One More Time (2 page)

Saying yes to him the first time wasn’t hard to do. And it got easier as we went along. Sex in his office, in his car, in a hotel, in my apartment… they were all normal parts of my life with him. He would send me a text saying he needed a file brought over, and a location, and I would be there.

I’d missed parties with friends, phone calls from my sister, and important meetings with my own clients just to be his fuck toy basically. It hurt to realize that now, but for once I was finally thinking with a clear head, and things were actually looking up for me, now that I didn’t have Paul Diggs around to screw with my thoughts and my body.

It was a good feeling to be free of him, and when I’d gotten cleaned up, I was ready to go explore Thornwood. I’d brought food with me, of a sort, in the form of beef jerky, bottles of soda, and granola bars. But now I was hungry for something real. I felt a little bad for leaving a pile of boxes half-unpacked in the middle of what would be a gorgeous living room once my clutter and broken pieces of cardboard were removed. But then again, this was my house now, my first house, the first time I hadn’t been living in an apartment, and if I wanted to leave cardboard boxes lying around, then I could. I was able to leave them there for weeks if I chose to. Uh, actually, no I couldn’t. That would drive me nuts. But I could wait to unpack the rest of them for a little while. I’d been pushing hard to get through them all in one day. I could take a little break. And my back was really sore too. I rubbed at it as I walked down the narrow, winding path that went from my front door to the driveway. Another path went to an old garage, but I didn’t think I’d be using it all that often until it got really cold and snowy. My SUV was good off-road—it had perpetual mud on it—and I couldn’t remember a time when I’d ever kept it in a garage except for at work. And I hadn’t made enough to make that an affordable everyday option.

My SUV and I bumped along the uneven dirt driveway that ran into my property until it met up with a paved two-lane road, which I understood to be the main street going through Thornwood. Tiny towns were new to me, but I absolutely loved the lack of traffic as I signaled out of habit, then pulled onto the road. I turned on some classic rock—my favorite—and kept to the speed limit as much as I could since the way was a bit twisty and I didn’t really know my way all that well.

I passed by what looked like a pretty nice horse property a few miles down the road with a sign saying they gave lessons and offered boarding. There was even a sign for an upcoming competition, which made me think of my nephews, who were all big into showing their horses. It wasn’t something I’d ever been interested in, and my sister hadn’t been either, but I guessed her husband was in a big way. I wasn’t all that close to him, probably because the only thing we had in common was my sister and the kids, but I’d been trying. Now that I had a house, I planned to invite them out to spend some time there. I was pretty sure I’d get tired of having three boys running around my home pretty quickly. I wasn’t really big on kids for the most part, but since I hadn’t seen them since before the oldest one started kindergarten, and now he was a teenager, I thought I probably should. They were my nephews after all, and I missed my sister.

I drove into what I figured was the town proper, which was little more than ten stores all together on either side of the street, parking spots in front of them, and signs for more parking behind the stores in the aspens. I saw a mechanic, a bank, a drug store, a craft place, a pet store, which promised the lowest prices of tropical fish around, a fishing store with live bait, and then, at the end of the row and with the most cars circled around it, a fifties era-looking diner complete with aluminum accents and neon lights.

I parked in front of the diner, which was called Rosie’s, and headed inside. Seating was tight, but I got a space at a high bar with people sitting on stools on either side of me. Like a typical diner, the place was loud, but the food looked great—or maybe that was because I was starving. Either way I needed a bacon cheeseburger right away.

After my food came and some of my need dissipated as I took big bites of my burger and shoved fries into my mouth, I looked around the diner and noticed a familiar face. The only person I knew in town was talking with some other cops in a booth. When he saw me looking, I waved to him, he waved back, and I returned to my burger. The food was great, with just the right amount of grease coming out of my thick burger patty and dripping down my fingers as I ate. I knew I’d be back there regularly, and not just because it looked to be the only place in town to eat out. From where I was seated, with big windows a few seats down from me, I could see a small grocery store tucked behind some of the aspens farther on through town, which was great because that meant I could get frozen pizzas to keep on hand. I wouldn’t be doing much cooking. I just wasn’t all that good at it. Thankfully I already had design jobs line up from clients back in LA who were just waiting for me to open my books and become available again. I’d be booked solid again in a month, I was sure of it, and that was a good feeling.

