Chapter 23
Twenty-Three
That feeling of relief when you thought you ran over an animal and it turns out to be a person…
—Eddy to Nettie
Eddy
Weaver’s phone rang in the middle of the night almost a week later, and he groaned. “Hello?”
There was a shift and a tug on the sheet that was covering me, and then he was sitting up, swinging his legs over the bed. “I’ll be there in about thirty minutes. It’s going to take me a bit, because I have to go to the office and get the truck.”
Silence, and then Weaver stood up from the bed, groaning as he did.
We’d only gone to sleep an hour ago.
Boston and Weaver had taken it upon themselves to catch up for lost time and spend every available second together watching TV, eating copious amounts of food, laughing and chattering.
When she wasn’t eating, sleeping, or talking with her father, she was bouncing a ball around in the house.
It didn’t bother me.
It did, however, drive Weaver insane.
“I forgot how annoying it is,” he’d said to me as he came to bed just an hour ago.
“I saw an ad for one of those silent balls that makes no noise when you bounce it,” I’d said. “Maybe we could order one?”
“It’s not the same,” he’d admitted. “The weight’s different.
It’d be a cool present, but she’d just go back to that old ball.
I can’t believe she even found it. I had Dad ship it to me because it was one of her older ones and she wouldn’t notice it missing.
But it’s like she’s laser-focused wherever there’s a soccer ball concerned. ”
Now, after just getting into bed, he was getting out of it.
“Sleep,” he urged as he saw me shift under the covers. “I’m going to head out. I probably won’t be long, but it still takes time to get to the office, get the truck, and get back.”
“No rush,” I slurred. “I’ll just freeze without you.”
He chuckled quietly, and I had the urge to reach out and tug him closer by his pants leg, asking for a kiss.
We hadn’t gone much further than sleeping in the same bed seeing as his daughter was taking up the only spare room he had. But the tension was there.
He hadn’t so much as kissed me since the day we’d gone all the way in his laundry room. However, that didn’t matter to my heart.
I was so irrevocably in love with him that he could never kiss me again, and I’d still be just as in love.
Our relationship had started out purely sexual.
Our relationship now, however? It was something that they wrote romance novels about.
The tension. The need. The yearning.
It was all there.
The casual glances across the room. The long, shared looks over dinner.
The way I felt against his heart as we watched movies.
The way he checked my injuries every day.
The way he came to my appointments to make sure that I was okay.
The way he made dinner every night. The way he laughed with his daughter.
There were just so many things that I’d found attractive about the man that I was finding it hard to breathe.
“Be careful,” I told him when he started out of the room. “Love you.”
I was asleep moments later, unaware of just what I’d said to him as I’d fallen back under, but he was more than aware.
I missed the way he came back to the bed and pressed a kiss to my throat and the way he pulled the covers up high, tucking me in slightly.
I was so deeply asleep that I wasn’t aware that something was wrong until Boston all but hissed into my ear.
“Wake up.”
I started awake, which had my ribs screaming.
“What’s wrong?” I said through the pain.
“There’s someone here.”
I frowned. “Who?”
“I don’t know.” She sounded scared, and I didn’t like hearing the fear in her voice.
“Call 9-1-1,” I ordered.
She swallowed thickly before saying, “I tried on the way in here. Every time I place the call, it makes this weird beeping sound.”
I got out of bed with zero dexterity and made my way to the drawers of Weaver’s nightstand.
I’d seen the gun there when I’d opened the drawer looking for a remote to turn on the television last week.
Being a native Montanan, I’d grown up with guns. I knew how to shoot. I knew how to protect myself. And I knew what to do in case of emergencies.
My dad had taught me how to protect myself, which seems hypocritical now seeing as my father didn’t protect innocents any longer, but exploited them.
With the gun in my hand, I checked to make sure the chamber had a bullet in it and that the magazine was full.
It was.
“Try again,” I whispered. “And get into the closet. On the floor, cover yourself with the blankets we threw there after the movie last night.”
My left hand was in a cast, so the left hand was going to have to do.
“Okay,” she whispered and moved, her phone screen already lighting up.
Only when the door closed behind her did I go out to the main living area.
All seemed quiet until I heard the scratch of the back door lock being picked.
“Fuck,” I whispered to myself, terrified.
I’d never shot anyone or anything before. The only thing I’d ever intentionally maimed was a watermelon.
And now I was going to shoot someone coming into Weaver’s place.
