Chapter 17
Seventeen
Paying taxes on roads rough enough to knock a tooth out is wild.
—Odin to Constance
Odin
Great freakin’ question.
What was I doing here?
I’d intended to go home with my tacos and beer.
Instead, I’d found myself driving out of town to a certain woman’s house in the middle of a wildlife sanctuary. Clearly, I wasn’t using my brain.
I had a case of beer under one arm, Peanut’s leash in the other hand, and a bag of tacos between my teeth.
She reached forward to catch the greasy bag from my mouth and looked at me with curiosity.
Waiting for me to answer.
“I was going to go home,” I admitted.
Her shoulders slumped. “But you came here?”
“But I came here,” I agreed.
“Oh.” She nodded. “Do you want to come in?”
I nodded, giving the bird in the tree glaring at me one last glance before I stepped over the threshold.
“Your pet doesn’t seem to like me.”
“He’s jealous,” she admitted. “He likes to monopolize my time. He barely tolerates Wendy. I try to spend alone time with him every single day, because of his obvious control issues, but even that’s not enough sometimes.”
My lips quirked. “Not a bad thing having an animal so fully devoted to you.”
She looked down at Peanut who was leaning against my leg looking up at me with the same devotion. “Looks like you got one of those of your own.”
I shrugged. “He’s extra clingy today. He’s not usually glued so securely to my leg. I think he thought that I’d given him away when I took him to the trainer. When he got here, he turned into this clingy fool.”
“That’s sad,” she said as she walked farther into the house. “Is it snowing too bad yet?”
“Not terrible,” I called after her. “Tonight’s just supposed to be a dusting. The real stuff won’t start for another month or so, according to the locals.”
“You’re not local?” she asked in surprise.
I winced, wondering how I was going to explain this. I hadn’t had the need to use my “lie” before with someone that was going to want to know everything and would likely sense that I wasn’t being completely truthful.
“No.” I shrugged. “Moved here about a year ago.”
Not a lie.
I had moved here.
Only after I’d been broken out of prison.
“Oh.” She nodded. “That makes sense. You said something the day they were choosing jurors about how you weren’t too keen on the snow. How last winter was brutal. But then the lawyer said that it was mild in comparison. You said ‘you wouldn’t know.’”
I had said that.
She was too perceptive. That’d been a passing comment, and she’d been across the room. How had she heard?
“Let him off his leash,” she suggested. “I have some big bowls you can use for water right there on the counter.”
I got Peanut some water and set it on the floor for him.
He sniffed at it but didn’t go for it.
I took his leash off and hung it on the back of the dining room chair before shifting awkwardly from foot to foot.
“Do you plan on staying for a while?”
I opened my mouth to say no but that was not what had come out. “As long as you want me.”
Her eyes lit up with excitement. “How do you feel about House?”
I’d never watched it before in my life. Which I admitted to.
Usually, I tried to stay away from medical shows. Usually, they ended up pissing me off.
“I’ll start it from the beginning. You’ll love it.”
I didn’t love it.
In fact, it was outrageous that they couldn’t come up with the obvious as soon as the symptoms were presented within the first five minutes of the show.
Drama for drama’s sake.
“She has lupus,” I murmured.
“How do you know?”
I explained all of her symptoms that instantly pointed to lupus and why they pointed to lupus. There should’ve never been a question as to what she had. Even a first-year med student could figure this out.
“This is something we learned in the first year of med school,” I said, then realized that I was being rather hard on her show. “But still fun to watch.”
Kind of.
Watching an obvious drug addict was slightly worrisome.
Especially how all the staff seemed to know it yet still allowed him to practice medicine.
“The way he comes up with these epiphanies at the end made me think that it’s not obvious.” Constance frowned.
The show ended with the woman having lupus and the doctor saving her in a dramatic fashion at the very last second.
“Okay, let’s see if you can figure out the next one.”
“I’ll bet it’s cobalt poisoning from her hip implant,” I mused.
Constance’s fingers flew on her phone as she Googled the answer, then laughed abruptly. “You’re right.”
This is how it went for the next hour. She would watch the first five minutes, I would guess the outcome, and she would Google the answer.
I was right nearly every time.
“This is amazing,” she said. “But, possibly, we shouldn’t watch any medical dramas. I think you’d be best served watching something that you can forget and just relax.”
Tacos and beer devoured, I helped clean up while she searched through the movies on Netflix for something to watch.
“If Peanut needs to go out, you can let him out the back door. It’s fenced,” she said.
I let him out and came back inside moments later to see Shawshank Redemption cued up on the television.
I nearly laughed out loud.
Of course she would want to watch a prison break movie.
I sat down as she leaned sideways and took off her socks.
She tucked her feet up underneath herself and reached for a blanket on the back of the couch.
She was almost completely covered as she waited for me to come sit down.
I took the seat that I’d had earlier, but kicked off my boots beside the couch and flipped the recliner up.
“This is one of my favorite movies,” she said as she hit Play. “I always love that he got out in the end. I hated that he was forced to be there.”
Something weird inside my chest tightened at her words.
“Yeah,” I agreed quietly. “I agree.”
She nudged the remote with her toe and said, “Here. Put this over there.”
I took it and laid it on the table next to the couch arm. When I turned back, she was a little bit closer.
Not touching, but not very far away, either.
All it would take is another couple of inches and…
The movie started playing, and I split my attention between the show and the woman at my side.
Despite it only being eight thirty, her eyelids started to droop and her face was half buried in her blanket.
“You want me to go?” I asked about twenty minutes in. “You look tired.”
She sat up straight. “No. Stay.”
The forceful way in which she said it had something inside of me stilling at her words.
“Okay,” I said. “But let me know if you want me to go.”
She nodded.
It was cute.
The next thirty minutes she tried valiantly to stay awake.
She would nod off and jerk herself back upward, looking at me to see if I’d caught the slip.
She was like a child who refused to say that she was tired.
I watched more of her than I did the damn movie.
At one point, I couldn’t take it anymore and reached for her. “Come here.”
She looked at me, trying and failing to open her eyes all the way. “It’s just that movies are really hard for me to stay awake through. I’ve been this way since I was a kid. I think I watched the entire Little Mermaid in bits and pieces. Never the whole thing at once.”
She was a chatterbox when she was tired, too.
It was cute.
I curled my arm around her and tugged her into my side.
She came willingly, and then curled into me tighter, keeping her knees up in between us.
Her feet snuck under my butt, and her head came to rest on my shoulder, right above my collarbone.
I never knew it but, this was exactly what I needed.
Her in my arms.
I hadn’t realized how right it would feel until that very moment.
She sighed, parroting my thoughts.
“This is one of my favorite parts,” she said when the scene where he became the prison accountant began. “I like how badly they need him.”
I hummed in agreement.
I was starting to get a bit of her movie drowsiness.
But then she shifted and her body moved into mine just a little bit deeper.
Her arm wrapped around my gut, and then she was pressing a little bit further into my space.
It was obviously the signal that my body needed to completely relax.
My eyes closed and my brain shut down.
The last thing I remembered was hearing Andy say, Get busy living, or get busy dying.
My last thought before I fell asleep with Constance on my chest was, maybe Andy was right.
Maybe I did need to get busy living. Because suddenly I wasn’t all too keen on dying.