Chapter 2
RILEY
Ihave got to be the world's most astounding dumbfuck.
What could possibly have possessed me to bring this girl back to my house, I can't imagine. Like most dudes, crying chicks short circuit my brain. Turn me into a panicking fucknut.
Like, Oh god, she’s crying! What do I do? Bring her to my house, obviously.
Raina all but threw herself at me, and I turned her down because I am—say it with me, now—THE WORLD'S MOST ASTOUNDING DUMBFUCK.
And then, mere hours later, I bring home a girl who is even more sweet and clean and innocent.
I mean, no, I didn't bring her home in that sense.
For one thing, my home is my haven. My safe space.
I don't bring chicks back here. Ever. That's a hard-and-fast rule, one I am even more obsessive about keeping than putting a hat on my bishop before hooking up.
For another, this girl, Cadence, is absolutely, unequivocally untouchable.
By me, I mean. She doesn't curse. Has never, until she met my sinful ass, even touched alcohol.
She doesn't watch TV. She goes on medical missionary trips to fucking Africa.
She's devastated because no one will fund her intent to go to South motherfucking Sudan, where a vicious, dangerous civil war is raging.
She graduated high school at fifteen and got her MD from goddamned Harvard at twenty-two. Doogie Howser, who?
Yeah, she's…strange. Talks like a Victorian age robot or some shit, and seems to be a walking encyclopedia of literally everything.
But fuck me, she's breathtaking.
Her hair is a wild explosion of strawberry blond ringlets that's always in her eyes, though she never seems to notice, never brushes it away, never tosses her head.
She has literally picture-perfect posture—ramrod spine, shoulders back, chin up.
Even sitting, you could balance a glass of water on her head.
She's around five-six or seven. She's delicate, with silky, creamy skin, tiny, clever, restless hands, and the biggest, deepest, greenest eyes I've ever seen.
Her beauty transcends—and yes, I know what the fuck "transcend" means, shut up—her individual features. I can't explain it. There's just this…light, to her. An internal brilliance that takes the angles and curves of her face and transforms them into something wholly angelic.
This is what's going through my brain as I strip my bed of the sheets, wad them up in the fitted sheet, and toss the giant ball of sheets toward the door.
After struggling with the fitted sheet for a moment, I finally get the fucking thing on the bed, after which the rest is easy.
Fuck fitted sheets. You'd think by this point in our race's technological advancements, we'd have come up with a better alternative to fitted sheets.
I settle the giant king-size-plus blanket over the bed, and then fold my grandmother's quilt in half and drape it over the bottom third.
I do my best to arrange the pillows into some semblance of order, but I honestly don't make my bed too frequently. Cole, the type-A goody-goody fruitcake, swears by making your bed every morning; he says even if your whole day is one big fuckup, if you made your bed, you’ve accomplished one thing, and then you get to go home to a neat, made bed.
Fuck that. When I crash at the end of a long, frustrating day, I like to wrap up in the blankets like a fluffy mouse's nest. When the bed is made, getting the blankets into the right nest shape takes longer.
I scan my room, making sure there's nothing embarrassing left out. Dirty clothes are in the hamper, and clean clothes are put away. Check the bathroom—fortunately, I just had Mrs. Henshaw over to do a deep clean of the kitchen and bathroom earlier in the week, so it's decently clean.
Satisfied that I've made things as female-palatable as possible, I head back out to the living room.
And there's Cadence, perched on the couch like a mannequin in that picture-perfect posture, staring straight ahead with her hands folded demurely on her lap.
If I couldn't see her chest rising and falling ever so gently, I'd wonder if she was some sort of super-advanced android from a hundred years in the future.
She doesn't notice me enter; I'm not sure she's even blinking.
"Cadence?" I keep my voice low and quiet, not wanting to stare at her. She doesn't register any reaction, so I approach closer. "Cadence?"
Nothing.
I have to be inside her field of peripheral vision, but still, not a sign that she knows I’m here. I touch her shoulder as softly as I can, keeping my voice quiet. "Cadence?"
She jumps six inches, gasping, clapping a hand to her chest. "Oh! Goodness gracious, Riley. You startled me."
"Goodness gracious, huh?" I echo, laughing and shaking my head. "My grandma used to say that all the time."
"I have a propensity for anachronistic speech patterns and syntax," she says.
