“I’m not going to jump.”
“Yeah, well, one of us might die even if you don’t, and that person probably isn’t you.”
I flip him a look. “Come on. I need some help.”
Peck looks at the sky, working his neck back and forth.
“Come on, Peck,” I say again. “I haven’t even told you what I’m thinking.”
“Why are you not at Cross’s again? I know you have a bed over there, and Kallie will probably even make breakfast.”
I lean on the rail. My arms almost slide off because of the dew dotting the surface. “Imagine listening to your brother go at it with his girl all night.”
Peck flinches. “Got ya.”
“See? I can’t listen to that. It’s disgusting, for one, and two … well, it’s disgusting.”
He glances over my shoulder, and then, with more trepidation than I’ve seen him have, he looks back at me.
I grin super wide in hopes it warms him up to my idea. “You don’t think Mach would mind if I slept up here, do you?”
He runs both hands down his face and mutters a few unintelligible things.
“Fine,” I say. “I’ll just go home with you.”
His eyes pop open. “The fuck you will.”
I got him. “So you propose, what? I sleep in my car? That sure sounds safe. Machlan’s gonna love you for suggesting that.”
“Now, I didn’t say that.”
“What did you say then, Peck? You won’t help me sleep here,” I say, motioning behind me. “And you won’t let me bunk with you.”
“Hadley. I. Don’t. Want. To. Die. Okay? I haven’t made it to the Wheel of Fortune yet. I haven’t made love to Molly. I haven’t even gotten my own dog yet, man,” he whines. “Don’t make me do this.”
“Stop being a baby.”
“But I am a baby.” He looks at me with the biggest set of puppy dog eyes I’ve ever seen. “Let me go home and forget this all ever happened.”
“Why?” I laugh. “Why are you acting like I’m asking you to rob a bank?”
“I’d rather rob a bank than help you break in to this apartment.” He gulps.
“You’re thinking of this in the wrong way. We aren’t breaking in. He’d totally let me if I asked—”
“So why don’t you ask?”
“Because then he’d come over here and just, bad things, Peck. Bad, bad things.”
I see the start of a grin, so I keep going.
“Let’s operate as if I did ask, knowing he’d approve, and he doesn’t even have to know. It’ll be our secret.”
“I promised Mach I was oblivious to your plans tonight, and that if I did find out anything, I’d tell him.”
“You don’t have to tell him anything,” I say.
“But bad, bad things will happen if I don’t.” He laughs. “Damn you.”
Propping both hands on my hips, I stare at him from my perch. I can see him break a little more with each second that passes. But after almost a minute, he still hasn’t given in, so I start toward the stairs.
“Fine. It’s your house then,” I say. “I like to sleep on my right side, and if I start to cuddle—”
“Fuck.” He storms toward the stairs, shaking his head the entire way. “This is going to hurt. You know that?”
“I don’t think so. The window looks fairly easy to pry open. I just need someone to boost me up there—”
“I meant for me. Machlan’s gonna milk my pain for all it’s worth.”
I swat him on the shoulder and lead him to the window. “Oh, he is not, you big baby. Just pretend this never happened.”
“I’m a terrible liar.”
Ignoring him, I direct my attention to the little window. On the other side is a sink that won’t have dishes in it because Machlan can’t stand dirty dishes. There will be a bottle of soap on the left side of the faucet and a strainer in the right sink basin.
“Did you hear me?” Peck asks.
“Nope. What?”
He dangles a set of keys in the air.
“Are those to the door?” I ask.
“Unfortunately.”
Snatching them out of his grip, I pop them in the lock, and the door swings open. “Peck,” I say, handing him the key ring. “You’re my favorite person tonight.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah.”
We step inside and flip on the light. It’s exactly as I expect it.
A sink sits to our right, soap and strainer in place. A little table sits a few feet away with an aloe vera plant in the center that was a start from Machlan’s grandmother. A hideous orange and brown sofa is backed up against terrible brown paneling, and a television sits across from it. The long back wall has a futon, a dresser, and a little desk with a lamp.
“Smells a little musty in here,” Peck notes. “Maybe we should open the window a bit.”
“Yeah.”
