The Fiction of Forever (A Stand By Me Novel Book 2) (25 page)

L
etting
myself into a stranger’s apartment isn’t the worst of sins. Mr. Expose has something that belongs to me, and I intend to get it. I’m not a real criminal. I committed my last illegal act in grade school when I shoplifted a My Little Pony for a friend. Later, regret set in and I imagined being hauled away and thrown into the slammer. I took the toy back to the store and slipped it onto the shelf. Incarceration didn’t scare me as much as a tongue-lashing from my daddy, the town pastor.

Breaking and entering is my first official crime of adulthood. My decisions these days have returned to the devil-made-me-do-it variety.

I push a desk drawer closed and continue to search through the paperwork in a box on his desk. A water bill, a flyer, a grocery list.

There’s a pamphlet for renter’s insurance. Boy, does he ever need some. There are all kinds of nut jobs in this world who would rob him blind. If I could advise the guy on how to avoid this situation in the future, I’d be sure to tell him that his apartment was a break-in waiting to happen. He conveniently left a key for me right under the welcome mat; as if that isn’t the first place a burglar would look.

And, while I’m handing out advice, I’d caution him not to be so assholey. His recent emails to me were downright rude and as short as my attention span during Sunday sermons.

In fact, his replies weren’t at all like his introspective musings on the Mr. Expose blog. No. Those are poetic masterpieces that dig into the psyche and pull back the curtain on evil.

But Mr. Expose blogger, also known as Leo Jensen, refuses to return my postcard. He recited all this baloney about policy and not mailing things back when people change their minds. Yada yada.

I blame him for my foray into the dark world of thievery. Harper Angel Wade—one account of felony, stealing a postcard.

The scraping sound of a key in the door lock has me frantically searching for a place to hide. My heart thrashes around in my chest like a trapped animal. I slip around a corner and slide underneath Leo’s bed like a runner into home base, a slight friction burn setting my left leg on fire.

The space underneath is shallow and barely covered by the cream comforter. In my limited vantage point, I make out movement near the apartment entrance. It will be a miracle if he doesn’t notice me. My head skims the bottom of the bed frame. My weight loss this year is the only thing saving me from being wedged under this bed like a piece of barbecue in your back molars.

Minutes tick by and a teeny drop of sweat escapes my hairline. It tickles against my hot face while taking its sweet time to meander centimeter by centimeter, eventually dripping into my eye. I strain to catch a glimpse of Leo. He’s walking around in the next room, each step squeaking as if his soles are too clean against the spit-shined floor.

Does Mr. Perfect sense something is amiss in his judgmental, I’m-too-spectacular-for-myself world?

The disturbing protests of his noisy shoes end, but he’s still moving around the apartment.

A dreaded June bug scuttles along the baseboard at my eye level. Just kill me now. I can handle anything but a June bug. I squeeze my eyes shut for a second and try to forget about the Starship Troopers movie—the one that convinced me bugs are evil.

His feet linger at the side of the bed. There’s a clattering noise as he drops some stuff onto the nightstand. I lose a little dignity and concentration as I stare at Leo’s ankles. The squeaky shoes have been discarded somewhere.

His feet aren’t bad. Not bad at all. Usually a guy’s feet give me the heebie jeebies—a residual phobia from the summer I worked in a men’s shoe store. But his bare feet are actually nice. No callused, cracked heels or Bigfoot hairy toes.

After our email exchange, I pictured him as some cranky old fart who lived with twenty cats and stacks old newspapers in the corner. The newspapers would, of course, be hiding the stacks of postcards.

On the contrary, it appears Mr. Expose has good grooming habits and a very tidy apartment. No errant socks or dust bunnies share my hiding place. The June bug scuttles along the baseboard, daring me to look away. I can’t blame him for the June bug. They have a mind of their own.

But this guy isn’t perfect or predictable. Although he’s stuck to the same schedule every day this week, today he failed to eat lunch at the bar on Printer’s Avenue.

One would think he knew I was going to show up.

I suppress a sigh and crane my neck from side to side, looking for a comfortable position. The June bug has disappeared to the opposite side of the room. Leo’s feet move out of view, but he’s still in the bedroom. I inhale deeply, the scent of his woodsy cologne reaching my nose. Nice.