I’d always loved to create beautiful things for other people, but doing so while also worrying about my relationship with Paul had been a bit of a mess. Now I could do my job and make banners and websites for people without having to worry about any complications like that.

“Hey, Caleb.”

I looked up to see Trent standing next to me. “Hi.” I wiped my mouth with my napkin and wanted to invite him to sit down, but the seats around me were full of people eating lunch just like I was. “On break?” I asked instead.

He nodded. “Yeah. Glad you made it out of your house to come mingle with the townsfolk.”

I smiled and he smiled back at me. “It’s good food.”

“Better be. Rosie was my mom.”

I thought he was joking at first, but he just kept looking at me, and I slowly realized he wasn’t joking at all. “Wow. Uh, congrats.”

“Thanks.”

“Trent, we gotta go! Break’s over, kid!” one of the guys with him called.

Trent turned and waved to them but not before I could see him blushing, maybe at being called a kid. He couldn’t have been that far from my own age of thirty-two, but maybe since the guys with him looked to be in their fifties, that was why they referred to him with that particular appellation.

“See you around,” I told him.

He nodded. “Yeah. You will.”

There was nothing ominous in the way he’d said it, just a simple, yes, I would. Probably because he was a cop and they were pretty active in the small town. He touched my shoulder as he left, nothing too major but enough for me to know he’d done it. I brushed it off, figuring it was a small town and people were probably pretty friendly.

But after I was done with lunch and spent some time walking around the town, I was thinking about it and wondering why he’d touched me like that. It was hard for me not to wonder, but as I drove back to my new house to tackle the boxes in my living room a few hours later, it started to get easier to forget about the touch and move on.

I found a picture of my sister and her kids and put it up on my bookcase in the living room, right next to my copy of the biography of Harvey Milk. I had romances galore, a lot of them historicals, under that shelf, but that was where I kept my important stuff. I put a geode next to the book, a small one, barely more than two inches wide, that I’d held on to since the first boy I ever kissed had given it to me. Right before his dad had broken us apart, then moved him to the other side of the country. I’d been thirteen.

A little jade elephant—a gift from my sister that she’d found in a shop in Thailand well before she met Dan and had the kids—was placed next to her picture. She’d traveled the world while I was getting my degree in design. I’d been jealous of her, but she was just as jealous of me when she went back to school after her travels, only to find out that she was the oldest person in her freshman class. And though some of the teachers liked her, none of the guys in her classes did.

With my bookshelf done, I had one more box I could recycle in the morning. It was a long drive to the nearest dump that had a recycling center, close to half an hour, but I didn’t want to throw them away, and I couldn’t stand all the clutter. I’d had movers to help me with the big stuff, but I’d gone from an apartment to a huge house and most of my big stuff fit in one room. I’d been sleeping on the fold-out couch in the living room since my futon stopped flipping back up to a couch a few months back, and as I sat down on it and groaned, I realized I really didn’t want to do any more moving, ever. I hated it. Not only was I not fit enough to carry heavy boxes everywhere, but my back hurt from bending over for even a short amount of time. If I wasn’t careful with it, my doctor in LA had told me, I’d throw it out for sure. I needed to find a good chiropractor, and soon, before I wound up on the floor on my stomach, unable to move again like I had in LA.

I was mostly done unpacking my kitchen when I heard something get knocked over by the garage, which I brushed off without thinking much about it. I really only heard it because I didn’t have on any music. Otherwise the house was completely silent except for me moving things around. I needed to get my TV hooked up right away to fix that. I couldn’t stand the quiet after living for so long in the city.

