Fix It Up - Mary Calmes Page 0,19

didn’t pull away, which was surprising, and instead turned his head so his face was pressed into the hollow between my shoulder and neck.

“I’m here to help you, shelter you, keep you safe and build you back up. I’m not gonna go behind your back or talk to Mr. Cox about anything that we don’t discuss first. I will never ambush you.”

“But I’m a prisoner,” he murmured, arms wrapping around my waist, and I felt the tumbler that held his smoothie pressing into my back.

“You’re not,” I assured him. “We can do whatever you want. You just have to take me along and realize that it’s time to start making different choices.”

He stood there, breathing, leaning, and even though I knew this was merely the calm before the storm, I found that him wanting to be close lessened my irritation and awoke every protective instinct I had.

He was tired that evening, but he couldn’t sleep, so I gave him a choice—Lord of the Rings, Marvel movies, or Star Wars.

“What?”

I stood next to the couch, arms crossed, waiting on him.

“Oh, um,” he said, shrugging. “Lord of the Rings, I guess, since I’ve never seen those.”

My scowl was immediate.

He chuckled. “Don’t look at me like that. I was five or something when the first movie came out.”

I suddenly felt ancient. “Fine,” I grumbled at him. “Do you want popcorn or a sandwich? Tell me.”

He shook his head. “I can’t remember the last time I had so many homecooked meals,” he told me, smiling. “The popcorn sounds good, though, and I would kill for a Pepsi.”

“I see iced tea or water in your future.” His whine made me smile in spite of myself. “How ’bout an Arnold Palmer?”

“There is no way there is actual sweet tea in that refrigerator,” he assured me.

“There is. Marisol made some.”

“It’s doubtful that it’s real Southern sweet tea,” he announced, sounding really snotty about it.

“I dunno. I don’t drink tea, but you wanna try it out, kid?”

“Not a kid,” he corrected me, as he’d been doing all day. “You’re not that much older than me.”

“Nine years is a lot,” I reminded him as my phone chirped and I answered it. “Yeah?”

“Loc, there’s a woman down here at the gate who says she’s Nick’s girlfriend.”

I grunted. “What’s her name?”

“Talia.”

“Hey.” Nick lifted his head to meet my gaze. “Is Talia your girlfriend?”

“Who?”

Clearly, he had no idea who she was.

“That’s a negative on the girlfriend,” I told Tony.

There was a pause, and I could hear yelling and cursing in the background on his end.

“Okay,” Tony said, back on the line, “I told her to leave—nicely, I might add—but she says she’s going to call in a wellness check to the police if we don’t let her see him.”

“That’s fine, tell her to g’head and call. The police are aware that I’m here and that there would be many calls to them once I cut Nick off from his hundreds of fake friends.”

“Oh, really?”

“Yeah, that’s how this works,” I explained. “When you cut off leeches, they bitch about it before they get the hint and disappear.”

“She wants to know why she can’t reach him on the phone.”

“I changed his number,” I told him. “If he calls her, she can have his new one, but he has to specifically find the contact on his new phone. If she’s not special, it’ll never happen, because there are literally hundreds of contacts in there with just initials.”

“You’re breaking hearts all over the place, Loc,” he said, chuckling. “How are all these people supposed to reel in a sugar daddy with you being a cockblock?”

“Exactly right,” I said, smiling as I hung up.

“Fine,” Nick told me, yawning and stretching out on the couch. “I’ll try an Arnold Palmer, but the lemonade better be fresh.”

I rolled my eyes and went to the kitchen.

As I anticipated, he fell under the spell of Peter Jackson’s epic. What was difficult was that because he was used to putting all manner of drugs into his system, it was hard for him to get comfortable. He’d been full of God-knew-what just a few months ago, and so he jolted now and then and continually twitched and shivered. He also had trouble regulating his body temperature, so even though it was seventy-two degrees in the house, he had on socks and sweats, a T-shirt and a zippered cardigan. When I gave him one of the blankets I’d put in the chest that he used for a coffee table, he stared at me, stunned.

“What?”

“Since