We filed out, picked up our phones, and made our way to the great room to drink. I was surprised to find Wyatt, Sabrina, and Raquel in the kitchen, opening boxes of fresh, hot pizzas.
“Where’s Letti?” I asked. She’d been with them down at Sundance and Wyatt’s place while church was meeting, but had planned to meet me when we were done.
“She’s here somewhere,” Raquel said.
I found myself relaxing, not realizing I’d been on such high alert.
Wyatt smiled. “Rough meeting?”
“I plead the fifth,” I replied.
She chuckled. “Fair enough.”
“There you are,” Letti said, wrapping her arms around me.
“Here I am,” I said, giving her a gentle squeeze.
“Can I steal you for a minute?” She frowned up at me. “Or are you still meeting?”
“I’m good,” I said. “Your room?”
She nodded and we made our way upstairs, closing ourselves inside.
“How bad?” she asked.
“Locked down bad,” I said.
She dropped her head to my chest. “We don’t have time for this shit.”
“It’s fine, baby. We’ll adjust.”
“I wanted to talk to you about looking for a place together.”
I sighed. “Yeah, I was gonna talk to you about the same.”
She smiled up at me. “Really?”
“Yeah, baby. I know you hate my place,” I said. “Ihate my place.”
“That’s not to take away from the fact you’ve done everything—”
“Babe, I get it. Thank you for acknowledging the difficult job of getting a recruit to clean my apartment.”
“Well,Icleaned it initially,” she reminded me. “Then I kind of put up a stink because you wouldn’t keep up with it, so you then got one of the grunts to do it on a regular basis, so you wouldn’t have to.”
I chuckled. “Right. Thank you for doin’ that.”
“You’re welcome.” She grinned. “I want chickens.”
“Come again?”
“Chickens,” she repeated. “I want snow chickens and regular chickens, chickens who lay eggs. Can you imagine having fresh eggs every day?”
“Let’s let all this shit calm down a bit,” I suggested, cupping her face.
“Are you against chickens?”
“No. I’m not at all against chickens.”