I venture into the room as Peck wrestles with the window. My heart sits at the base of my throat, pulsing with every beat. I’ve sat on that sofa many nights, listening to the chaos of the bar below as I waited for Machlan to come up after Crave closed. I’ve woken up on the futon with my face on his chest with our legs wrapped around each other so crazily that I didn’t know where his started and mine ended. I’ve tasted his lips, felt his skin, loved his heart on those sheets, and my own heart tugs a little as I think about it.
“You okay?” he asks.
I jump at Peck’s voice and turn around. “Yeah. Just thinking.”
“Just in case you were thinking about it—or not,” he adds. “Maybe you weren’t thinking of this at all, and now I’m bringing it up and—”
“What, Peck?”
He sighs. “Machlan doesn’t bring women up here. He comes in early and does some paperwork before the bar opens. He’ll nap up here if the bar is dead and he doesn’t need to be down there. He does all kinds of things, but never … that.”
My swallow is hard to pass. My tears are hard to blink back. I manage to do both.
“Thanks for telling me,” I say. The words scald my throat as I think of Machlan holding another woman or letting her hear his heartbeat in the dead of night.
My arms fold around my middle. Peck notices.
“If you want me to stay, I can stay,” he offers. “Or, despite my aversion to coffins, you can sleep at my place.”
“I’ll be fine. Thanks, buddy.” I give him a weak smile. “I won’t tell Mach you helped me.”
His brow furrows. “Nah, fuck it. Tell him.”
“That’s a quick change of heart.”
“Maybe it’ll be good to fire him up some. It’ll keep him off my ass for my tab.” He grins and closes the distance between us, pulling me into a hug. “I’m not asking for details because it’s safer not to know.” He chuckles as he lets me go. “But I feel like you have something going on, and I hope it works out for you.”
“Me too,” I whisper.
He heads for the door. “If you care, Mach is usually here by ten. Unless you want to deal with him, you might wanna be out of here by then.”
“Noted. And Peck?”
“Yeah?”
“Thanks. I appreciate you.”
He winks. “Lock this behind me.” He waits on the other side until I slide the lock in place. It’s only then I hear his footsteps descend the stairs and his truck start and pull away.
The room seems to shrink with only me in it. I stand next to the table, a piece of furniture I know Machlan made in a high school woodworking class, and wait for a chill. An unsettled feeling. A gnawing sensation at the back of my mind.
Meandering through the small area, my lips part in a smile. It grows as I remember making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on the tiny counter space next to the microwave and gets wider when I remember the night Machlan broke up a fight in the bar. I spent a couple of hours up here tending to his bloodied knuckles and black eye.
My eyes grow heavy as they land on the futon. Yawning, I pull back the navy blue comforter and inspect the sheets. They’re crisp and clean. Slipping off my flip-flops, I flop on the mattress. The frame groans under the movement. I nestle in the pillows, yanking the blankets over my body. The entire bed smells like a mix of Machlan’s laundry soap and cologne, and I sigh as I float into a dream that I never want to wake from.
Seven
Machlan
You’d think I have a hangover.
My head hurts the way it does after the couple of times a year I kick back with my brothers and get a little heavy-handed with the Jim Beam. A sharp pain rips along the side of my head and shoots across my forehead, threatening to take my sanity right along with it.
What little there is left of it, anyway.
The bright, early morning light doesn’t help my cause. As I turn onto Beecher Street and wave at Ruby as she heads to the library, I think my head might explode. The light almost blinds me as I grimace under my breath and pull onto the side street and then into the lot behind Crave.
I rub my temples in a futile attempt to lessen the ache between my eyes. Curiously, Beam headaches are generally less agonizing than this one. This is one I haven’t felt in a long time. This is a Hadley headache.
I have all the usual symptoms of this particular affliction. Piercing pain in my skull, extraordinarily high blood pressure, shortness of breath, a quickened pulse. Rock hard cock. Intense chest pains. Feeling of hopelessness and erratic behavior.
That’s what she does to me. She makes me a fucking lunatic.
Taking a deep breath, I try to focus on something other than her. The binder for my meeting with Spencer this afternoon lies on the passenger’s seat. I have no idea what I’m going to say to the guy to convince him to loan me the rest of the money for the building, and I should know that by now. I sat up with those damn papers all night, trying to come up with a plan. Instead, I just planned all the ways to interrogate Cross later about what Hadley might’ve said or done.