Chapter 16 Coco
Coco
We’re still full from lunch by the time we reach my house, and I figure dinner will be nothing more than cereal. I put down newspapers for the lambicorn to potty on (fingers crossed it works) and tell Stone the couch pulls out into a bed.
We’re just about to yank that sucker out when the doorbell rings.
When I answer, a small army of old ladies, as well as Cristina, who’s holding a bottle of wine, is standing on my porch, which is no bigger than a postage stamp.
My stomach bottoms out because I’ve completely forgotten what night it is. “Hey, y’all. I’ve . . . been expecting you.”
“Expecting who?” Stone comes over and peeks out the door. “Hey, ladies.”
“Why, hello, handsome,” Clarice says. “I didn’t know you’d be joining us for book club.”
Stone quirks a brow my way. “Book club?”
“Uh, yeah.” The words I forgot about it nearly leave my mouth, but that would insult the women who genuinely read the monthly assigned books and want to discuss.
So not only did I forget it’s book club night—more importantly, I forgot it’s my night to host.
I gesture for them to enter, and a small stampede of seventy-year-old women charges into my tiny living room.
The septuagenarians are followed by Cristina. “I tried to call you,” she says as the women pull Stone aside and pepper him with questions.
Clarice interrogates him first. “What’d you think of the book?”
He plows his fingers through his hair. “Well, I—”
Another says, “Did you know who the killer was? Did you guess it?”
“Um, I wasn’t—”
“Do you want to be our dead body?” Clarice asks.
The women gasp with excitement.
Stone hears this and his brows pump with mischief. He bows with a flourish. “It would be my honor to be your dead body.”
The women cheer with delight and Stone laughs. His eyes shine bright and a lopsided smile smears across his face.
He looks genuinely happy, genuinely delighted. Genuinely pleased.
All these genuine emotions wafting off him confuse the hell out of me.
My mind spins as something inside me shifts.
There isn’t time to poke and prod the feeling, because the ladies begin bossing Stone around, asking him to push the furniture against the walls and move lamps.
Clarice calls over her shoulder to me, “Where’s the police tape?”
“In my car.”
“Well, it ain’t doing no good out there. Bring it in here.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Cristina follows me outside. Daffodils sprinkle both sides of the garden walkway. The yellow blooms inside the white petals make me swell with happiness.
“So,” my friend says after I pull the slightly melted tape from the trunk of my car.
“So, what?”
She shakes her head in disbelief. “What is he doing here?”
“I couldn’t just leave him in his trailer all by himself.”
“So you brought him to your house.”
“What else was I supposed to do?”
“I don’t know.” She leans her hand against the car. “I guess he shouldn’t be alone.”
“My thought exactly.”
“Have you found the flower?”
“I haven’t had a chance to search.”
Cristina nods in understanding. “Maybe you’ll have better luck than me.”
“I hope so.” I nibble my bottom lip in thought. “In the meantime, I’ll watch Stone—and don’t worry. Everything’s going to be okay.”
Her gaze flicks to the street. “Famous last words.”
“Hey,” Stone calls from the house.
I cock my head. “Yes?”
“You two found that tape yet? The ladies are getting impatient. For some reason, they really want me to be this dead body. I’m not sure if I should be scared or excited.”
Cristina laughs. “Maybe both.”
“Great. Can’t wait.”
“We’ll be right in,” I tell him.
“He’s certainly different,” she mumbles as we make our way inside.
He sure is.
What initially began as a group chat to gossip about old men—a chat Cristina started because the ladies couldn’t figure out how to create one themselves—eventually became a book club that I somehow got roped into.
Every month we pick a different novel. Many of them are very spicy. These ladies love their steamy sex scenes. But every once in a while, we hit a mystery for variety—and because the ladies like to reenact the actual murder as if this is some sort of private murder-mystery party.
Which is what’s happening now.
“Walk in like Blake did,” Clarice directs Stone. “Act like a real jerk, and then Coco will stab you in the back.”
Stone enters the room, hunching over like a villain in a kids’ cartoon. He rubs his hands together and says in a thick European accent, a mixture of German and Count Chocula, “I am so evil. Look at how evil I am.”
“He was Canadian,” Betty, another local, corrects.
“Eh, I’m so bad, eh,” Stone says, which makes everyone laugh. I grab my sides to keep from falling over in a fit.
“Now, Coco,” Clarice directs.
I step behind Stone and say in a fiendish voice, “This is for all the people you’ve hurt,” then mime knifing him in the back.
Stone whispers over his shoulder at me, “Did you do it?”
“She did it!” Clarice shouts.
