64. Some Kind of Connection
some kind of connection
Strider
The following March
“That’s the last of the boxes. Zipper lucked out with the season starting.
Remind me to take up a sport that takes me out of state during moving bullshit.
I’m too old for this.” Charlie drops the cardboard box with a thunk in Mirren’s unused guest room and looks to me with confusion and curiosity.
“But, seriously, do you really not have more stuff?”
“Stuff? Yeah. Worth moving across the country? Not so much.”
“Yeah, I get that. So what now?”
“Mirren said she needs you in the apartment.”
“I love Scooter, but, damn, I assumed now that she had a man, I’d be off the hook for all these chores.” He sighs and leaves the room, heading out the back door.
Incoming
Mirren
{Thumbs up emoji}
I grab my laptop and toggle to the cameras. This has been months in the making with Freckles and I scheming late at night as I hold her in bed. Ideas have come and gone, but when we settled on this one, we both knew it was a go. We’ve laughed ourselves silly thinking about the set up.
Her knee needed to be healthy, but nearly three-and-a-half months in and a good two practice runs already tested and proven, we’re ready. Hell, my cross-country move was timed around weather, her rehab, and our readiness for this.
Charlie is through the apartment door and calling for Mirren.
She pops her head out of the bedroom. “Shit. Let me get dressed,” she rushes out and dives back into the bedroom, and into the closet, making use of the fireman’s pole she’s apparently never needed.
That’s my cue.
Green lights fire up to shine through all the windows. A projection of a circling disc is cast outside of the one right where our victim stands. With a whoosh, the lights and the projection vanish.
“Scooter?” Charlie chokes out before clearing his throat and asking louder, “Scoot??”
She can’t respond because she’s right beside me, doubled over laughing.
“Mirren!” He moves through the apartment, into our former bedroom and turns three hundred and sixty degrees before looking straight up. “No. Not possible,” he mutters before returning to the living room.
“Mirren. Come out now.” This time it’s a command as he spins again to look over his shoulder.
He reenters the bedroom, at first hesitant. “If you’re in the bathroom, we’ll both be scarred for life, but I’m coming in. Speak now.”
“Or forever hold my pee,” Freckles chokes out on gulps of wheezing laughter.
Charlie comes out of the bathroom white as a ghost and approaches the closet.
One fist at the ready, he throws open the closet and tosses its meager contents aside.
A few coat hangers clatter together since so little is left hanging.
We moved almost everything down here to start this chapter of our lives.
“What the fuck?” Charlie asks and then manages to tear apart my fiancée’s apartment, including braving looking in the two other closets in her place. He’ll find nothing. That’s the way the prank was designed.
“But I saw her. I know I did.”
“Watching him talk to himself is so worth the price of the cameras,” Mirren says from my side.
“As if the look on his face wasn’t?” I ask.
“No, that was worth paying double.”
Charlie laps the apartment another time, faster than I’d think he could move. To the bathroom, around the bedroom, inside the closet, reopening the hall storage, surveying the living room again, but that open area holds nothing. Neither does the coat closet he’s checked twice already.
He spins in circles before running down her front stairs only to go back up them again and do yet another lap, calling her name the whole time.
When he flies down the stairs, he yells my name.
We could’ve planned my “disappearance,” too, but it means I lost my starring role.
“You’re up,” Mirren says.
Stepping out into the hallway, I mask my features and ask, “What’s wrong?”
“Mirren’s— Um. I, uh…”
“Charlie, is Mirren okay?” I push past him to exit the house.
“She’s gone. Mirri’s gone. I don’t— I mean…”
“What do you mean gone?” I let my voice rise and rush into the night.
“Did you see those lights?”
I whirl on him. “What lights?”
“You didn’t see the green lights?” Confusion is plastered all over him.
“There weren’t any green lights. Where. Is. My. Fiancée?”
“There were green lights.” His voice drifts off as he stares up toward the garage apartment.
“You sound like you saw aliens or something. Let’s go.”
He follows me. Had I known for one moment that we could have done a two-parter, we would’ve planned for it, but what were the freaking chances?
When we reach the apartment, I call for Mirren knowing she’s not here. “Freckles? Baby, everything okay?”
Turning to Charlie, I seal the gaslighting. “She was here, right?”
