded.
FFS!
I didn’t have the patience for this. Not now.
But yesterday did happen, and by damn, she couldn’t pretend it didn’t.
“We’re gonna figure this out, Dream,” I told her.
“Is that a threat?” she asked.
“If you wanna take it that way,” I said breezily. “But strap in. You showed me what we could have yesterday, and it meant everything to me.”
She wasn’t so good with the attitude I didn’t see her eye twitch when I said that last.
Thus, I kept at her.
“I don’t have it in me right now to go a round with you, and you have to get to work. But this isn’t over.”
She said nothing.
I held her gaze.
She still said nothing.
I continued to hold her gaze.
She then said something. “Are you leaving, or what?”
Argh!
I stomped to my bag. I then stomped to the door.
At the door, I called to the empty living room (my sister had disappeared), “Thanks again! Later!”
No reply.
Whatever.
I kept stomping, this time to my car.
Fortunately, it was Saturday, so I didn’t have to go to work.
And it was a little out of the way, but my day yesterday, and my morning this morning screamed I deserved it. Therefore, before heading home and invariably to an Angel Interrogation, I sidetracked to JL Patisserie and found my luck had changed.
They had their famous pistachio-chocolate croissant in the case.
I got that and a dirty chai to go, and to fortify myself for what was sure to come, ate it greedily (and sloppily, they didn’t skimp on the fillings) on the way home.
I was parked, had shoved the electric juicer into my car, and was headed to the complex gate when my luck changed again, and an unexpected trauma reared its ridiculously pretty head.
Cheyenne angled out of her car in one of the visitor’s spots and hoofed it so she was right in the way of me getting to the gate to the Oasis Square courtyard.
For God’s sake…
Why me?
Why?
I halted and started, “Listen—”
“No,” she snapped, leaning toward me, her pretty face twisting, making it not so pretty anymore. “You listen to me, Luna. Stand aside. Back off. Take a hike. All three. Just fuck off.”
I tried again. “Cheyenne—”
“You hanging around just confuses him, and I know that’s what you mean to do, but it’s a fucked-up play.”
Did I say I didn’t have a lot of patience this morning?
Well, as the seconds ticked by, I had less and less.
“He broke up with you,” I pointed out, my voice tight.
“He didn’t break up with me…we’re on a break,” she stated delusionally. “That’s different.”
“All right, Ross,” I scoffed.
Her face scrunched angrily.
“And he wouldn’t have done that if you weren’t playing your games,” she shot back.
She might be right. I’d been playing a game with Brady.
But no man who was into a woman for the long haul dumped her ass because his semi-kinda-not-quite-but-also-still ex was fake-flirting-with-and-dating his bud.
Further, no woman should continue to pursue a man who would do that to her.
“I don’t have any control over what Knox does or does not do,” I noted.
“You sure try,” she retorted.
That wasn’t true.
As such.
“This isn’t cool,” I returned, and because my patience was spent, perhaps ill-advisedly, I went on, “It’s actually a dozen shades of psycho.”
Her perfectly plucked brows reached her hairline.
“I’m not psycho,” she snapped.
She was totally psycho.
I started to count it down.
“One, your man broke up with you. Take it like a champ and move on. Not doing that and pretending you’re still together and horning in to see him first after he was shot,” I paused for effect, “twice, when his best bud and his concerned boss were right there, is psycho. Two, showing at the home of the friend of your ex who you view as competition in order to confront her is psycho. Three, telling her to back off from a man who dumped you is, again, psycho. Ergo, you are psycho.”
“He loves me,” she spat.
“If he loved you, when he’s in a hospital bed, whacked out on the tail end of anesthesia and intravenous pain meds, why did he ask for me?”
She flinched.
Okay, so that was a low blow.
But the woman was barring me from my home, I’d slept on a couch and needed a serious stretch session (at least), and Knox broke up with her.
She started toward me, and I was thinking I was at one with the idea of a catfight in the parking lot of my apartment complex (though I’d lament the loss of the last half of my dirty chai if I had to chuck it) when the gate opened and Angels started streaming through.