Chapter Eight
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She’s a stray (kid)!
Poem
“She’s not staying with me,” Fox barks, aghast.
My nose scrunches. Do I want to stay with him? Absolutely not. The butterflies that live in my belly don’t understand the difference between proximity to a man who has potential and a man who, truly, does not. I don’t want to contend with them for weeks with no escape from the man.
Does he need to make it out like his parents just suggested he let a flesh-eating zombie stay in his guest room, though? Absolutely freaking not. He doesn’t have butterflies to contend with. He’s just being plain rude.
“I don’t want to stay with you, either, you know.” I harrumph. “But there’s no need to be a big, giant jerk about it.” Even if one is a big, giant jerk.
“Why can’t she stay with you?” Fox asks his parents, a bead of sweat forming on his temple. “You have a guest room. I’ve seen it. I’ve slept in it. Very nice. Top tier guest room. Perfect for a pretty little princess to sleep in for the night.”
“Pretty little princess isn’t an insult like you think it is,” I inform him, sweeping my pretty little princess hair over my shoulder. “I always wanted to be a princess.”
He doesn’t spare me a glance.
Jerk.
“Our guest room is under construction,” Gilbert tells him, head shaking. “Emerson says it won’t be done for another week, at least, but it’ll be longer now since they have to prioritize Poem’s place.”
Not even trying to hide his desperation, he turns to his brother. “Wolfe? She can stay with you, right?”
Wolfe blinks. “I live across the hall from you. My apartment is a mirror of yours. We have the exact same number of bedrooms. You know that I don’t have an extra.
I have mine, and I have Amia’s, and I’m not about to suggest that Poem sleeps on the couch in an apartment with an eight-year-old girl who wakes up around the same time the sun crests the sky.
Especially when Poem works late hours. Especially when you’re right next door with an empty guest room.
” His bone-white hair flops as he gives his brother a very clear, very confused, what are you on about face.
Fox turns to the other end of the high-top tables we’ve pushed together in the bar for this family meeting, appealing to my big sister next. “Muse?” he asks, voice tinny with his increasing affliction. “Do you have space for her?”
I rest an elbow in front of me, then prop my head in my hand. I wonder if, when he gets through everyone here, he’ll go out and start interrogating people in the streets about spare bedrooms.
“I live in a studio,” Muse answers, leaving out the part about how the one time we did try a sleepover, she spent the entire night in shambles, unable to sleep with Sonnet and me near.
She was up every hour to check on us and riddled with nightmare memories of our childhood during the fitful stretches of sleep she was able to fall into.
Even if she did have the room for me, I’d sleep in my car before I subject her to that again.
I smile my understanding at her and am rewarded with the relief that flashes in her gray eyes. She runs a hand through her short, blonde hair and smiles back.
Meanwhile, Fox moves his pleas to the last person at the table. “Sonnet?”
She nibbles at her lip, an anxious tick that tells me right away the answer is no, but Fox’s tense hopefulness remains in the line of his shoulders. Feathered forearms press into the table as he leans toward my younger sister. “You rent that little house in the square, right? Isn’t that a two-bed?”
“Well,” she says, slowly. “It is.”
He lets out a breath, body deflating with the joy of assurance that I will not be his to keep.
What a sucker.
“But,” Sonnet continues, and I snicker as all of Fox’s stiffness returns, a bow strung tight, “my second bedroom is an office, and the part that isn’t a working space for me is so crammed full of random things for Mayor Hale that you can barely even move around.
” Her eyes hit mine, hazel swirls full of regret.
“You could always share my bed?” she offers, the absolute angel.
Fox’s hope returns.
“Your bed is a single,” Muse comments.
Fox deflates.
“We’ve shared a single before,” Sonnet returns.
Fox perks back up.
“Yeah, when you were children. There’s not going to be space for both of you now.”
Fox groans. “Nobody can take her?” he asks. “No one at all?”
“Have any of you considered,” I ponder. “That I could just get a room at the bed-and-breakfast?”
Belinda shakes her head, silver hair bouncing. “Patty told me they’re full up until August.”
I sit up straight as my stomach drops. The butterflies rejoice. “August?” I repeat weakly. “What about that room that old lady Sherry was renting?”
“That got filled up last week,” Wolfe answers. “Her goddaughter or something.”
“Almond?” I croak. “Surely Almond has room.”
Gilbert and Belinda share a look.
“Almond has a couch,” Wolfe says. “And that couch barely fits Amia’s little body for her to sleep over. It’s definitely not fitting you, even if you are a pretty little princess.”
“I can’t stay with Fox,” I tell the room.
“She can’t stay with me,” he agrees just as vehemently.
Crickets respond.
An hour later, I stand unhappily in front of Fox’s door while my sisters make a run to my house to pack a suitcase for me for the next several weeks. Of staying with Fox. In his apartment. With him.
This is the worst day of my life, and that’s saying something with the house I grew up in.
The butterfly enclosure that is my body disagrees.
Bodies. Are. So. Stupid.
Host extraordinaire, Fox sniffs unhappily as he unlocks his door and pushes in ahead of me, not waiting to see if I follow.
I highly, highly consider not, but Wolfe nudges me from behind, and I have no choice.
It’s into the belly of the grumpy, jerkface beast I go.