He doubles over. “I’ve been stabbed. Someone got revenge on me for being evil. I’m dying! I’m dying!”
He gives one last croak and collapses on the floor. Hercules trots over and licks his face.
Clarice hands me the police tape. “About time someone killed that evil Blake. Let’s clear the crime scene.”
Quickly as I can, I press the tape around Stone. He opens one eye. “How long do I have to stay like this?”
“How long would you like to?” I ask, smoothing a line of tape next to his arm.
“If I stay here, will they stop asking if I have a girlfriend?”
I frown. “They’ve asked that?”
“About twenty times.” His gaze flicks to me, softer now. “I think they want me to say it’s you.”
Something catches in my breath. “Oh.”
“Hurry up over there, lovebirds,” Clarice snaps. “Mabel brought strawberry pretzel salad, and I can’t wait to dig in.”
Stone’s expression shifts to intrigue. “Strawberry pretzel salad? That will either be amazing or make me vomit.”
I laugh and finish taping around his legs. “It’s pretty amazing. As long as you like cream cheese, Jell-O, strawberries, and pretzels, you’ll love it.”
“I could dig it.”
I finish taping around Stone and he gets up. “Ladies, you’ve successfully killed me. Thank you for your cooperation.”
“Let’s give him a hand,” Clarice says, and they clap, congratulating Stone on his performance.
The rest of book club dissolves into a light sprinkling of conversation about the novel, people gushing over Mabel’s strawberry pretzel salad (which is amazing, as always), and the ladies thanking Stone for coming and telling him they hope he visits again, though next time it would help if he read the book.
They also ask about the resort—how it’s going, et cetera. Stone keeps his answers generic.
As the women clean up and book club winds down, Clarice makes a point to approach Stone. “I gotta admit, I had you pegged all wrong.”
Even though I’m picking up paper cups and plates, I pause to listen.
“How’s that?” he asks.
“When I overheard you tell Isaac to fire that guy because he left some bricks in the wrong place, I thought you were one of the coldest-hearted sons of bitches I’d ever encountered.
To be honest, when I saw you were here, I thought, Oh, great, which one of us will he try to fire from book club?
But you didn’t. You were a good sport, and for that, I thank you. ”
Stone looks dumbfounded for a beat, but then he smiles and recovers. “Yeah, that was quite a moment I had about those bricks.”
Clarice claps his shoulder. “Stick with Coco. She’s good for you.”
Soon as Clarice steps toward the door, the women surround Stone to say their goodbyes.
He says all the right things: “I had a great time at book club . . . Yes, I loved being the dead body . . . Hit me up next time you need someone to act it out.”
I catch him looking at me as he says goodbye to Mabel. He quickly glances away, and my stomach tightens.
I pick up several more cups and drop them in the kitchen trash before scurrying outside.
“Clarice?”
“Yes?” She slowly turns. I scan the street and don’t see any sign of her tractor, which means she caught a ride with someone—probably Cristina.
“I have a question for you.”
“Shoot.”
I suck in a deep breath. Here goes nothing. “Back when there was first magic in town . . . I’ve heard the stories of people with abilities.”
“What about it?”
“Well”—I twist my fingers—“is there any truth to what happened, like people disappearing and all that?”
Her eyes narrow. “Why do you ask?”
“I don’t know, just wondering.”
“This is God’s country. Back when the magic happened, it was one thing for the unicorns to appear, but magic in people?
” She shakes her head. “They were seen as working for the wrong team. Do I agree with that? Do I think unicorns are devil-worshippers? ’Course not.
But you can’t change what people think.”
“But what if that person couldn’t help it?”
Clarice takes a slow step toward me. “I wouldn’t care, like I said. But the others? They would care. They would care a lot. So if someone has abilities in that vein, they need to keep them very, very quiet.”
“Good thing I don’t know anyone like that,” I reply glumly, doing my best to ignore my wobbling stomach.
This wasn’t the news I wanted, but it’s not unexpected. Hearing that showing my abilities will only lead to pain stings in a way that’s impossible to ignore.
Clarice pulls her purse strap higher on her shoulder. “Why’re you asking about all this?”
“No reason.” I rub my arm nervously. “Just curious.”
“If there’s nothing else, I got a belly full of strawberry pretzel salad, and all that sugar’s making me sleepy. This old gal needs to hit the hay.”
I squeeze her arm. “Good night.”
“Night.”
I say goodbye to the rest of the group, sharing a long knowing look with Cristina, before I head into the house, where Stone is tossing trash in a garbage bag.
