Chapter 5
Teddy
I opened my eyes to sunlight on my face from the curtainless window across the room. I was alone in Curt’s massive bed, and the bedroom door was cracked so I could hear movement in the rest of the house. Rolling onto my back, I took a few moments to let my new reality set in.
We were in Eugene, Oregon, and I’d just spent the night next to a man who—for some reason that hadn’t been explained to me—had put his life on hold to fake a relationship with a woman he didn’t know.
I scrubbed my hands over my face, trying to make sense of the decision I’d made on a whim and I now had to deal with.
I’d gotten into bed the night before and lay there stiff as a board, waiting for Curtis to come out of the bathroom.
He’d been pretty touchy-feely on the ride north, and I wasn’t quite sure just how real he thought we were going to make things.
From my experience with men, if you gave them an inch, they’d take a mile, and I’d given him quite a few inches.
I wasn’t looking forward to telling him that he would not be giving me a few inches.
That was when I’d really know what kind of man he was, and if I was honest, I was worried that my gut instinct had been wrong about him.
It was wrong a lot.
So I’d waited there in bed, hyping myself up to turn him down and deal with the fallout, and he hadn’t come out.
There was no clock in the room, so I couldn’t be sure how long I waited, but it was so long that I’d managed to fall asleep.
I woke up sometime in the night to find him snoring softly beside me, sprawled out on his side of the bed with his hand on my ass, but he hadn’t even twitched when I’d moved it away.
I wished it hadn’t been pitch black in the room so I could’ve seen what he looked like when he was sleeping.
Now, it was today, and now I had to do all the things that I’d pushed out of my mind during our mad dash.
The kids’ school needed to be informed that they wouldn’t be back, and I was hoping that they would just let finals slide and post the grades as is since they’d only had a week left anyway.
I needed to call Sara to let her know I wouldn’t be back in and why.
She’d wonder what the fuck was going on, but she wouldn’t ask.
She’d gotten enough of my history during a drunken night when the kids were at friends’ houses that she probably wouldn’t be surprised I’d found a way out and taken it.
The kids needed furniture, and our boxes needed to be unpacked so we had food and towels and all the other little things that you didn’t realize you needed until you needed them.
I also had to start looking for a job—I had a little put away, but not nearly enough—and I needed to touch base with Grease.
The list was endless. I needed to get my ass out of bed.
“You awake?” Jesse called softly, pushing the bedroom door open.
“Yeah,” I replied, leaning up on my elbow. “What time is it?”
“Eight,” they replied, coming over to sit on the edge of the bed. “Curt said he’ll drive me to get coffee. Is that cool with you?”
“Yeah,” I said, pushing myself up. “Give me a sec, and I’ll get dressed.”
“No.” They shook their head. “Finn is still out, so someone has to stay with him.”
“Oh.” I looked them over. They were wearing a Guns N’ Roses muscle shirt and a pair of baggy cargo shorts that we’d found at a garage sale and were at least two sizes too big and had to be held up with a canvas belt.
Their braids were starting to get a little fuzzy around the edges, probably because they hadn’t been able to find their bonnet last night, so they’d thrown on a National Parks hat that sat at a jaunty angle.
They’d already gotten ready to go. Asking me if I minded was a formality.
“Sure, baby. Go ahead. Do you need cash?”
“I’ve got some.”
“You sure?”
“I have a ten,” they confirmed as they hopped to their feet. “Curt is gonna bring me to his cousin’s shop, and he said we’ll be back in, like, twenty.”
“You have your phone?”
“I got it,” they replied as they disappeared through the doorway.
They’d gone from threatening to murder the man to going with him for coffee, which was a bit of a head scratcher, but I wasn’t worried. Jesse was born with a built-in bullshit detector. If they hadn’t felt comfortable, they wouldn’t have asked to go.
I got up and took a quick shower, thankful that I’d packed a beach towel in my bag in case of emergencies and I didn’t need to go search through the boxes downstairs to find one.
I’d learned early, especially on road trips, that it was the random shit you couldn’t think of a reason to bring that you ended up needing.
Towels could be used as a blanket, cleaning up a spilled fast-food soda or a bathroom incident—though we hadn’t had one of those in a long time—covering a seat that was too hot from the sun, or, in my case, drying off after a shower in a bathroom that had absolutely nothing in it.
