“Yeah, it was. Don’t forget to put your gun up.”
Lila snorted. Might as well tell her not to forget to breathe.
“Listen, Lila, maybe I’ll see you around.”
“Don’t threaten me,” she warned.
“That wasn’t—do you think you’d want to get coff—never mind.”
“Wait! What? Were you about to—” What was she doing? They were leaving! She must not hinder the leaving! “Never mind.”
“Right. Exactly.” He nodded. “I’m on the clock. So.”
And then they were gone, not quite as abruptly as they came.
Chapter 10
At the sharp knock, Lila stopped unpacking and went to the door. “It’s upon a midnight dreary,” she said to the peephole. “So of course there’s someone gently rapping at my chamber door.”
From her porch: “It’s Oz. From before? Oz Adway?”
Thank goodness he clarified, or she might have gotten him mixed up with the other Oz who’d broken in. She ignored the way her pulse picked up and opened the door. “’Tis some visitor entreating entrance at my chamber door.”
He waved like a dork. “Hi!”
“Only this and nothing more.”
“Poe?” he guessed.
“Had to memorize the whole thing for speech class my senior year. No matter how much I drink, I can’t dislodge it. You can’t come in.”
He froze halfway across the threshold. “No?”
“It’s midnight and you’re a bumbling B&E guy I barely know. Of course ‘no.’”
“Fair.” The foot that had gotten halfway into her house retreated. “I just wanted to check on you.”
She ignored the spark of pleasure his words ignited. “At midnight.”
“Your light was on.”
So he was watching her house now? Why am I not more alarmed? I should be more alarmed. “Well, you’ve checked.” She bit her tongue before she could throw (more) caution to the wind and invite him in for a drink. Assuming she could find the box of booze. Perhaps he’d like to come in for tea. If she could find the box of tea.
“I just… I know it’s been a long day.” He shifted his weight from one foot to another, looked over her shoulder, looked behind him, looked at the floor. “I knew you’d want to know Sally was safe at IPA. And I was in the neighborhood. So.”
She raised her eyebrows. She did want to know Sally was safe, but she didn’t care for the presumption. “Too bad no one has invented anything that would allow you to pass on news without knocking on my door at midnight. Well, someone will probably think of something. Until then, all we can hope for is a brighter future with cutting edge tech that precludes pop-ins.”
He was scrubbing a hand through his short hair, which definitely didn’t make her itch to see if the hairs at his nape were as soft as she thought they must be. “Yeah, you’re right. Sorry. This was a bad—sorry.”
“Do you want to c—ow!”
He leaned forward, clear concern on his face, but respected the threshold, so he looked like he was bowing. “Are you okay?”
“Nit my tongue. Bit my tongue, I meant. Why are you really here?”
Seconds crawled by while she waited for an answer, and Lila found she was holding her breath. When he finally spoke
“I don’t know.”
she was surprised by her lack of surprise. Was that disappointment she felt? Or relief? Or a new emotion as yet unnamed and unknown? “I guess you’d better go, then,” she said and preemptively bit her tongue.
He looked at her for a long time, or so it seemed to her. And when he finally spoke, she thought he sounded almost regretful. “Good night, Lila.”
“’Night.”
He didn’t look back as he ambled into the darkness (the neighborhood was seriously lacking in street lights). She knew, because she watched until she couldn’t see him anymore.
* * *
Oh, oh, oh…hello, darling. Come to Daddy. All that whipped cream, those sexy chocolate curls, there it was, just waiting to be devoured. He hoped there were clean forks, because either way, the pie was going down.
“Ow!”
“You wait,” Mama Mac said, implacable. The statue of David would have been easier to move.
“Never! It’s not like she’d wait for me.”
Mama sighed. “Always at it. It’s been a decade, aren’t you two bored?”
“You just now whapped me on the knuckles with one of your nine thousand wooden spoons. That’s as big a cliché as sibling rivalry. And I’m not bored. What I am is hungry.”
“There’s a box of saltines in the cupboard behind you.”
“Or I could just eat a bag of sawdust.”
“Sawdust’s in the garage,” she replied, then ruined her stern mien with a giggle. Oz loved how the girlish giggle made her sound like a fifth-grader huffing helium.
After his late-night porch chat with Lila, he’d headed home, gotten little to no sleep, gave up, got up, showered, took no particular care with his hair or clothes
(He was wearing an expensive suit because it was comfortable, dammit! Nothing to do with wanting to look good for a stranger!)
checked on Sally, and then made his way to Lila’s.
No. No. He’d made his way to Mama Mac’s house. Lila was immaterial. Irrelevant. A virtual stranger he barely knew, as she’d reminded him last night. He was still kicking himself for going over there while simultaneously bummed she wouldn’t let him in. “Confused as fuck” didn’t begin to cover it.
Should I ask Mama Mac? Mama Mac wouldn’t laugh at him. Or at least not once she realized he was asking a serious question. You know the Kama-Rupa myth? Is it possible it was rooted in reality? Like how the Shroud of Turin exists, but it wasn’t necessarily used to wrap up Jesus?
The fact was, he’d lingered on Lila’s porch for too long. Not last night. Earlier, when he left with Sally. And after making sure the cub was buckled in (Shifters were tough, but there was no point to tempting fate), he’d lingered like a loser. A lingering loser. Worse, he hadn’t noticed right away. When he’d come back to himself, he realized he’d been staring at the sidewalk leading up to her porch for several seconds, trying to think of a reason to go
