“It’s fine. I’ll pay for the tow.”
“Damn right you are! What am I supposed to do now? I have to go to work!”
Her anger wasn’t really directed at him. She was reacting to Hayden and leftover adrenaline, but Nick knew when to back away slowly. He fished his wallet out of his jeans and put a twenty on the table.
“That will cover a cab and anything else you need today.”
Anya glared at him, but she took the twenty. “I can’t believe you got towed.”
“I had some help.” A lot of help, in fact. In the form of a six-foot-two hipster with a superiority complex and too much hair.
When she was gone, Nick called the probation officer. He didn’t sound very happy, but that was par for Nick’s course. Every minute he spent on the phone was a minute he wasn’t asleep, and stringing sentences together was a miracle. He used his patient work voice, the one he used with panicked families. Eventually, the officer relented, although he promised to make a note of this absence in Hayden’s file.
Exhaustion weighed on Nick’s shoulders. Far too much drama for one day, and it wasn’t even eight o’clock yet. He shuffled up the hall and knocked on Hayden’s closed door.
“Yeah?”
Nick pushed the door open to find Hayden lying on his bed. He’d hit a growth spurt and seemed to be too long for the mattress in every direction. The foot with the tracking bracelet hung off the side. As a kid, he’d slept like that too, arms and legs splayed all over the place, but then he'd been small, and the position sweet. Now, the tracker was like an ugly scar.
“Are you really sick?” Nick asked from the doorway.
“Yes.”
The room was a disaster, and the smell of teenage boy wafted over him and out into the hall—beautiful normalcy amid the storm they lived in.
“There isn’t another reason you don’t want to go to community service?” Getting a straight answer out of Hayden about anything was a distant memory, but Nick had to try.
“Would you leave me alone? I don’t feel good, okay?” When Hayden was a baby, people said his eyes were just like Nick’s. He hoped he’d never looked at anyone with the impatient loathing filling his son’s gaze right now.
“Hey, don’t look at me like that. I’m the one who called your PO. How do you think it’s going to look, missing community service, at your next court date?”
“I don’t care.”
“You should care. If you want that thing off your leg, youneedto care.” Now he was starting to sound like Anya. Despite giving this speech almost daily, they might as well be shouting at a brick wall, but they had to keep trying.
Hayden shifted, shoving the foot with the bracelet under a pillow. “It’s all stupid. It doesn’t matter. The judges hate me.”
Time to go. When Hayden turned to theme against the worldargument, continuing was fruitless.
“Pick up your room before your mom gets home, okay?”
Nick went down the hall to his room. He slid out of his jeans and shirt and into bed. His curtains didn’t do much to block out the daylight, but he’d gotten used to it ages ago, like he’d learned to sleep alone again after his divorce.
And then his ex-wife and son had come back to his house. While there certainly had never been any question of Anya sharing his bed again, having her and Hayden in the building meant Nick had needed to adjust all over again. He didn’t want to resent their presence—they needed his support—but mornings like this were hard, especially when their situation had no end in sight.
Nick rubbed a hand over his eyes and down his chest. With the motion, the fantasy with the guy from the market returned. He skipped over the memory of the angry words shouted after Nick’s car had disappeared down the street, but the rest...Nick’s hand roamed over his body. Before it had all gone wrong, the guy had been amazing. The hair, the face. A man could dream about things like that.
Nick wanted that. Just not with some asshole turnip farmer who liked having Nick’s wreck of a car towed.
On a whim, he reached for his phone. He sent a short text to Brian.
I’m interested. Set me up.
The little bubble indicating Brian was replying popped up on the screen. The message appeared shortly.
I’ll tell Jess. His name is Oliver. That’s pretty much all I know.
Nick lay back on his bed, ignoring the nervous pang in his chest as he set the phone down.
