Chapter 4 #2
“Come on,” I said, leading them up the walk with my hand on the small of Teddy’s back.
“Welcome home,” Draco greeted.
“He doesn’t look like you,” Finn announced, making my brother laugh.
“Yeah, he does,” Jesse hissed. “Shut up, Finn.”
“Jesse,” Teddy mumbled, shooting them a look over her shoulder.
“My wife cooks for me every night,” Draco told Finn, patting his flat belly. “I’m a little bigger than Curt. Hey, I’m Draco.”
“Let ’em in the house first?” I chastised.
“Just thought I’d get it out of the way before—”
I stepped past him and took in the room in an instant, stopping so fast that Jesse ran into my back. “What the fuck?”
“Come in, come in,” Kara said, hurrying toward us. “Hi, I’m Kara! You must be Theodora.”
I heard them making introductions, but my attention was stuck on Dylan and his girlfriend standing frozen in the living room. His girlfriend, who should’ve been a thousand miles away in Montana.
“I can explain,” Dylan said quickly.
“You’re out of your fuckin’ mind,” I barked. “Do her parents know she’s here?”
“Dad—”
“Asked you a question,” I said, cutting off what I knew would be some kind of excuse. I looked at Isla. “Your parents know you’re here?”
“I called them when we got here,” she confirmed softly.
“Fuck’s sake, Isla,” I said, shaking my head. “They’re gonna charge Dyl with fuckin’ kidnapping.”
“As of three days ago, I’m eighteen,” she replied, lifting her chin a little. “Legally an adult.”
“Oh, yeah? How’d that go over with Greg and Debbie?”
“They’re mad.”
“Yeah, I bet.”
“But there’s nothing they can do.”
“Jesus Christ,” I breathed in frustration. “Girl, you haven’t even graduated high school.”
“She can go to school with me,” Dylan said quickly. “We got it all figured out.”
“Oh, you got it all figured out?” I asked derisively. “You, Dylan, who’s seventeen fuckin’ years old, have it all figured out?”
“What’s going on?” Teddy asked, resting her hand on my back as she came up beside me.
It was the first time she’d touched me when I wasn’t touching her first, but I couldn’t even enjoy it because I was staring at my idiot son and his sweet but not-supposed-to-be-in-Oregon girlfriend.
“Deep breath, Curt,” Kara advised.
“She can stay with us,” Dylan said, his tone sliding from apologetic to stubborn. “We’ll finish high school together.”
I should’ve fucking known. When he’d brought up moving to Eugene a few months ago, I should’ve realized that it didn’t make any sense.
He and Isla had been dating since their sophomore year.
Two years was a lot when you were a teenager.
Dylan wouldn’t have willingly left her. Plus, he’d barely questioned that I was going to Sacramento to bring a woman and her kids back to live with us.
If I hadn’t been so fucking distracted, I would’ve clocked that red flag immediately.
“It’s late. Nothin’ we can do tonight,” Draco said, trying to defuse the situation. “Figure it out tomorrow, yeah?”
I continued to stare at Dylan, thinking of all the ways he’d lied since we decided to move home. There hadn’t been a fucking camping trip with his buds. He couldn’t make the drive with me because he’d been waiting for Isla to hit eighteen.
“Curt,” Teddy said quietly, pressing her hand against my back. “Finn is going to burst a blood vessel if you don’t give him a tour soon.”
“Yeah,” I replied absentmindedly. “Right.”
After shaking my head at Dylan, I turned to Teddy’s kids, who were watching the situation uneasily.
“Jesse, Finn,” I said, jerking my head toward Romeo and Juliet. “That’s my son, Dylan, and his girlfriend, Isla.”
“Nice to meet you,” Dylan said from behind me, pissing me off more with his politeness.
“Hey,” Finn greeted.
“You met Draco and Kara?” At their nod, I kept going. “Okay, you wanna see the house?”
I moved toward the back, Teddy at my side. “This is the kitchen. That door leads to the backyard. Pantry’s there.”
“Nice towels,” Jesse said quietly.
Hanging from the oven door handle were two folded towels with rainbows and gnomes on them.
“Thank Kara for those,” I grumbled. She’d also put dish soap and hand soap on the back of the sink.
I showed them the laundry room and led them upstairs. Teddy was silent beside me, but Finn became more animated as he checked everything out.
“Last door is the primary,” I informed them. “Not sure if Dylan picked a room yet, but you can choose from the others.”
Finn threw open the doors. The first one held Dylan’s bed and a bunch of boxes, so he moved on. There was another room open on the left side of the hallway facing the front of the house, and the last open bedroom was on the right side, with windows facing the backyard.
“I want that one,” Jesse said quickly, pointing to the one on the right. “It has more windows.”