But I heard the noise again, and after freezing and wondering where it came from, I walked over to the big windows across from my sofa bed to check if I could see anything outside. I couldn’t exactly see the garage, and even if I could, it was dark out and I didn’t have any outside lights. I had been used to sleeping by the light of an overhead streetlamp across from me that lit up the parking lot where impounded vehicles were taken. I shook my head as I realized, for the first time really, that moving here had not been my smartest idea ever. I didn’t even own a flashlight.

I heard something coming from the garage again and dug my phone out of my pocket to call 911. I probably should have too, but I pulled out Trent’s card with his number on it, and suddenly I was dialing him while I crouched beside my window and hoped that whoever it was out there hadn’t seen me standing in my living room all alone with the lights on behind me.

“Hello, this is Trent,” he answered on the third ring.

“Trent!” I hissed into the phone as I covered it and my mouth with my hand to muffle the sound of my voice. “It’s Caleb—”

“I know who you are. There aren’t that many people in this town that I can’t remember the voices of. What’s wrong?”

I heard him getting up, and the sound of a bed squeaking, and I winced, hoping I hadn’t woken him up or interrupted something. It was only nine, but maybe he had to be up early. I wanted to hang up, to tell him I’d only been imagining something being by my garage, but then I thought back to every single horror movie that took place in a cabin in the woods where not one of those stupid kids ever called a cop at the first sign of something going wrong. Well, I had a cop on the phone with me right then, and I wasn’t going to end up hacked into a bunch of little pieces if I could help it. “There’s someone outside my house—”

“I’ll be right there. Where are you? Are you safe?”

I couldn’t tell if having him sounding genuinely worried about me was a good thing or not. “I’m in my living room, kneeling on the floor and trying not to be seen.”

“Good. I’m getting in my car now. I’ll check it out, then come up to the house. Stay on the phone with me.”

“Okay, okay. I can do that.” Breathing became easier as I relaxed a little bit. Trent was coming, he had a gun, and he would take care of whatever it was. “But what if it’s a bear?” He couldn’t possibly hold off a bear with just a gun.

He laughed, and I heard the sound of his car as he started driving. “If it’s a bear, we’ve both got big problems.”

“Well that’s not reassuring at all,” I grumbled.

“Wasn’t supposed to be. I’m coming down the hill now. I’ll be there in just a few minutes.”

I nodded and licked my lips as I pressed my hand against the cold glass window. “Be careful.”

“Will do.”

Trent

I PULLED
up to Caleb’s house, which was more like a mansion compared to the rest of the houses in town. We didn’t really have neighborhoods in Thornwood, just the town, and everyone lived in it. But Caleb’s house was on the far east side of it and I lived directly in the center of the townhouses that stood between my mom’s diner and the grocery store. I got a text and glanced down at it before I parked my car in Caleb’s driveway.

Where’d you go? The bed’s cold.

I shook my head and sent a quick text back. Neediness didn’t really work for me, as endearing as my current bedmate thought it might be.

Out on a call.

There was no text of him telling me to be safe or to be careful or any of that, which didn’t really surprise me. I’d found him on one of those quick hookup sites and was actually kind of surprised he decided to stay for a while after we were done. Most of the time the guys I brought home didn’t.

Anyway, couldn’t think about that right then. Caleb had someone by his house, and I was ready to rush in and save him, though I was pretty sure it was nothing. City boy might think we had bears, but I hadn’t seen one around the town in at least a year. Deer on the other hand we had plenty of, elk too. But not bear.

I went around his house along the path toward the garage that could have easily fit my house inside it. Actually it probably was a barn at one time that someone had converted somewhere along the way. I hadn’t been particularly close to the Smiths, who had owned the property before Caleb, but I did think it was a shame he didn’t have horses in the fields like the Smiths had. I grew up seeing the foals playing each summer in those pastures.

The area around the garage was dark, which was something Caleb should have probably looked into, and I figured I’d mention it to him at some point. I had my gun out of the holster and held firmly between my hands, but just as I suspected, there was nothing for him to be worried about, just some knocked-over trash cans. No trash was in them, but there was probably the smell of old trash on them and I saw plenty of raccoon paw prints around.