Chapter 36 Rosie
ROSIE
The sound was sharp and loud enough to rattle me from sleep.
At first, I thought it was Lionel, getting upset that I had overslept breakfast. But as I stumbled out of bed, my foot caught on his shell, and I went flying, only to come face to face with what looked like a sleepy tortoise glaring at me like I meant to trip over him.
Loud rattling sounded from outside my bedroom again, and I grabbed the baseball bat from behind my door.
“If I’m not back in five minutes, run,” I joked to Lionel, trying to make light of the situation as my heart was fluttering so hard and fast it was at risk of vacating my body.
Light was barely flooding in through my curtains, so it must have been early.
Don’t robbers like to sleep in? I tried to walk quietly to the kitchen, but I was huffing and puffing, and there was nothing I could do about it.
I turned the corner, ready to swing, only to see a familiar outline. Wesley.
“What the hell?” I screeched, and he jumped, banging his head on an open cabinet.
“Ouch, what the f—”
“Don’t what the fuck me. What are you doing here at the ass crack of dawn?!” I was seething, and trying to calm my heart and explain to my body that I was not having a heart attack.
“I, uhm…Well, I didn’t want to give you time to change your mind or cancel.” He kept his eyes trained on the ground, and if I weren’t currently fighting for my life, I would have found it extremely endearing.
“So you broke in?” I questioned, not trusting myself to say anything else.
He looked guilty, and I put the pieces together.
“You used your key,” I said, and he nodded.
It was on the tip of my tongue to ask for it back, but then I remembered that I also had his key.
He had slipped it on my keychain last summer.
“Just in case,” he’d said, like it was the easiest decision in the world for him. I used to think about that day a lot.
Now that the fear-turned-rage haze started to dissipate, I took in the state of my kitchen. “What is going on here?”
“I didn’t realize how loud I was going to be.”
“It looks like I’m in the middle of a renovation I had no idea about.” I was trying to understand what was happening. There were boxes in the middle of my living room and in the kitchen.
“Oh, no. This is Ned, Ted’s brother.”
“What?”
“I don’t have what Lionel needs at my place, so I brought our Sunday fundays to you.”
I looked at him like he’d grown three heads. “That machine is like, $600.” He just shrugged at me and went back to putting it together.
“What’s in the box on the floor here?” I questioned, pointing at the box on the living room floor.
“It’s my gaming machine. Gaming Sundays are your favorite, and since you didn’t want to miss out on time with Lionel, I figured we could do it here.
I know you have your shift at Orla’s. That’s another reason why I’m here so early.
I figured I’d feed you, get you caffeine, and set up the gaming system and watch Lionel while you work. Maybe bond with him a little bit.”
I hated that it was a really sweet and well-thought-out idea. It was exactly what I wanted, and exactly what would make me happy.
At that moment, I heard Lionel as he came down the hallway. Immediately, Wesley opened my fridge, started pulling out fruits I definitely didn’t have in the fridge when I went to bed, and started chopping them up.
“Give me a bit, and I’ll have your coffee ready—and Lionel’s breakfast,” he tells me.
“How do you know what his breakfast is?”
“I made use of my library card, did some research. Speaking of that, I have a few pamphlets on zoos that you can set up a transfer of care if something should happen to you. Do you actually know how old Lionel is? That might help us come up with the best plan for him.”
I gaped over at the man standing in my kitchen, chopping fruit, asking me how old Lionel was, like he belonged to both of us. I had to tamp down the way my heart fluttered at that thought. No.
“Uh, I haven’t thought much about it…” I honestly hated to admit that, because I hadn’t. I briefly thought about how he would be passed down from generation to generation. “I always thought I would pass him along to my kids.”
“Kids?” Wesley’s nostrils flared at my confession.
“Someday, hopefully.”
He grunted in my direction, and I noticed the way the knife started chopping faster. Lionel had made it to where we were. Wesley was taking his time arranging the fruit with a precision I could never match. Lionel gave him a look that said he was considering eating him if he didn’t hurry up.
“Stop rushing perfection, or your tortoise tapas will be ruined,” Wesley grumped at Lionel, dodging his half-hearted attempts at eating his sweatpants.
“His what?”
“Tortoise tapas.”
I was at a loss for words. He was making my tortoise—who had bitten him pretty badly, who was currently trying to take another shot at him—his own special plate. I could feel the hot sting of tears in my eyes at how thoughtful Wesley could be, which was just really fucking annoying right then.
I wanted to continue to be mad at him, but in those moments—in most moments—I was reminded of why I had loved him for years. And I wanted to lash out, tell him he was stupid, but I couldn’t because that would be childish. And he’d made Lionel tapas.
He set down the plate on the ground, and my tortoise abandoned his mission of trying to give him another battle wound and settled on the food in front of him instead.
It gave Wesley the space he needed to move around him and finish setting up Ned.
I just watched him as he did it. Okay, I might have sat gawking at him with his back turned.
Watching the way his gray sweatpants molded to his ass and his dry-fit T-shirt was doing everything it needed to for his back. I was pretty sure I was about to start drooling before Lionel let out a belch.
“What in the world was that?” Wesley turned and looked at him in concern. “I made sure he could eat everything on that plate.” Panic filtered across his features as he started to pull out his phone to double-check. I was hiding my amusement at his horror.
“Call the vet. I can lift him.” He started to make his way toward Lionel, and I could no longer keep the jig up for fear Wesley would lose a hand if he tried to lift him.
“Wesley, stop. He’s just burping,” I said, a ripple of uncontrollable laughter spilling out.
“What? They do that?” He looked puzzled but relieved.
“Yes. Don’t worry. I had something of a similar reaction, but I assure you, it’s normal. Sometimes, I hear his stomach digesting, and let me tell you, that one threw me into a state of panic.”
“I can only imagine.” His lips twitched in amusement. He went back to the task he was working on, and I shot Lionel an I don’t fuckin’ know, man look as he stared at me while eating his food.
“Coffee.” Wesley put down a perfectly made latte in front of me, and I could smell the sugar. My mouth watered, and I groaned as the sweet goodness hit my tongue. “Ned might do it better.” I mumbled, “I love you,” to my latte.
The air around me shifted, and I looked up into Wesley’s piercing stare, his pupils blown. “Drink your coffee, Rosie. Quietly, before you kill me.” He started to wash the dishes hanging on the rack.
“Those are already clean,” I informed him, but he just shot me a look I couldn’t quite decipher, but it had heat pulling between my thighs.
“So, I take it you’re going to be here when I get back from Orla’s?
” I didn’t realize how harsh the words were until they were already out in the open, and I saw the way Wesley flinched and drew back from me again.
“I can go, if you want. Really.”
The words hung there, and maybe it was the guilt, or the look on his face, but I shook my head. “You can stay…”
“I thought we could, uh, just play some of our favorite games. I, uh…” Wesley stuttered and stumbled over himself to get the words out.
“I just thought, uh, maybe you have missed our Sundays like I have… So that was my plan. But now it seems stupid. Not at all well thought out. Not at all.” He grimaced at the ground, where Lionel was still munching away.
“It’s perfect.” And it was. It really was. I just wasn’t sure about how I felt about it.