The bed sags a little over my head. No way. He’s going to take a nap?

Resting my forehead on the floor, I allow myself a bit of self-pity and picture my rap sheet. It’s a bad hair day for a mug shot. The humid Nashville weather will make me appear a likely felon.

Clickety-clickety-tap-tap. He’s pounding the keys on his laptop and I imagine the worst. Prayer is not out of the question here. If he’s working from his bed instead of the fantastic desk in the other room, I’m going to scream. He works for hours straight. Why did he skip lunch to work on his computer?

The tapping stops. There’s some movement on the bed as he gets comfortable.

The television clicks on. I need to cough. It’s as if my mouth has dried and been filled cotton balls. Dry, tickly cotton balls. The sounds of a soap opera meet my ears. It’s unbelievable, but also a little amusing that he deviated from routine so he could watch daytime drama. Perhaps this is where he learned his poetic, yet dramatic writing style for his blog.

Ruining lives by exposing one postcard at a time.

My muscles ache from holding still as a two-by-four for an entire hour. Checking my watch, I try not to panic. Finally, the television clicks off and Leo leaves. I take my time extracting my stiff body from underneath his bed.

If he decides to do what he normally does at this time, I’ll have less than an hour to finish rifling through his apartment. At 1:00 in the afternoon on every Tuesday and Thursday, Leo visits the Nashville Library. I haven’t followed him inside, but he always goes in with a handful of paperwork and leaves empty handed. This excursion ranks high on his list of puzzling routines, but no more mysterious than most of the facts about him.

His apartment reminds me of a library. Everything has an organized spot, which makes the location of his blogging material sort of mind-boggling. Postcards for his Mr. Expose blog should certainly be beside his desk, an area I’ve already searched.

I look around the bedroom, partitioned off from the living room in his loft apartment. This place totally lacks storage space. One armoire sits in the corner, and a trunk lies underneath a long set of windows. The guy doesn’t have much stuff. This should be easy.

I open the double doors of the armoire to find the wooden space packed with jeans, one black suit, and some long sleeved shirts. Shoes are piled at the bottom. I close the doors and move on to the trunk.

“If I were a postcard, where would I be? Yes. Here.” I lift the lid. Crapola. The trunk is filled with t-shirts folded neatly into perfect squares of the same diameter. Did Leo get his training at The Gap? I squish my hands down into the spaces between shirts to make sure there isn’t anything else hidden.

I slam the lid and bump against a side table. A coffee mug tips over and liquid drizzles over the surface and onto the edge of a magazine. My heart taps double-time in my throat.

Oh, come on, Mr. Tidy. You couldn’t have put your mug in the sink? I grab the edge of my T-shirt and wipe at it before coffee can soak into the magazine.

I look down at the once white material. Ruined. Oh, Leo Jensen, you are truly a pain in the patootie. I like this shirt and living out of a suitcase doesn’t allow me one to spare.

I walk once more back through the open living area and kitchen. One wall has a bookshelf filled completely with hardbacks. I search the cabinets beside the refrigerator and another set built into the bottom of the island bar.

He has little food and only a few appliances, pots, and pans. No wonder he eats lunch most days in the bar.

No postcards hidden in the kitchen.

I catch a glimpse of someone in the large window lining one wall. A bolt of fear zings my heart like I’ve been electrocuted.

I’ve been caught.

Then I recognize the image. Wild hair that’s escaped my usual ponytail during the excursion under the bed. Frazzled expression. It’s only me, my crazy, mug shot-ready reflection. There is no way I’m getting trapped in here again. With a sigh, I let myself out, lock up, and return the shiny gold key to its place under the mat.

T
he next morning
, I’m up later than usual. My cell alarm flashes 10:30 am. I push damp hair from my forehead. The hotel building lacks modern heating and air conditioning. Finally, cool air pushes up from the floor unit. I pull the string on the light-blocking curtains. A film of condensation obstructs my view momentarily, and I wipe my palm across the glass. The unit blows frigid air into the bottom of my oversized T-shirt and forces the fabric to billow bell-shaped around my thighs. I shudder.

