Chapter 22 #2
“Hey,” Gunner protests.
“I do,” I tell Gunner. “And you did do that.”
“That doesn’t mean we have to talk about it. We decided not to talk about it.”
“You would do it again,” I interrupt him, turning around to stare my dog down in the back.
“No, I wouldn’t,” he says.
“You absolutely would,” I tell him.
Caleb’s trying not to laugh, but I can tell by the way his cheeks indent that he’s biting them to keep from laughing at the two of us.
“Where are the stops? Where we going?” God, I literally cannot eat fast enough. I had no idea I was this hungry.
“I’m sure there are several stop signs and traffic lights on the way,” he says.
“Fine. Keep your secrets.” Rolling my eyes, I grab my root beer float and drink it, savoring the way the flavors of the root beer and ice cream mingle together deliciously on my tongue. “Hard to be annoyed with all this food though.”
“Yeah, you’re gonna food coma hard, huh?”
“Meat sweats for sure.” I open up the burger, and sure enough, it’s two patties. “It’s gonna be so worth it.”
Caleb pulls into a cute town center, one that I haven’t been in for several years because I haven’t had reason to go anywhere but Silverlight Shore, the grocery store, and the places I needed to go to deliver special orders locally.
“I can’t go shopping like this,” I tell him, looking down at my gross clothes. “I’m pretty sure there’s lettuce in my teeth.” I flip the mirror down and sure enough, lettuce is stuck between my two front teeth. “I look like a hamster that went on a mud run.”
“You don’t have to.” He gives me a long look. “I’ll go shopping for you.”
“What?” I blink.
“I got you an apple hand pie too,” he tells me, shaking the bag of fast food. “Finish your burger. You can have it. Eat it right now while I go shop for you.”
“You can’t tell me what to do. I’m a grown woman.”
“Fine. Don’t eat it. I’ll go in and I’ll take care of it. Okay?”
“You know what size I wear?” Incredulous, it’s all I can do but stare.
Stare and eat my giant burger.
Priorities.
“I looked at your clothes when you were taking a shower at my place earlier,” he says with a grin. It’s devious.
“You were planning on buying me clothes earlier today?”
My brain can’t process that.
“I wouldn’t say that. But if the occasion presented itself, I wanted to know what size you wear. Eat the pie.”
“I will not be bribed with pie,” I fake yell, and we both know that’s a lie. Gunner snorts. I snatch the fast food bag and sure enough, there’s a pie-weighted something in the bottom.
I set it back down, already knowing that thing’s going to be in my stomach in the next ten minutes.
“It looks like you can be bribed with pie,” Caleb observes.
“We’ll we will see about that! And we will see if you pick out the right things,” I say, crossing my arms, then remembering I’m holding my hamburger and taking a massive bite of it instead. “At this rate,” I say through my full mouth, “you might have to buy stuff with a stretchy waistline.”
“I’ll buy whatever you want, sweet cheeks,” he says.
“Please don’t call me that,” I tell him.
“Okay, Ivy. What do you want me to call you?”
“Ivy’s fine.”
“Wifey, maybe?” he asks, raising one eyebrow.
“Caleb Mercer,” I say, “you better get out of here before I decide to cast a spell on you.”
He leans over and gives me a big kiss on the lips.
“I think you’ve already done that.”
He slams the door shut without another word, and slack-jawed, I watch him walk into the cutest boutique on the street.
I’ve only been in it once or twice. I end up buying most of my clothes online because it’s too much of a pain to get around and shop when you own your own business, but I’ve loved everything I’ve seen in there every time.
I have a sneaking suspicion Caleb remembers that from when we dated all those years ago. He gives me one last grin as he shoves the door open.
Then all I have to do is stare at the windows and wait, my heart beating faster than ever.
“It feels too good to be true,” I tell Gunner suddenly and turn around to stare at him.
“That’s because you never let yourself have anything nice,” Gunner tells me.
“That’s not true. I have you, and I have the store, and I have my sisters, and I have a lot of very cute clothes.”
“Yeah, but you don’t let anyone ever do anything for you.
Ever. Even me. I have to practically beg you to let me help you when you’re sick.
And your sisters — don’t even get me started.
The fact that you let them help you last night finally cracked your armor.
" Gunner shakes all over, like he’s just been given a bath he didn’t like.
“Plus, Caleb’s back, and he wants to take care of you, and you’re going to be happy, so deal with it,” he says.
I pick up my phone, at a loss for words and slightly nervous about the fact that Caleb is shopping for me.
“He called me wifey,” I blurt out, then turn around to stare at Gunner again.