As soon as I was dressed, I braided my hair so it would stay out of my face and pulled out my makeup.
I’d spent my entire adult life wearing the same thing—sunblock, black eyeliner, mascara, and ChapStick.
It took me about two minutes to do and made me feel put together even when I didn’t have the time or inclination to spend much time getting ready.
A couple of years ago, though, Jesse had been a bit obsessed with makeup tutorials on the internet, and that shit had rubbed off.
They’d been so interested and insistent that I’d eventually agreed to branch out.
I now owned eye shadow and blush, some shit that made my face look dewy, and a lip gloss that didn’t make my lips feel like I’d slathered them in maple syrup.
Today, though, was a black eyeliner day. I felt anxious and determined. I didn’t feel dewy.
As soon as I was done getting ready for the day, I went to check on Finn.
Yesterday had been a long one, and I’d wondered how he would react.
There were two options—he could’ve woken up at the ass crack of dawn because he was so excited to be in a new place with new people, or he could’ve crashed hard and slept in.
He’d done the latter. When I opened his door, he was sprawled out on top of his sleeping bag, one hand flung over his head and the other over his face to block out the light shining through the window.
We really needed curtains or blinds. I added it to my mental list as I made my way downstairs.
I wasn’t sure how much time I had left before Curt and Jesse got back from their coffee run, but I figured I’d get started on unpacking some of our boxes while I waited. Dylan and Isla were sitting at the kitchen table, whispering, when I entered the room.
“Hey,” Dylan greeted, lifting his head.
“Hey,” I replied. I smiled at Isla, who smiled right back, if a little nervously.
I understood Curtis’s reaction the night before.
They’d done something really stupid by bringing Isla to Oregon, but I couldn’t help but notice how adorable they were.
You could tell by how she looked at him that Isla thought Dylan was the coolest, funniest, handsomest boy she’d ever seen.
I couldn’t really blame her. He was the spitting image of his dad.
Dylan, on the other hand, looked at Isla like she was something precious.
His normal teenage-boy cool turned into something else entirely in his interactions with her.
I hadn’t been around them much, but he seemed to bend to her.
If only they were about ten years older, things would’ve been a lot simpler.
“It’s kind of weird,” I noted, mostly just for something to talk about. “How bare everything is. We’ve always rented furnished apartments, so we at least had something to sleep on.”
“Yeah, my Aunt Charlie and Uncle Bishop brought this over last night,” Dylan said, knocking on the kitchen table. “It was my Aunt Rose’s, but they bought something new, so they gave it to us.”
“Nice.”
“We sold pretty much everything except our beds and my dad’s recliner when we moved,” he continued. “It was all shit anyway. He said we’d just get new stuff here instead of having to move it all.”
“Makes sense,” I replied, leaning against the counter. “That’s pretty much what we did. I don’t enjoy moving things I can’t lift myself, so furnished places worked great.”
“You lived in California?” Isla asked. “I love California. We’ve been to Disneyland like four times!”
I smiled and nodded. “Happiest place on earth, right?”
“It really is,” she said with a sigh.
Sacramento wasn’t anywhere near Disneyland, and my kids had never been to the theme park. I’d gone with my parents and brothers when I was little, but as an adult, I’d never had the money for that kind of trip, and I also hadn’t wanted to be so far from my pop when he was sick.
“So you and my dad, huh?” Dylan said, his eyes steady on mine. “How did that happen?”
For a moment, I froze. The words had been calm and nonchalant, but the look on his face wasn’t.
I had no idea how much Curtis had told his son, but it clearly wasn’t enough for Dylan’s liking, and he was hoping that I’d slip up and give him something more.
He looked like a man, but I reminded myself he wasn’t.
He was just a kid, and the fact that he was asking me, a practical stranger, while his dad wasn’t home, reminded me of how young Dylan really was.
“We met years ago,” I said, fighting the urge to fidget. Lies were best told when you believed they were true and gave the impression that you didn’t care if the other person believed you or not. “And then we started talking a few months ago.”
“Crazy,” he replied, nodding a little like he didn’t trust a word I was saying. “He didn’t say anything to me.”
“I didn’t tell Jess and Finn either,” I replied, holding his gaze. “Sometimes, you just want to make sure something’s right before you tell everyone about it, you know?”