“Yeah, no clue what that means," I say. "I did say your name like three times."
"My apologies. I tend to become too lost in my thoughts to the exclusion of all else."
"So, how do I not startle you when you're thinkin' deep thoughts?" I ask.
"With great caution. Approach from the front. Try to catch my gaze." She blushes furiously. "If you have ever attempted to approach a skittish horse, you might understand."
"My buddy Nyx grew up on a farm not far outside town, and they had horses.
" I don't know why I'm telling her this.
"They had this horse, Spook. Nyx's older sister was the type who was always bringin' home birds with broken wings, stray cats with injured legs, malnourished dogs.
Well, she found Spook being neglected, bullied the owners into selling him, and brought him home.
Only, Spook was called Spook because he could be spooked by literally anything.
And for some reason, that weird-ass fuckin' horse took a liking to me. "
She smiles. "So you have an affinity for weird, easily spooked creatures."
"Nah, just that one horse."
"And me, it would seem." She yawns, then, a huge, jaw-cracker of a yawn, stretching her arms overhead and arching her back.
My eyes, the dirty fucks, fix like laser beams on her chest as her stretch presses her tits against the neckline of her dress.
Yeah, I'm getting the impression that she's hiding a pretty damn killer body under that loose, modest, flowy dress.
I drag my eyes away before she ends the yawn, not wanting to be caught ogling her.
Her moss-and-pine eyes find mine. "I am extraordinarily tired. That walk was woefully ill-advised. I feel stupid for subjecting myself to it so unnecessarily. I should not have allowed myself to behave so rashly."
"Well, I've got the bed all made up for you. So, you know, you can crash now."
She smiles at me tiredly. "That would be wonderful. I have not looked forward to sleeping this much in a very long time."
I stand up and hold out my hand. "C'mon, I'll show you."
She just stares at my hand for a moment, and then tentatively fits her tiny, delicate hand into mine.
Allows me to help her to her feet—I don't miss the wince she tries to hide, or the way she limps and hobbles a few steps before willing herself to walk normally.
God, she's tough. Her feet were destroyed.
If you've never walked that far, you don't understand what it's like, or the toll it can take on your body.
I lead her by the hand to my room at the end of the hall.
She stops just inside and takes it in, studying her surroundings.
I try to see it from the perspective of someone who didn't put the floors down and paint the walls: I picked a soothing pale blue for the walls, and instead of harsh can lights in the ceiling, I picked wall-mounted light fixtures in a warm bronze with Edison bulbs.
Same floors as throughout, obviously, but I put a big, thick-pile rug under the bed to soften the room a bit.
My bed is a sleigh bed, a handmade antique that I restored myself.
"This is very much not what I expected from the bedroom of a single adult male," she says. "It is…cozy. Inviting. And…clean."
"Used to be a slob, growing up," I hear myself say. "Dad and Fee were always on my ass about picking up after myself. My car was a science experiment, and I'm pretty sure there were entire ecologies growing in my bedroom."
"You clearly learned the value of cleanliness at some point," she says.
"Sure did. I spent a few years in a place where there wasn't much of a choice about keeping your shit neat." My gut burns—the last fucking thing I want is to tell this girl—the poster-child for "good girl"—that I'm an ex-con who did a nickel in a state pen.
She doesn't reply to my statement—no follow-up questions, no leading statements, trying to dig deeper. She just turns those virulently green eyes on me, her expression unreadable.
I can't take it. "Not gonna ask what that means?"
"No." She resumes her examination of my room, wandering over to the bed, where she trails her fingers over the quilt.
"Just no?"
"If you wished to elucidate, you would have done so. Curiosity does not excuse nosiness." She traces her fingertip around the perimeter of a quilt square made out of my grandfather's flannel shirt. "This quilt is quite old, is it not?"
"Yeah," I answer. "My grandma made it…ah, shit, when? Fifty years ago? Sixty? If there was ever a house fire, god forbid, and I could only save one thing, it'd be that quilt. Loved the shit outta my grandparents.”
"It is lovely. One can sense the love that went into its creation."
I nod. "Right? After my folks split up, Grandma and Grandpa were what kept me anything like sane.
Second-worst day of my life was the day Grandma passed.
Grandpa went less than a week after her.
" My throat is hot and tight and thick. "Not bein' there for the funeral is somethin' I doubt I'll ever get over. "