Page 80 of Little Sunshine

“I was drunk.”

“And?” Cole prompted because the bastard knew that wasn’t the whole story.

“And watching a movie.”

“Annnnd?”

“And I figured if there is gonna be a robot uprising, I wanted my phone on my side. I was being a polite host.”

“Oh my God,” Mila cried as she threw her head back and laughed.

I didn’t give a fuck she was laughing at me. I’d tell her all the embarrassing shit I’d ever done. Hell, I’d recreate the scene with another expensive bottle of bourbon if it made her laugh like that.

Carefree and unrestrained, granting me a glimpse behind her barricaded walls.

Before I did something stupid—like push for more—I handed her back the breakfast bowl. “You see the game room yesterday?”

“You mean your arcade?” she teased.

“Can’t be an arcade. Doesn’t have tickets or a prize counter. But yeah. We’ll be in the room across from there. Come get me if you need anything.”

“Got it.”

“It was nice to meet you, Mila,” Cole said with a smile. He had a quiet charm that women liked. I shot him a glare so he’d stop fucking aiming it at Mila. He ignored me and grinned wider. “I’ll get your phone to you soon.”

“No rush,” she said, before her own smile faltered. She caught herself and forced it back into place. “And it was nice meeting you, too.”

Cole and I headed for my office. Once there was enough distance from the kitchen, he spoke. “Why do I feel like I’m about to be fired from a door duty that I’m not even on?”

His question was a reference to when Maximo had fired me after Juliet called me Handsome Goon.

He wasn’t wrong.

“I’ll head home, see what else I can dig up.” Cole stood and gathered his shit as my phone beeped. “That the boss?”

I checked my phone. “Nope.”

Vi: She had two blowouts and a projectile, you bastard.

Vi: If it wouldn’t send poor Mila up those mountains, I’d pay to fly Emily’s and Maggie’s kids here so I could dump all eleven off with you at the same time.

Vi: You bastard.

“What’d you do to piss her off?” Cole asked, reading over my shoulder.

“Baby shit curse.”

“Evil.”

Cole had come over to drop off some clothes for Mila and get her broken phone. He would transfer her data onto a new one and dig into the texts from her bitch mother to see if there was any merit to her suspicion. Since he was already there, he’d stuck around for a few hours to go over work shit with me.

“Almost forgot.” He pulled something from his bag and tossed it to me. I looked down to see a small plug-in light. “She afraid of the dark?”

“Think so.” The light she left on in the bathroom could’ve just been so she could navigate the unknown space in the night, but I got the feeling it was more than that.

“Make sense. She’s had a lot of monsters hiding in the dark.”

“Now she’s got one in the light, too.”

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