“Well, that was fun,” he says with a smirk and a mischievous glint in his eyes.
“Highlight of your day—fending off old ladies?”
He gives a mock bow. “Even if I could remember the past year, I would still say this was one of the best nights in it.”
He says it lightly, but his words land hard and make my stomach do this weird swooping thing.
Stone holds the bag open and I toss dirty plates inside. “Not to mention,” he continues, “I will now learn how to make strawberry pretzel salad and eat it every. Single. Day.”
A real laugh escapes me and I look up to see him smiling down. Light dances in his eyes, and one corner of his mouth tips up slightly higher than the other.
He watches me openly, studying me, and I feel completely exposed, as if there’s no secret he can’t see.
Which is really bad seeing as how . . . well, you know.
“So how did you wind up in a book club with all those ladies?”
“Oh, that started as a group chat to find eligible bachelors.”
His brows lift. “For you?”
“No.” I chuckle. “For ladies of a certain age. And somehow it wound up becoming that.”
“Do you like it?”
“Yeah, I do,” I tell him as affection spreads through me. “I love those ladies, and they don’t mind that I’m me.”
He frowns. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Oh, you know.”
“No, I don’t.”
He watches me carefully and I shake my head. It’s too much to explain. “They just accept me for who I am.”
“Don’t most people? Don’t you accept you for who you are?”
“Sure. I mean, yeah.” I guess. How did this conversation get so deep, so fast? “I mean, what I’m saying is that sometimes when people see the messy, they don’t . . .”
“Stick around?”
“Yeah. Or they don’t hear you. See you.”
“You get ignored.”
“Right.”
Our gazes lock and my neck heats. I didn’t mean to say so much.
His voice becomes low, gravelly. “You don’t seem messy to me. In fact, you’re really good at this.”
“At tossing cups in the trash?”
“No.” He rolls his eyes. “Smart-ass. I’m talking about people. Those women. You’ve got a great group of friends, even if they do go in for their curler sets once a week.”
I double over laughing at that and say, delighted, “You know about curler sets!”
Stone scrubs a hand up the back of his head. “A thing I wish I didn’t remember.”
We both laugh and step forward as if we’re falling into each other’s orbit.
He looks down at me. I look up at him, and there’s no denying the tension in the air, the pull of him. He handled the book club ladies with all this golden retriever energy, and it has disarmed me.
He’s unexpectedly charming and warm, like a cozy blanket in front of a fire. He’s this wonderful surprise, and my body hums at the nearness, at the pull of him.
How can you go from hating someone one day to being drawn to them the next?
It’s ridiculous.
Impossible.
Stupid.
Spellbound.
And a thought occurs to me: Maybe I’ve been so busy keeping people out that I forgot how to let anyone in.
“The ladies asked more than once if you were my girlfriend.”
My stomach jumps, but I tamp the feeling back down. My voice comes out soft. “Did they?”
He nods, tipping my answer over, seeming to study it, like he’s inspecting me right now.
“Mmm,” is all he says.
He shifts closer, lips directly in my trajectory. My own act like they’re just along for the ride, tilting up toward him.
His gaze flicks to my mouth.
My eyes land on his. Stone has soft lips, piercing eyes, strong features—all of which draw me in.
No.
This is wrong. Stone doesn’t know who he is. I can’t kiss him. I can’t even entertain the thought.
I clear my throat, step back, and search for another cup. Oh, there’s one!
He opens the bag for me to drop it in, but his smile fades, as if there’s a rain cloud hanging above his head.
“What’s wrong?”
“It’s just that . . .” He cinches the bag. “Did I really fire a worker because they left bricks in the wrong spot?”
The earnest look on his face makes my stomach quake. “I can’t say for sure because I wasn’t there. But . . .”
I let the rest of the sentence hang in the air. Stone’s gaze latches on to mine, and it feels like there’s a line of strings running from my ribs to my stomach, and they’re all being plucked at different times.
“But it sounds like something I would do. You were going to say that,” he notes.
“Yeah,” I admit glumly. “It does.”
This sinks in and he stares at the floor in thought. “Coco?”
“Yeah?”
His eyes lift, and the look of worry and longing in them makes my throat shrivel to the size of a hazelnut. “Would I like me?”
Why does this small question make me wince? “I’m not . . . sure.”
He nods and yawns. “I’m pretty tired.”
I pull out a new bag and put it in the trash can. “Me too. Let’s get your bed set up.”
As I grab blankets and pillows, I’m unsure what tomorrow will bring, or who Stone will be when it comes.
Will he be the man who ignores the ley lines, or the other man—the one who surprises me minute by minute?