Cold. I hate being cold. My mind flashes to another city. I detested Tacoma with its never-changing, dark horizons. My entire life turned blue and gray last winter. But I can’t blame everything on the weather.

Tacoma’s climate and people matched my life with Wesley—cold, distant, and lonely. A person on the outside, looking in with my nose pressed to the window. Tacoma was the perfect place to hide a wife and keep her estranged from family, far away in Texas.

Her family and his.

The view through my window isn’t the greatest, but it’s one I’ve studied for days—one rooftop below my fifth floor window, a busy street with lots of noisy traffic, and a row of restaurants and bars on the opposite side of the street.

Movement across the street reels my attention back to the present. Leo Jensen opens the coffee shop door and allows a girl to exit. She stops and spends several seconds smiling and talking to him. His classic All-American profile shines from all the way over there.

“Leo, you seem nice. Why were you so mean in the emails?” I step back and grab my binoculars from the nightstand before returning to the window. The two of them pull into focus.

The girl, a cute, twentyish brunette, shifts subtly closer to Leo. He backs away. I shake my head. Body language doesn’t lie. Lady, are you blind? The girl across the street obviously is, and keeps inching toward him.

Leo points toward the west, gives her a smile, and enters the coffee shop. The girl walks away, but I can still see her smiling long after he disappears inside.

I quickly get dressed and find my phone. Evidently, I slept like the dead, because I’ve missed several calls. My mother’s voicemail urges me to call my daddy. She doesn’t say what he wants, but I know he’s going to try to persuade me to move home.

The second voicemail is the one I dread listening to even more than my mother’s. I stare at the number that belongs to Isabella Warren—Wesley’s legal wife and the mother of his beautiful daughter, Charley.

Wesley. Dead, but still reaching out from the grave to affect us.

“Harper? I wanted to talk when you have time. You’re the only one who understands what I’m going through. Charley and I have a museum visit today, but you can call back anytime after nine. Hope you are doing well.”

I swallow the lump I get every time I imagine Charley missing her dad. Wesley.

It’s still hard to reconcile the Wesley who kept me in Tacoma with the Wesley that seven-year-old Charley knew—a kind, caring father. Trying to make the mental picture work is like squashing a one-foot-square block into an ant-sized pinhole.

First, I need to visit Dog Ears Bookstore, a cute little place only a couple of blocks from my hotel. The hotel concierge said Dog Ears stocks the best resources for books about the neighborhoods and places to live in Nashville.

I take my time, enjoying the scenery as I stroll the five blocks. Nashville feels like home. The city’s not exactly like Austin, but a close cousin. A cousin with more of a swagger—louder and more worried about getting your attention. Still, the music and the people are of the same family.

Colorful objects fill the bookstore window. There’s an elaborate tea set with hardback books stacked under various colorful cups. On closer inspection, it’s clear that all the books deal with tea.

Taking a deep breath, I enter and look around for an employee. There’s only one, apparently, and she’s with a customer, so I turn to the nearest shelf and pick up a book. The bookstore opened an hour ago and most aisles appear empty.

A buoyant voice startles me. “I see you’ve found Fifty Ways to Please Your Lover,” the girl says, the same girl I spotted talking to Leo a day ago at the bar. Lucky coincidence? She gives me a cheerleader smile to match her voice.

“Excuse me?” I shift uncomfortably.

She cocks her head to the side and looks at the book in my hands. “Wrong book?”

“Oh,” I flip the book to the front. The cover, a naked couple locked in an incredibly acrobatic embrace, causes me to avert my eyes. “I…um…picked it up by mistake.” I shove the book back onto the shelf.

“What brings you in today? By the way,” she gives a devious smirk, “that book you picked up is a New York Times bestseller. I sell at least a copy a day.”

“I don’t want to please a lover.” I lower my voice to right above a whisper. Is my declaration a Freudian slip buried deep in my heart? Can the other customer hear this conversation?

She grins.

I want to crawl behind a shelf. “I don’t have a lover.” I am not helping the situation, but cannot seem to stop myself. “I don’t need a book for that.”

She bobs her head in agreement as if she deals with awkward customers every day. “OK then. Wonderful. My name is Josie. Can I help you find a great read today?”