Chapter 6
CASH
We didn’t usually have spaghetti night on a Saturday, but Avery had to go help one of his millions of brothers or sisters move house tomorrow in Richmond or something, and he wouldn’t be back until late. It wasn’t the change in routine that threw me and made me late, though.
Because I’d never been late for spaghetti night in my life, when I slipped into Avery’s dining room after coming straight from spending the day at the vet clinic, everyone stopped eating and stared.
I took the seat beside Chase and reached for a plate.
“Dude,” Danny said. “You missed the garlic bread.”
I whispered to Chase, “I sent you a text!”
“Yeah,” Chase agreed, “but I still thought you were being held for ransom and one of the kidnappers was pretending to be you. ‘I’m going to be late for dinner.’ Like, come on. It’s spaghetti night.”
So, firstly, if anyone was holding me for ransom, why would they pretend they were me?
Wouldn’t they want Chase to know that I’d been kidnapped?
And secondly, they were gonna be pretty disappointed with whatever ransom Chase and the rest of the guys managed to come up with.
They’d be lucky to get enough to cover gas money.
But all of that was too much to relay to Chase when everyone was watching, so I just snorted and elbowed him.
“Let me get the rest of the garlic bread out of the oven,” Avery said, pushing his chair back.
“There’s more garlic bread?” Wilder asked, looking betrayed. “Were you holding out on me, Avery? Why don’t I get extra garlic bread?”
“Well, I like Cash,” Avery said, sailing off toward the kitchen with a wink in my direction.
Wilder clutched his heart dramatically like he’d been shot, and Gracie giggled.
It was a full house. Everyone was here. Avery and Wilder and Gracie, of course, because it was their place.
Danny and Miller were both here too, and so was Lee.
It was crowded around the table and pretty loud.
I liked the noise and the busyness, though.
It meant the circle of people I considered safe was getting bigger.
It had been just Chase and me for so long, but now we were both learning to trust other people.
I thought about Mason as I chewed on my garlic bread.
Was he a safe person? I thought that maybe he was, even though he seemed like he was stressed a lot of the time.
I hoped he was, because I’d need his help if I wanted to keep the dog.
I wondered what he’d say if he knew I’d stolen it, and my stomach twisted with guilt.
“Hey, how come you spent the day at the vet’s anyway?” Danny asked me. “He’s not making you work on your days off, is he?”
I shook my head and whispered to Chase, “I wasn’t working. I was visiting the dog.”
“He wasn’t working,” Chase said. “He was playing with the dog.”
I saw Danny and Miller exchanging a look. Then Miller said, “Any luck finding it a home yet?”
I ignored the question and concentrated on twirling spaghetti strands around my fork. I hadn’t even started looking, still hoping I could keep him.
Gracie opened her mouth and started to say, “Maybe—”
“We’ve talked about this, sweet pea,” Wilder said firmly. “Now isn’t a good time.”
Gracie huffed out a dramatic sigh and slumped back in her seat, but she didn’t pursue the subject any further, which was unlike her, so I figured they really had talked about it and the no had been final.
“You’d better start looking. The vet won’t keep him forever,” Chase warned, “and you don’t want him going to a shelter.”
Trust Chase to bring up the worst-case scenario. To be fair we’d lived through some shit, and he was still unlearning stuff, just like I was. I just didn’t appreciate it right now. I elbowed him in the side to let him know.
“I can ask Cal,” Miller said. “He might take him.”
Cal was Miller’s boss, and since he already had a dog that came to work with him, he’d probably be a good match. But it still felt wrong.
“What about Bobby?” Wilder suggested.
That was a terrible idea. I glared at Wilder and whispered, “Goose.”
“I don’t think the dog would attack the goose, Cash,” Wilder said.
I shook my head and leaned into Chase and whispered, “I’m not worried about the dog attacking.”
Chase laughed. “Cash is more worried about the goose attacking the dog.”
“Oh shit, you’re right!” Wilder said, laughing too.
“Daddy said a swear,” Gracie announced loudly. Since she normally didn’t mention it when Wilder’s language slipped, I guessed she was still mad about not being able to keep the dog. I got it.
Avery reached over and picked up Gracie’s empty spaghetti bowl and said, “Did you leave room for dessert, Gracie? Lee brought pie.”
