This? Tonight?
Yeah. This is probably my fault.
I shouldn’t have stopped to talk to her.
Doesn’t matter that all I wanted was to see if we could clear the air and get past all the shit that’s made it so fucking hard to be around her the past couple weeks. I knew better.
I don’t wait for my burger, but I still stuff a hundred in the tip jar on my way out the door, chasing Tillie Jean, her coat in hand.
Crazy woman left without it.
She’s not on the street, which means she’s either hiding in a side alley, she took off at a run, or she flagged down a friend driving past and got a ride the three blocks home.
All three are equally likely around here.
Two goats trot along behind me as I march through the cold night to the little house I’m calling home these days. Stars are shining overhead. Moon’s not up yet. I don’t have any extra food in my pockets to give to the goats like I usually do, since I don’t usually see the goats this late at night.
When I hit my block, the lights are on in Tillie Jean’s house.
She’s home. She’s safe. I could go straight to my own house.
Pretend this didn’t happen.
But there’s an anxious feeling roiling my gut and telling me I need to apologize, if only so Cooper doesn’t get pissed at me for picking on his sister.
So I man up and knock on her door.
She flings it open with an expression igniting in her eyes like maybe I should call her Growly Bear tonight. “So you were the lookout man so Cooper could get his revenge, hm? Nice. Well-played. Congrats. You win.”
She slams the door in my face.
And now I’m pissed. I don’t get involved in her stupid pranks.
I bang on the door again.
She yanks it open, snags her coat, snaps out, “Thank you,” and shuts the door again.
But this time, I get a shoulder in the way. “I’m sorry.”
I don’t sound sorry. I sound pissed and I know it.
“Congratulations. Never too late to learn new words, and you just did it. You can leave now.”
Reason number two hundred billion… “Can we please call a truce?”
“That would sound so much more sincere if you weren’t yelling it at me.”
“I’m not yelling.”
“You’re not sounding very contrite either.”
My hands ball into fists. “I’m not good at this, okay?”
She eyeballs me with one bloodshot blue eye while the other scrunches closed, but this is no saucy wink.
If anything, this is probably an attempt to make it look like there’s just one of me.
Hell.
I’m negotiating with a drunk.
You’d think I’d know better.
She flings the door open. “Fine. You can come in and undo what Cooper did, and then we can discuss if we can call a truce. If I’m still awake.”
Despite the sinking feeling in my gut that this is a terrible idea, I follow her inside, expecting much of the same as I get in my roughly-same-shaped house next door. Small living room, kitchen and dining room combo, two bedrooms, a powder room, and a main bath between the two bedrooms, with utilitarian but clean furniture that is from this decade, upgraded with family pictures here since they’re all tight and that’s what people tight with family do.
They show off their family pictures.
Sometimes on blankets and pillows even.
Instead, I walk into an art gallery.
There’s no television in Tillie Jean’s living room. Only bright paintings on the muted gray walls. Her couch is a low modular thing that looks more like a pile of ivory cushions than furniture, and the only family portrait in the room is a large digital frame flashing candid shots of her brothers, parents, friends, and extended family on a white end table that looks like it, too, belongs in a museum instead of inside a small two-bedroom house in a dinky mountain town.
I should add this to the list of things about Tillie Jean Rock that drive me up a wall—well-rounded in unexpected ways—but I can’t.
I should also keep up before she catches me gawking, as she’s headed through the doorway at the back of the room that I expect leads to the kitchen. Unfortunately, I get stuck looking at a painting that seems like it’s a woman peering around a tree, except the tree is made of a complex pattern of stripes in bright colors that shouldn’t go together.
It’s oddly soothing. And peaceful. And the woman—she has as much mischief in her bright lavender eyes as Tillie Jean has in her—
“That’s not what Cooper did.”
Caught.
I jerk my head away from the painting and follow TJ into the kitchen, where the first thing I see is—wait.
What are those?
Tillie Jean grabs a handful of her own face and yanks.
Towels.
Holy shit.
Cooper papered half her kitchen with tea towels with her face on them.
And it’s quite the face she’s making on the towels too. One eye shut—much like she was staring at me at the front door, except her other eyeball is half-rolled into her head, with her mouth twisted open and her tongue showing.
For the first time since I left the guys up at Cooper’s house, telling their funniest family memories that left me unsettled and in need of a break from people who grew up with the kind of normalcy I thought was a lie, I’m smiling.
“Cooper was with me the whole day.” It comes out automatically. I’ve had teammates I would’ve fed to the wolves at the first opportunity, but I’ve owed Cooper Rock more than my life for most of the time I’ve known him, and it’s second nature to defend him.
Even to his little sister.
Okay, especially to his little sister.
“Start pulling them off or go away. And don’t damage my paint.”
I turn to the wall and gently pry off the nearest towel printed with her face. It’s attached with a thumb tack. She’ll probably have to spackle and repaint her whole wall. “He was. He couldn’t have done this.”
“News flash, Cole. We have teenage cousins who’ll do anything for gas money.”
I get one tea towel off the wall while my stomach grumbles a protest that I’m missing my cheat day hamburger, but when I turn to toss it on her table, food is the last thing on my mind.
Her cabinet doors are even more interesting than her living room. They’re also painted.
I think.
They sparkle over swishes and swirls of gold, blue, and black. It’s almost like staring at the universe on a clear, dark night, except they’re her cabinets. Her countertops are white marble, the perfect complement to the cabinets. The floor is wide-planked gray wood, and the backsplash is a soft aqua green glass reflecting the designer coffee maker and planter of three succulents on the otherwise clean counter.
I glance at Tillie Jean. “Your kitchen—”
“Is none of your business.” She’s scowling, which both feels wrong but also inspires a naughty teacher fantasy that makes my cock leap to attention.
If her hair weren’t tied up in a bun and she wasn’t in a Crusty Nut blouse with the top two buttons undone and giving me a peek at her cleavage, I swear my cock would be behaving itself.
I turn back to the wall and grab another Tillie Jean Face Towel and make a hesitant attempt at peace. “I thought you liked it when Cooper pranked you.”