“I saw her,” he says. His face turns ashen, and he slumps onto her sofa before looking toward the window behind him and springing up immediately. “We’ve got to get out of here.”
He rushes down the stairs and spins to face me. “You said aliens. Do you think—?” he shakes his head and starts walking toward the street.
Where the hell is he going?
Chasing him down the driveway, I realize Mirren can no longer hear or see anything, but this is too good to let go.
“Charlie, wait! What are you saying?” I’m losing my poker face but can’t stop this charade.
He paces, pausing to look between the apartment and the sky, and resumes his steps. “Um. Okay, so, you’re going to think I’m nuts, but… I saw her, and then these lights appeared, and there was a spinning disk outside the window, and she was gone.”
“Gone. Gone like…”
“Dude, she’s gone. She was there. I saw her and then poof.”
“Poof?”
“She was there and then she disappeared. I think they snatched her.” He resumes his pacing and wild searching around.
His lack of attention at least allows me to school my features. “Like the greys? Or the reptilians? Not the elder race, right? Oh, this is so bad.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Charlie, I’ve never told anyone this.” I look around like I don’t want to be overheard.
“Shit you not, when I was a kid, I was abducted. Like, for real. Do you think they were coming back for me and got the wrong person?” I stare straight up into the sky, ducking and bobbing, for effect, knowing there are mere moments before I lose my shit and spew laughter.
“What the fuck?” Charlie starts. “Did you miss some kind of connection”—his hands wave wildly—“and get my sister sucked up in some mess?”
I level him, riding this out way too long. “I have no intergalactic pull, Charlie. I never once thought this would come back to bite me, or get Mirren probed…” I turn my back to him disguising my laughter as sobs. I fucking had to say intergalactic and probed with a straight face.
“It’s okay, Strider. We’ll get through this.” Charlie puts his arm on my shoulder as I force out, “How?”
From the front porch, Mirren yells, “Where have you two been? I’ve been in here waiting forever for help with these boxes and you two left an hour ago. Sheesh.”
“She’s— What the?” If Charlie’s face was priceless before, watching him glance at his watch, to me, to Mirren and back to the sky is enough to make me break.
“Charlie?”
“Yeah?” Panic laces his tone.
“Gotcha.”
Mirren
It took way longer than necessary to get Charlie out of our house. At first, it was his relief that I was okay. Then he had to work through whether it was me who was snatched or him. Finally, he had to come to terms with the fact that he’d been pranked in epic fashion.
Then, simply to be ornery, he camped out in our living room to annoy us.
Now it’s after one in the morning, I’d fall into bed ready to collapse, but Strider is reading. Like many nights, his chest and abs are on display, the sheet barely covering his waist. His mussed hair tumbles over the frames of those sexy-as-fuck glasses.
“It’s a good thing you’re mine,” I say, sliding under the covers.
His head turns my way. “And why’s that?” He kisses my forehead as I settle into his chest.
“All this does it for me. And I can have you anytime I want.” I trail a finger over his arm and plant a kiss to his pec.
“And do you want me now?”
“Always,” I yawn.
“Yeah, nothing says ‘you’re in the mood’ quite like yawning. Get some sleep, Freckles. I’ll be here in the morning. And every morning after that.”
And he will. His sister, Lorien, has found some hopeful breakthroughs in autoimmune research and on some twist-of-fate is now the head of the lab doing the research.
If anyone has the smarts, it’s her. If anyone has the desire…
well, we’ll call that fifty-fifty. But that woman loves her big brother and has basically dedicated her life to curing him.
For the first time since those terrible bruises faded in December, I’m not just hopeful, I know that a cure is on the horizon.
“I’m holding you to that, handsome. But in the morning?”
“Yeah?” He slides his glasses off and places them on the nightstand before turning off the lamp.
“I want it hard and rough.”
He growls.
And I smile the most contented smile of my life.
Never in a million years, would I have assumed I would meet my match in every way in a man whose chest I tumbled into on the hopes of not being made on an op. But sometimes, as luck would have it, we get exactly what we need when we aren’t looking for it.
I didn’t know I needed Strider Anderson. Or his sweet smiles, his phenomenal body, his delicious cooking, or the even more delicious sex.
I couldn’t know that he would be everything I could want and everything I didn’t know I’d need.
But here he is, making my life a fairy tale…
… The spy who comes home to a gorgeous man and his slutty little glasses.