Did I announce myself? Did I tell whoever was on the other side of the door that I was going to shoot? Should I surprise them and just fire?
I had no clue what to do.
Even worse, I didn’t know if they were bad or good.
Which was a stupid thought as the lock clicked and the scraping stopped.
Whoever was trying to get in here was doing it in the middle of the night and it was a perfectly reasonable assumption that they were doing it for nefarious reasons.
The door handle slowly pushed open, and only Weaver’s well-oiled maintenance on his doors kept it silent.
I felt like I could feel my heartbeat in my throat, though.
If someone had said they could hear my heartbeat in that moment, I wouldn’t have been surprised.
“Don’t come inside!” I said forcefully. “I don’t know why you’re here, but you need to leave!”
Shock had me freezing where I stood when I heard my father’s voice fill the room around me.
“I’m here because you’re ruining my life with lies!” my father hissed.
My hand holding the gun started to shake, and I brought the gun down lower, but didn’t take my finger off the trigger just in case.
“I’m not lying about anything, and you know it.” My voice trembled. “You need to leave. Right now.”
“I’m not going anywhere.”
Then he started running toward me, his feet pounding on the floor in such a way that I knew he was going to hit me. I instinctively started backing up.
The gun went off in my hand almost automatically, and I jolted as my elbow pounded backward into my hip. My ribs screamed, and my body jolted in surprise and shock.
Then my father wasn’t running toward me anymore.
He was yelling on the ground while rolling around yelling, “You shot me!”
“Of course, she fucking shot you,” I heard hissed. “You came running into her house in the middle of the night after breaking in, and after her clearly telling you to stop!”
Boston.
Goddammit.
“I told you to hide.”
“I couldn’t leave you out here barely able to move to handle this on your own,” Boston replied.
That made me want to throw up.
“B, back into the room. Now.”
At least I had the brainpower to know that Boston shouldn’t be seen by my father, and he shouldn’t know her name.
“But…”
“Now!”
She left, closing the door behind her as she went.
I reached to turn on the lights that were by my hand using the barrel of the gun, and as my eyes adjusted to the dark, I watched as my dad rolled around on the floor moaning with his hands covering his upper belly.
Blood was pouring out from between his fingers, and he was staring at me with gritted teeth.
“What are you doing here?” I asked.
He didn’t answer.
“Hey, B? Can you get a call out yet?”
“No!” she called through the window.
“And what did you do to our cell phone communication?” I asked angrily.
“Jammer.”
“Well, where is this jammer?” I asked.
“On the back porch,” he hissed out.
“Well, you get to crawl to it and turn it off so I can call 9-1-1 for you, or you can just die on the kitchen floor. Whatever you want,” I suggested.
He crawled. Slowly, but he crawled, leaving a trail of blood behind him as he moved toward the back door.
“What did you think you were going to accomplish here?” I asked. “Did you think that you were just going to come inside and I’d listen?”
“You weren’t taking my calls, and you weren’t at home,” he hissed. “I know you had something to do with this all.”
“Of course, I did,” I retorted angrily. “I saw the room. I’m not down with having pedophiles as parents!”
“It’s not pedophilia,” he hissed.
“Looking at young children naked isn’t pedophilia?” I asked in outrage.
“They’re over five,” he countered, his voice haughty and disgusting. “That’s not pedophilia. Technically, it’s a minor attracted person.”
I don’t know what came over me, but I shot him again.
He cried out, his hand coming back down to his thigh where the bullet had entered from behind.
“Eddy!” Boston cried.
“I’m okay. I did it!” I called out.
Silence.
“Keep crawling, you sick fuck,” I hissed out, ignoring the pain in my ribs.
At least my wounds were closed.
The bulk of the stitches had come out yesterday morning. And though they were hideous as fuck, at least they weren’t stitched anymore and were still holding when I did things like shoot a man.
If you could call this person a “man” after what he’d just admitted to.
“Keep crawling,” I ordered.
Lights filled the room behind me, and I froze, wondering what I should do next.
Should I…
The familiar sound of a truck door closing had me loosening a breath.
The keys in the door at the opposite end of the house had me breathing out shakily.
The door opened and then, “Eddy, what…”
His footsteps on the hardwood floor went from calm to panic in a matter of moments.
“I’m okay,” I called out when I knew he’d spotted the blood. “Back here.”
He arrived in half a breath and took in the scene, his body moving to mine as he took the gun from my grasp.