Gunner leans forward, resting his chin on the center console, looking up at me with beautiful eyes.
“So?” Gunner says. “So what if he wants to marry you?”
“But he’s only been back in town for a few days,” I whisper-scream.
“We like a man that knows what he wants,” Gunner says. “Besides, where are the red flags?”
“He’s moving too fast.”
“It’s been nearly both your whole lives. How much slower could a man move?”
“But what if he sees what we’re capable of when we’re doing the Calling the Corners ritual and resetting the ward and decides that he’s freaked out at me? It’s going to break me. I don’t think I’ll ever get over it.”
“Yeah,” Gunner agrees, “that would be pretty awful. Well, you want to go down this road of worst-case scenarios? I’m being a supportive familiar.”
“So you think that he’s going to be terrified of me?”
The minute the words explode out of me, I know that’s exactly my problem, and it makes me feel sick.
I put the last bite of burger down and wrap it back up, dropping it in the bag. Suddenly I don’t want anything to eat anymore.
“Ivy,” Gunner says slowly, “no. I don’t think that man could be scared of you if you tried to scare him. I think he’d take one look at you and say something like, ‘I like that in a woman,’ and then he’d throw you over his shoulder like a caveman to take you back to his house.”
“Gunner.” I pinch the bridge of my nose.
Gunner sniffs his way into the paper bag, snout disappearing as he grabs the last bite of burger.
“That apple pie smells really good,” Gunner tells me. “Do you want it or not?”
I swat at him, but he dodges all the way, giving me a wolfish grin, tongue lolling out.
“Don’t you dare touch my apple pie,” I tell him.
“Oh, you got your appetite back already, or you just don’t want to share with me?”
“You’re literally eating the last bite of my burger right now,” I argue with him.
Sighing, I grab the apple pie. It looks delicious. There’s just something to be said for a fully fried hand pie with a molten lava filling that regular apple pies just can’t touch.
Not that I don’t love regular apple pies. I do love a good apple pie. Hell, I love any pie. Sweets are literally my entire business and livelihood and at this point likely ninety percent of my body composition.
But this fried, almost magma-level heat ooey gooey hand pie? Delish.
Especially after a day as wild as the one I just had. Especially after physical labor like the stuff I just did, which, according to my sore shoulders and back, is something I should probably do a little bit more.
All that running didn’t prepare me for lifting a bunch of heavy stuff all afternoon.
“I will eat the pie,” I tell Gunner.
“I knew you would,” he says.
I take a big bite of it, then fish my phone out of my purse, only to see a slew of text messages from my sisters.
Hazel: I found a few ingredients on my list already. Also I found a weird ass ceramic rooster in the kitchen. We can use that, so Rose, don’t worry about finding the perfect cock. We know you’re terrible at that.
Rose: You suck butt
Posey: Your ankle sure healed quick
Hazel: About that
Hazel: I might have found a little spell in that book
Posey: You absolutely did not
Rose: GOOD FOR YOU HAZEL
Hazel: Well don’t be too hasty about that
Rose: WTF does that mean
Hazel: I’ll tell you when I get home. Got my van, btw. There was a racoon in it and now it won’t leave me alone. I swear to God its following me
“Hazel thinks a raccoon is following her,” I tell Gunner, turning around to look at him again and moving my legs so that I’m halfway sitting on top of him.
“I smelled a raccoon on her earlier,” Gunner says casually.
“What the hell? How the hell did you smell raccoon on her? What does that even mean?” I ask.
“I have a very advanced sense of smell, unlike some people.”
If dogs could roll their eyes, he’d be rolling his. Lucky for me he can’t, so I can just hear it in his voice.
“Yeah, but she said the raccoon just started following her.”
“Wait a minute… you don’t think it’s her—?” I pause, not daring to say the word out loud.
“Too soon to tell,” Gunner says casually, like this isn’t huge news that Hazel should probably know about right away.
“You don’t think I should say something, do you?” I say, my fingers hovering over the keyboard on my phone.
Gunner and I look at each other for a beat.
Then we say at the same time: “We shouldn’t get her hopes up.”
“You absolutely do not want to do that,” Gunner says. “Otherwise that raccoon will be living in your house, acting like a familiar with rabies and destroying anything that gets in its path. Probably pissing everywhere too.”
“Raccoons aren’t nasty,” I tell him. “I think they’re pretty cute. They look like little burglars with little masks and little hands.”
“Those little hands will destroy everything in your house,” Gunner tells me. “They’re not that cute.” He looks appalled, clearly upset with me.
“Well, nothing is as cute as you are, buddy,” I say, rubbing his head for good measure.
“Stop pandering to me,” he says.