The man in question turned and put his elegant hands on his trim hips. He was wearing shorts and one of his fitted, long-sleeved T-shirts, both of which highlighted his broad shoulders, tight ass, and muscular calves. I, for one, was grateful for the view.
“We’ve got a lot to do today,” he said as I caught up. “We have to get our strength training in, we’re going to San Antonio so I can sign a few papers, and then we’ve got to get back and get ready for the soft opening.”
I snorted. He was talking about Ozzie and Joel’s new restaurant, but that’snotwhere my mind went.
“There is nothing dirty about the wordssoft opening,” he said, seeming to think I wouldn’t notice the slight upturn to his lips.
“Okay, fine, but I bet you a new tie that you love an actual soft opening. One you’ve already worked over. One you could slide into without any additional lube or preparation,” I teased.
He turned around and started walking again. “Shut up.”
Agnes had been in a bad mood the last couple of days. Maybe even weeks, though time seemed to move strangely on this property. The last time I was here, I’d remained stuck in the house, not even going out to the back porch. I hadn’t tried to write—I hadn’t tried to do anything—and time had felt like it was moving backward.
These last few months had been different. Time still felt like a foreign concept, and I was resting more than I could remember doingever, but I was weirdly productive. The only thing that took a shine off the situation was the series of phone calls coming in from an unknown Seguin number that I suspected belonged to Dick DeWitt. Dr. Ahmed assured me that she’d been firm with DeWitt’s lawyer, but that didn’t exactly reduce my anxiety about the situation.
In better news, Ozzie and I were hanging out more. We had always been close, but I’d started sharing more of what my life had been like on the road, and it was nice to listen to him talk through the plans he and Joel had for downtown. I still wasn’t comfortable telling him about the whole DeWitt mess, but maybe I would once I was past it.
Bonus, Walker often joined us. I’m not sure I’d have thought of that as a good thing when I first got here, but after sharing a handful of dinners and lunches with them, I had to admit they went together like peanut butter and jelly. Just as importantly—at least to my mental health—I’d concluded that Walker and I would never have worked as a couple. Under his sometimesgruff appearance and country-boy language, he was genuinely the sweetest man on the planet. I needed somebody who could take my shit and throw it right back at me.
Realizing that Sawyer was definitely trying to leave me behind, I jogged to catch up with him. It wasn’t a good look, me trying to jog, so I switched to skipping.
“What do you want to talk about this morning?” I asked, hilariously out of breath.
He looked down at me, clenching his jaw. “We don’t have to talk about anything. We can just walk in silence.”
“I miss our conversations,” I said, gracefully transitioning from skipping to matching his airport walk. Gulping oxygen, I gestured at him. “Usually you tell me what I’m doing wrong with my life, and I pretend to ignore you. It’s been almost two weeks since you’ve told me what to do.”
“I’m tired of giving you advice that you never listen to,” he said, wrinkling his nose.
“Oh my God, Emo Sawyer is the best. I don’t know how you pull off ennui in Ralph Lauren sport, but here we are.” I held up a finger. “Also, I just admitted that I’ve only beenpretendingto ignore you. Surely I deserve a little credit for that monumental progress.”
A muscle in his cheek jumped, and he kept marching forward.
“Seriously, dude. Did I do something wrong?” I asked as he checked his phone for the millionth time.
I’d started to pick up on the fact that he was a pretty big deal in the network security company he worked for. A decent chunk of my money went to them, and I never had any security breaches,so they must be good. While I was pleased with the results, I worried about Sawyer’s stress levels. He was never not on, working practically all hours of the night and day.
It made me feel a bit guilty, because I suspected he’d have a more manageable schedule if he didn’t spend so much time feeding me, making me exercise, arranging time for me to socialize with our friends, and forcing me to go to sleep at his definition of a reasonable hour.
He still hadn’t told me what I’d done wrong, and his nose was buried in his screen.
“Hey, stop ignoring me,” I said. I elbowed him for emphasis—perhaps a little too hard, as his phone fell from his hand and went tumbling into a grassy culvert. He shot me a glare, which I ignored in favor of jumping into the culvert to retrieve the device.
He held out his hand. “I could’ve gotten that myself.”
“I know. It’s okay for me to do nice things for you, too,” I said as a message popped up on the screen. I spat out a laugh. “What the hell isTops? Is this a dating app?”
“Give me my phone,” he said, lunging for it.
I backed away from him, catching the first couple of lines of another incoming message.
TwinkBabyBlue:Daddy? I haven’t heard from you in a long time. Are you okay?
“Hendrix! Watch out!” Sawyer shouted, grabbing my shoulder and preventing me from falling back into the same damned culvert. That would’ve hurt.
“Agnes saves the day again,” I said, waving his phone at him. “Or should I call youdaddy?”
He dug the palms of his hands into his eyeballs. “I don’t ask them to call me daddy,” he said, his cheeks flaming. “But the younger guys in their early twenties… it turns them on.”