She perked up instantly and I smiled. Avery knew what made Gracie tick. “What kind?”
“Peach,” Lee said. “Your favorite.”
“Yeah, but you brought it because it’s my favorite, right?” Chase said, shooting Lee a look that might have been threatening if you didn’t know Chase. That was just his face.
“Sure. You keep telling yourself that,” Lee said.
He was probably about the only person in the world who could say something like that to Chase and actually get him to laugh in return.
It was something, watching Chase let himself relax and be happy.
Like, actually, genuinely happy, not just flashing the sort of sharp grin that might have been a smile or might have been a warning.
But throwing people off balance was part of what Chase did to keep safe, the same as I kept quiet.
It had taken Chase a long time to figure out that he didn’t have to do it with our roommates, let alone how to let someone in even closer than that.
But Lee was here now, in Chase’s life and in our house more often than not, and I was so fucking proud of Chase for allowing that to happen.
It had been hard, though, for me, because the more there was a Chase and Lee, the less room there was for a Chase and Cash, and that hurt.
Like, it wasn’t as though Chase could be there for me in the middle of the night every time to make sure I slept, and I knew that.
Hell, I’d been the one to tell him so when he was being a dumbass about dating Lee in the first place.
But it turned out that being right wasn’t any consolation when I woke up alone and shaking from a nightmare, and I missed him.
Maybe if I got to keep the dog, the nights wouldn’t be so lonely, and I wouldn’t have to lie there in the dark when things were bad and fight the urge to go and get Chase. And some nights I lost that fight, and I did go and get him, and he never minded. Neither did Lee.
But I’d meant what I told him when he started dating Lee. I didn’t want to spend the rest of our lives depending on each other and holding each other back at the same time. And I was working on getting better and talking more. It was just hard.
I thought about Mason again, even though I didn’t know what to think about him.
I just kept coming back to poke at the idea of him, like he was a bruise I couldn’t leave alone.
I liked him because he seemed like a good guy, and he hadn’t done anything to make me not like him.
So that wasn’t the issue. The issue was that I wasn’t sure what I meant when I told myself I liked him.
That was a word that could mean a whole lot of different things.
It never had for me before now, but when I thought about Mason, everything seemed complicated—him, me, and that little word that got trickier to pin down every time I tried to look at it.
I thought of Mr. Conrad and the Lego we were building together.
You just had to follow the instructions and place one brick at a time.
There was a life lesson in that, Mr. Conrad liked to say with a laugh, but I doubted Lego had made instructions that covered how to figure out the feelings you were having for the local vet.
Like, I had feelings. They were fucking loud, louder than spaghetti night.
But hell if they could tell me what they wanted.
I ate my peach pie and tried to enjoy the rest of spaghetti night.
Later that night, back home, I sat on the ratty old couch on the front porch and stared out into the darkness while I listened to a podcast on how communication worked in deep space.
Which was funny since I couldn’t even figure out how to make it work in Goose Run.
Behind the voice of the podcast host, I could hear the usual sounds coming from inside the house as everyone settled down for the night—muted conversations and low laughter, the squeal of the pipes as someone used the shower, the background music of whatever was on the television in the living room.
I slid a hand under the neckline of my borrowed scrub shirt and curled my fingers over my shoulder to ease the phantom itch I sometimes got there.
I didn’t have to scratch or anything, just rub my hand over the skin as though it needed the touch to remember it was healed now.
The burns hadn’t been as bad as they could have been, but my shoulders in particular had blistered like I’d layered a few weeks’ worth of bad summer sunburns over each other all at once, and even now I hated the smell of Neosporin.
Chase had applied it diligently to my skin for weeks, stealing a fresh tube from the Piggly Wiggly whenever we were close to running out.
Mason hadn’t been weird about the scars.
He’d seen them, but he hadn’t reacted. That was good.
Like, it wasn’t a huge jump for him to figure out that the guy who couldn’t talk about anything especially couldn’t talk about his scars, but I appreciated it all the same because not everyone would have pretended like nothing had happened.
It reminded me of the way Mason was with the dog, just talking to it in a regular way like nothing was wrong, even when the dog was vibrating with anxiety while Mason checked his injured ear.