little cooing noise that wasn’t meant for me, telling me he wasn’t totally paying attention before replying with, “Double of whatever you’re bringing.”
“Okay, I’ll be there in thirty,” I told him, shouldering the outside door open.
“What’s wrong?” Grandpa Gus asked suddenly, and it didn’t escape me the fact that he asked what was wrong, not asking if something was wrong.
He knew me too well.
And, God, he was going to lose his shit after we had our talk. Fuck.
Knowing that made it hard to keep toeing that line. “Nothing life-or-death. I’ll see you in a little bit.”
I didn’t like the way he said “okay,” but if I didn’t like it, I deserved it.
Fuck!
Thirty-five minutes later, I opened the door to the house I had lived at on and off my entire life, holding a bag of burritos and tortilla chips in one hand.
And I was sweating my damn ass off despite the fact it was in the high forties outside.
But as I went through the back door connected to the kitchen that had been completely remodeled a few years ago and then through the hallway that led to the living room of the house that Grandpa had bought a thousand years before I’d been born, I listened.
Everything was quiet. Too quiet. Usually the television was on, or there was something playing over the speakers in the living room, or somebody was making some kind of noise, but there was none of that.
Hmm.
I kicked off my shoes and started creeping down the hallway, clutching the bag of burritos and hoping the paper bag wouldn’t make too much noise.
Still, there was nothing.
I narrowed my eyes and peeked into the living room to find it empty. I held my breath and listened. And that was when I heard it. Just the slightest, most quiet little noise…
“I know you’re there. I can hear you breathing,” I called out with a snort.
Nothing.
I rolled my eyes and climbed up on the love seat, one of the two couches in the living room, and hung over the back of it. Then I reached down and smacked one of the two bony butt cheeks sticking up in the air. “Get up before you can’t,” I laughed at my grandfather, who was on his hands and knees. Hiding. To try and scare the shit out of me.
He grunted and looked up with a frown. “You heard me?”
“Your sinuses are acting up. Your nose is wheezing.” I peeled my jacket off and dumped it on the armrest of the couch.
He muttered something like “damn it” under his breath as he struggled, just a little, to his knees and then up to his feet. At seventy-five years old, his bones only reminded him every once in a while that he was closer to a hundred than twenty now, but it wasn’t enough to make me sad. He had barely slowed down over the years, and he sure didn’t look his age. Grandpa was a vampire and would end up outliving me.
I got off the couch with a snicker and shook my head again as he came around. “How long have you been down there?”
“I heard you pull in,” he replied, still frowning at being caught as one hand went down to rub a circle into his left knee.
Because this was our game.
Hiding and scaring the crap out of each other. Or at least trying to. We’d been doing it for so long that we could both usually pick up on signals that said something was up. Example: the silence.
With a snicker, I dropped the bag of burritos on the coffee table and spotted the paperback sitting on the surface. It wasn’t just any book, but one with a bare-chested firefighter—or two—on the cover; I couldn’t tell from this distance. And just like always, it fucking made me laugh even though my stomach was knotted up at why I was home.
Because my seventy-five-year-old, four-time world champion boxer of a grandfather loved the hell out of romance novels, and it tickled the shit out of me. It always had and always would. And it was a perfect example of what made up his personality: a mixture of a thousand what-the-fucks.
“How’s the book?” I asked him, hearing the weirdness in my voice and pretending like I didn’t, as he lowered himself to the couch and opened the bag of food. I didn’t need to give him more reason to be suspicious.
“I just started it. It’s about two firefighters right after 9-11. I’ll let you read