“We don’t have any friends here,” Jesse replied flatly.
“Finn, don’t,” Teddy ordered as Finn ran and jumped onto the bed. He was already in the air when she said it and landed sprawled on his stomach. She glanced at me apologetically. “Come on, you guys. Back downstairs. We need to unload.”
“Okay!” Finn popped back up and went racing out of the room.
“We don’t have beds,” Jesse said quietly.
“We’ll figure it out in the morning, okay?” Teddy replied, moving toward us. “I brought your frame. You just need a mattress.”
“We don’t haveanything,” Jesse continued.
“We just don’t have furniture,” Teddy countered. “I packed all the important stuff.”
Jesse stared at her for a moment before silently turning on their heel and leaving.
“We don’t need to unload tonight,” I told Teddy as she sighed. “It’ll be fine in the truck overnight.”
Teddy shook her head. “They need their shit around them,” she told me, meeting my gaze for the first time since we’d come upstairs. “They came home this afternoon to a packed-up house and the news that we were leaving. They need their stuff.”
“Then we’ll get it,” I conceded. What was another hour? I could sleep when I was dead.
“Thanks.” She scrubbed her hands over her face tiredly. “This is…not what I was envisioning when Grease called.”
“What were you envisioning?”
“Ourownapartment,” she replied. “Where we could sleep on the floor for a few days until we found furniture at a garage sale or thrift store. Some time to explain to them why we’d come to Eugene, get them settled, all of that.”
“And instead, you walked into a house full of people and my idiot son’s drama.”
“I mean…” She shrugged. “Yeah.”
We went back downstairs and found Finn talking a mile a minute to Kara, who was grinning at him indulgently. Everyone else was already outside, and the front door was wide open.
“We can unload ourselves,” Teddy said, following me toward the door. “If you’d just open the garage, we can—”
“No reason to put it all in the garage when it needs to come in the house anyway,” I replied, nodding to Kara as we passed.
“I’m serious,” Teddy continued, her voice thin. “Really. Jess and I can unload it. I loaded it all up myself. None of the boxes are that heavy.”
She ran into my back when I stopped on the porch. “You loaded it all yourself?”
“I told you. Everything was loaded when the kids got home,” she replied. “What? Did you think I had the maid do it?”
“You had a maid?” I asked dumbly.
Teddy looked at me like I’d grown an extra head as she moved around me. “No, I didn’t have a fuckingmaid.”
“Right.” Fuck, I needed sleep. With every minute that passed, I felt foggier, and my body felt heavier.
“Fucking hell,” my brother grumbled as we reached him. He was leaning over the side of the truck bed, reaching inside. “You think you tied this down well enough?”
“I have a system,” Teddy replied, climbing onto the back tire. I stared at her ass and thighs as she bent over, my mouth watering. Completely oblivious, she reached between the boxes and the sidewall, and after a few moments, the spiderweb of tie-downs came loose. She rose up and hopped down from the tire, and I jerked my eyes away.
“Let Dylan carry the heavy shit,” I told Jesse as they came toward me holding the bags from the back seat.
“I can carry boxes,” they replied dryly.
“Didn’t doubt it,” I said. “But Dylan’s on my shit list. Let him do it.”
