CHAPTER 6
ren
Life was a fucking nightmare, and everything was falling apart. In the past week I had: broken my reading glasses, lost a critical button during a class lecture, displayed my nipples during said class lecture, backed my car into a utility pole, found a thatch of silver in my pubic hair, and broken my trusty old electric kettle.
I’d alsotechnicallybeen late for this morning’s class, but I wasn’t counting that since no one prioritized a seven-thirty a.m. lecture on a Saturday. Class had gone surprisingly well, and for a second I thought I’d moved past this stretch of bad luck.
Foolish, foolish man.
The other shoe dropped when I came home to discover that my toilet was running slow. While that was low-grade fuckery at best, it was still enough to make my left eye twitch.
I turned to Robert’s urn—a stainless steel container that resided on a shelf in my bathroom—and snarled. I had no proof, but Iknewit was mocking me, if only because my late husband would’ve taken great delight in this week’s list of minor calamities.
Stifling the urge to push the damned thing off its shelf, I decided instead to confront the reluctant toilet. I had no idea what I was doing and winced at the heavy scraping noise as I pried off the lid and then set it on the seat cover.
Looking into the exposed, water-stained tank, it was clear something was amiss with the flappy doohickey and the chain thingy. I did a YouTube search and found a kindly plumber who promised a quick, easy fix.
YouTube plumber guy was a goddamned liar. I glared at Robert’s urn as water gushed out of the hose leading to the tank. I was pretty sure I’d shut the water off, but I did sometimes confuse the lefty loosey, righty tighty of things.
“Shut up,” I growled at the urn.
In case you were worried that I was hallucinating a conversation with a funereal container, it’s important to note that it had never once said anything back to me.
The whole urn-on-the-bathroom-shelf thing, by the way, was an inside joke. Robert had loved having conversations while he was on the pot, but I’d found that revolting. Thankfully, in life, he’d honored my request to not share bathroom space while one of us was using the facilities. In his private letter to me, however, he’d asked that I put his urn in the bathroom.
Don’t make it weird—I just want to be a part of your day.
The man I still adored to distraction wasn’t truly in that fucking urn. His cremains—a word I despised—were in there, sure, but his spirit had moved on. The container was merely a stand-in for Robert’s amused scoffery.
All of this toilet drama could’ve been avoided, of course, had I simply called Major. There was no reason for me not to, save for the fact that I had not one clue what to do with his kindness. Even after what we’d done together, he never gave me funny looks or weird energy when we ran into each other. He treated me exactly the way he always had.
Which was how I ended up with a flooded bathroom.
I did manage to stop the water flow by turning the knob in theotherother direction, but now I was truly lost as to how to fix the issue. I took a stack of towels down from the cupboard and laid them out on the floor to sop up the mess as I tapped my phone.
“Ren? Are you okay?” Major’s deep voice immediately comforted me, even through the line. I hated it.
“If you consider minor flooding okay, then I’m fantastic,” I bit out, letting my chin fall to my chest.
He chuckled. “Plumbing problem? I’ll be there shortly.”
“Thanks, Major. I appreciate it.”
“Always,” he said before hanging up.
See? So kind. So accommodating. So fucking big and sexy and…Mmph. I scrunched my face, not knowing how to process wanting to bone a specific person. Being a generically horny widower was one thing, but pining for the smell of a particular man’s spunk—other than Robert’s—was a different animal altogether.
I still hadn’t forgiven myself for the whole jacking-off-on-the-anniversary-of-my-husband’s-death thing. The urn had mocked me hardcore for that one.
After suffering through a day of honoring Robert with a guilty conscience, I’d gone to my grief group the next day and confessed my Major sins. The group had assured me that having sex with somebody and then having dreams about that same somebody didn’t make me a bad person. I was not convinced.
The bullshit of this past week seemed to verify my take on the matter.
Thankfully, by the time I was dragging a laundry basket full of sopping towels down to the washer, Major was knocking on my front door. I stopped in the little half bath downstairs to check my hair, decided that I looked old and ragged, and opened the door anyway.
Leo stood there, tall and youthful with a sunny smile. I supposed that was better than having to face Major, save for the crushing disappointment.
I swear, don’t get married. If the bastard dies before you, it’ll ruin the rest of your life.
