Chapter 30 #2
The storage unit was worse than she remembered.
Nothing had happened to it, but because she had changed enough to see it differently.
She stood just inside the rolled-up door while Tyrone waited behind her and looked at the remains of the life she had once been desperate to rebuild.
The couch had been secondhand when she bought it.
Two mismatched bedside tables were stacked upside down on top of it, one still bearing the pale circular stain from the night Dwight had put a hot coffee mug directly on the wood and then spent twenty minutes insisting the mark had already been there.
Boxes filled most of the back wall, some labeled in her handwriting, others shoved into whatever container she’d managed to find when she lost the house and had less than forty-eight hours to decide what parts of their life she could afford to keep.
She walked inside and opened the nearest box and found kitchen stuff. Another held towels and bedding. The next contained clothes Kelsey had outgrown years ago because apparently Glenna had once believed there might be a reason to keep six pairs of toddler pajamas.
Tyrone leaned against the door frame. “You planning on taking all this back?”
“I don’t know.”
“Okay.”
She looked over her shoulder. “That’s it?”
“What do you want me to say?”
“I don’t know. You usually have opinions about everything.”
“I have opinions. You didn’t ask for them.”
Ho boy, he’s pretty and he can learn... wow!
Glenna turned back before he saw her smile and opened another box and this time found photographs.
She lowered herself onto the edge of a plastic tub and pulled the first envelope free, already knowing what she would find before the pictures slid into her lap.
Kelsey as a baby. Glenna looking exhausted and twenty years younger.
Dwight holding his daughter in the hospital with an expression somewhere between terror and awe while Kelsey’s tiny face disappeared against his chest.
Tyrone moved closer, and she handed him the photograph. For a long moment neither of them said anything.
“He was scared to hold her.”
Tyrone’s eyebrows lifted. “Dwight?”
“Terrified. Kept saying her head was too floppy.”
A quiet laugh left him. “I would’ve paid good money to see that.”
“He made the nurse show him three times before he’d pick her up by himself.”
Tyrone looked down at his friend. “I’m still a little mad at him for not telling me.”
“He didn’t tell you a lot of things, so I get it.”
The words could have hurt him. A week ago, they probably would have, but everything they’d found out about that douche-canoe Sullivan had changed that.
They knew why now. They knew exactly who had convinced Dwight that protecting Glenna and Kelsey meant keeping them away from the men he trusted most. Tyrone gave the photograph back, and she put it carefully into an empty box beside her and kept going.
That was how they spent the next hour. Not cataloguing the wreckage of her old life or mourning every possession she no longer needed, but deciding what deserved to travel forward with them.
Photographs stayed. So did Kelsey’s baby book, the Christmas ornaments Dwight had bitched about hanging every December and the ugly ceramic bowl Kelsey had made at preschool that looked less like a bowl than something recovered after a structural collapse.
Glenna kept a handful of books, some jewelry that had belonged to her mother and the old quilt folded inside a garbage bag at the bottom of one box.
The furniture could go, as could most of the kitchenware.
So could the clothes neither of them had worn in years and the television she’d paid more to store than it had probably cost new.
By the time they reached the last stack, the keep pile was surprisingly small.
Tyrone had shifted the boxes she wanted toward the front without questioning a single decision, although she’d caught him looking at the ugly ceramic bowl twice and knew damn well he was wondering why that particular disaster had survived the cull when perfectly functional kitchenware hadn’t.
“Don’t,” she warned.
“I didn’t say anything.”
“Your face did.”
“My face wants to know what the fuck that thing is.”
“It’s a bowl.”
“That thing has corners.”
“Kelsey was three when she made it.”
“Then it’s fucking beautiful.”
Glenna laughed as she shoved the lid onto the final box. “Smart man.”
“I’ve got me some decent survival instinct.”
She straightened and immediately regretted it when her back protested after an hour spent crouching over boxes. Tyrone caught the wince and reached for her before she could tell him she was fine, his hands settling on her hips as he drew her back against him. “You done?”
