but especially not to me. She always handled me like I was something fragile. I put a hand to my chest and blinked, not only because her words and tone stung, but also because a loud bang of thunder echoed through the small building. With Huck gone, and with her being so defensive, all the fizzy, fun feelings began to dissipate, and my lingering fear of storms was starting to creep back under my skin.
I held up my hands in a gesture of surrender. “All right, I get it. I won’t ask about the guy or your relationship anymore. Just know that I’m here if you decide you want to talk to me about why you’ve been acting so weird lately. You’ve been there for me, no matter what. It’s the least I can do in return. I just want to be the kind of friend to you that you’ve been to me.”
I yelped and did an embarrassing little hop-skip thing as another crack of thunder rattled the walls and windows.
Mercer sighed and gave me a look that I couldn’t really read. I hated that there seemed to be this gap building between us that I couldn’t figure out how to cross. “No one’s going to come in with the weather being like this. How about I keep the closed sign out, and we hide out in the back and watch Netflix? I’ll order delivery, and you can play hooky from school in style. It’s been a while since it was just you and me on a rainy day.”
It’d been a while because we both had boys on the brain, but for very different reasons. I thought I would never know what it was like to have my own life without Huck’s help. Mercer seemed to have sacrificed her happy-go-lucky lifestyle for the new man in her life. Come to think of it, I couldn’t recall the last time I’d seen her with one of her signature smiles that lit up the whole room.
While I would rather have been alone to weed through all my rambling thoughts, I forced a smile and nodded. “Sure. That sounds fun. You always make rainy days better.”
Or, at least she had. Today she looked like she was going to her own execution rather than sitting down to binge something with me.
I guess it wasn’t only me and Huck who had a change of heart recently.
Huck
“Do you really think someone was in the house last night?”
Harlen looked pissed as he asked the question. Vernon looked concerned. Both ambushed me as soon as I walked in the front door, soaking wet and still reeling from everything that had gone down between me and Ollie over the last handful of hours. From waking up alone, to chasing after her in the rain, to realizing I wasn’t going to be able to let her go again; it was a lot to absorb. It had taken me a very long time to get to a point where I finally felt like my life wasn’t in a constant state of flux, but now I was standing right back on the edge of a cliff of uncertainty. Logic told me I needed to back away as quickly as possible, but my heart wasn’t having any of it. My heart wanted me to jump.
I rubbed a towel over my head to try and dry my hair. I’d needed a shower to chase away the chill of not only jogging home in the rain, but also the one that made the only place that ever felt like home feel tainted. It felt like my sanctuary had been corrupted and violated. It felt like all the shadows had once again found their way back into my world.
“I don’t know if someone was in the house last night, but if we didn’t fix those stairs, and Mr. Peters didn’t touch them, I think it’s safe to say someone was in here tinkering around with things that would make it easier to come and go without being noticed.”
Harlen let out a growl that rumbled from low within his muscular chest. “Fuck that. Do you think your brother hired someone to track Ollie down?”
Vernon scowled and ran a hand over his white hair. “But that doesn’t make any sense. Why would he wait until Ollie found you to fuck with her? If he really wanted to mess with her or scare her into going back home, wouldn’t he have done that when she first got here? She