“Fine with me,” Finn agreed, disappearing into his new room. “This one is awesome!”
“He’d think that if we were putting him in a closet,” Jesse said dryly as they walked into their room.
“Ours is down here,” I told Teddy.
“Ours,” she mumbled.
“Generally, couples share a room.”
I reached for her hand and tugged her toward the bedroom.
When we got there, I let out a silent breath of relief.
Draco and Kara hadn’t just moved me in. They’d also set up my king-size bed and made the fucking thing.
I tried not to look at it too long, or there was a good chance I’d collapse onto it. Fuck, I was tired.
“I was thinking we’d have two twins,” Teddy said. “Like Lucy and Ricky.”
“Sorry, sweetheart,” I replied, my lips twitching. “I’d fall out of a twin.”
“Yeah,” she looked at me. “I can see that.”
“Plenty of space for both of us.”
“I’ll build a pillow wall,” she muttered, moving further into the room. She walked over to the en suite bathroom and flipped on the light.
“We’ll figure it out,” I told her as she disappeared.
A gentleman would’ve offered to sleep on the floor, but there was no fucking way I was going to do that.
After sleeping on the couch at Draco’s, being awake for nearly twenty-four hours, coming home with a ready-made family, and finding Isla in my living room, sleeping in my bed was the only silver lining.
“Your room is huge,” Jesse announced as they came through the door with Finn on their heels. “And there’s a whole, like, living room at the other end of the hall.”
“Bonus room,” I told her. “We’ll get you kids a couch and shit so you can hang out with your friends—”
“We don’t have any friends here,” Jesse replied flatly.
“Finn, don’t,” Teddy ordered as Finn ran and jumped onto the bed. He was already in the air when she said it and landed sprawled on his stomach. She glanced at me apologetically. “Come on, you guys. Back downstairs. We need to unload.”
“Okay!” Finn popped back up and went racing out of the room.
“We don’t have beds,” Jesse said quietly.
“We’ll figure it out in the morning, okay?” Teddy replied, moving toward us. “I brought your frame. You just need a mattress.”
“We don’t have anything,” Jesse continued.
“We just don’t have furniture,” Teddy countered. “I packed all the important stuff.”
Jesse stared at her for a moment before silently turning on their heel and leaving.
“We don’t need to unload tonight,” I told Teddy as she sighed. “It’ll be fine in the truck overnight.”
Teddy shook her head. “They need their shit around them,” she told me, meeting my gaze for the first time since we’d come upstairs. “They came home this afternoon to a packed-up house and the news that we were leaving. They need their stuff.”
“Then we’ll get it,” I conceded. What was another hour? I could sleep when I was dead.
“Thanks.” She scrubbed her hands over her face tiredly. “This is…not what I was envisioning when Grease called.”
“What were you envisioning?”
“Our own apartment,” she replied. “Where we could sleep on the floor for a few days until we found furniture at a garage sale or thrift store. Some time to explain to them why we’d come to Eugene, get them settled, all of that.”
“And instead, you walked into a house full of people and my idiot son’s drama.”
“I mean…” She shrugged. “Yeah.”
We went back downstairs and found Finn talking a mile a minute to Kara, who was grinning at him indulgently. Everyone else was already outside, and the front door was wide open.
“We can unload ourselves,” Teddy said, following me toward the door. “If you’d just open the garage, we can—”
“No reason to put it all in the garage when it needs to come in the house anyway,” I replied, nodding to Kara as we passed.
“I’m serious,” Teddy continued, her voice thin. “Really. Jess and I can unload it. I loaded it all up myself. None of the boxes are that heavy.”
She ran into my back when I stopped on the porch. “You loaded it all yourself?”
“I told you. Everything was loaded when the kids got home,” she replied. “What? Did you think I had the maid do it?”
“You had a maid?” I asked dumbly.
Teddy looked at me like I’d grown an extra head as she moved around me. “No, I didn’t have a fucking maid.”
“Right.” Fuck, I needed sleep. With every minute that passed, I felt foggier, and my body felt heavier.
“Fucking hell,” my brother grumbled as we reached him. He was leaning over the side of the truck bed, reaching inside. “You think you tied this down well enough?”
“I have a system,” Teddy replied, climbing onto the back tire.
I stared at her ass and thighs as she bent over, my mouth watering.
Completely oblivious, she reached between the boxes and the sidewall, and after a few moments, the spiderweb of tie-downs came loose.
She rose up and hopped down from the tire, and I jerked my eyes away.
“Let Dylan carry the heavy shit,” I told Jesse as they came toward me holding the bags from the back seat.
“I can carry boxes,” they replied dryly.
“Didn’t doubt it,” I said. “But Dylan’s on my shit list. Let him do it.”
They snickered as they moved past.