Glenna looked around the storage unit one last time, at the couch she had once saved for months to buy, the furniture she’d fought to keep when everything else started disappearing, and the boxes she’d paid to store because losing them had felt like one more admission that she had lost control of her life.
Now the things that mattered were stacked neatly beside the door, and everything else could go to somebody who needed it more than she did. “Yeah. I think I am.”
Tyrone pulled out his phone. “I’ll let the movers know.”
“There are movers?”
“Three units down.”
“Of course there are. Why wouldn’t there be movers three units down?”
“Grizzly.”
“Obviously.” The protest came automatically, years of counting every dollar and refusing anything she couldn’t repay putting the words on her tongue before she could stop them.
Gunnar didn’t need to pay movers. Four X’s didn’t need to ship her boxes to Italy.
She and Tyrone could rent something, move the boxes themselves, work out storage, figure out shipping later, except none of that would accomplish anything beyond proving she was still capable of making life harder than it needed to be.
Glenna looked at Tyrone and caught the moment he realized she was fighting with herself, and he said nothing.
He really is learning.
“The boxes by the door go with us,” she said. “Everything else can be donated if somebody wants it.”
His thumb hovered over his phone for half a second before he nodded. “Okay.”
“And whatever you’re thinking, keep it to yourself.”
“I’m not thinking anything.”
“Bullshit.”
His mouth twitched. “I’m proud of you.”
“Oh, fuck off.”
Tyrone laughed, and Glenna threw the roll of packing tape at him.
He caught it one-handed, because apparently even mercenaries couldn’t allow office supplies to hit them without treating it as a threat, and something about the ridiculousness of it finally broke through the last of the strange tension she’d been carrying since leaving the attorney’s office.
She went to him, and Tyrone barely had time to drop the tape before she grabbed the front of his shirt and pulled his mouth down to hers.
His surprise lasted approximately half a second, then one big hand slid around the back of her neck while the other locked around her waist and pulled her flush against him, and Glenna stopped thinking about courts, storage units, Sullivan, immigration or any of the other shit waiting for them outside the narrow strip of space between two stacks of cardboard boxes.
Tyrone kissed her like he did most things once he decided he was committed, thoroughly and without any apparent concern for moderation, his mouth moving over hers until the laugh still caught in her chest turned into something warmer and she curled both hands into his shirt to keep him exactly where he was.
She loved kissing this man. There had been a time when admitting even that much to herself would have sent her scrambling backward, searching for all the reasons wanting him was dangerous when her life already contained enough uncertainty.
Now she let herself have it. The scrape of his day-old beard beneath her fingertips, the warmth of his body surrounding hers, and the way his hand moved from the back of her neck into her hair as he changed the angle of the kiss, taking it deeper until she forgot there were movers three doors down who could walk past at any moment.
Tyrone finally lifted his head far enough to let them breathe, although his arm stayed firmly around her waist. “What was that for?”
“Do I need a reason?”
“Absolutely not. I’m trying to work out how to make it happen again.”
She smiled and dragged her thumb over his lower lip. “You could kiss me.”
“See, this is why I keep you around. You have epic ideas.”
His mouth came back to hers before she could insult him, slower this time, and somehow that was worse.
Or better. She hadn’t decided by the time Tyrone backed her carefully against the edge of the shelving and settled one hand beside her head, keeping his weight off her while his other hand slid beneath the hem of her shirt and spread warm against the bare skin at her waist.
Her entire body responded.
“Tyrone.”
“Yeah?”
“We are in a storage unit.”
“I noticed.”
“There are people outside.”
“Also noticed.”
“And if you put your hand any higher, I’m going to forget why those things matter.”
His forehead dropped against hers as a rough laugh moved through him. “Pretty sure I’m the one who should be complaining about that.”
Glenna looked down between them and grinned when she saw exactly what he meant. “That seems like a you problem.”
His eyes narrowed. “You’ve been spending too much time with me.”
“Probably.”
Tyrone kissed the corner of her mouth before reluctantly taking his hand out from beneath her shirt. “Definitely.”