Page 75 of Caught Up

A muffled whimper came from behind me that sounded more like Taylor than Walter, followed by a shushing noise. I loved my roommates, but did they need to hear every word that was about to come out of our mouths? Probably not.

“Let’s sit,” I said, careful to keep my distance as I walked past Junior. The man had a way of grabbing me that had turned me skittish.

We took the steps down to the sidewalk and sat on the bottom one. Thankfully, they were wide enough that we weren’t touching. The smell of leather and cologne brought me right back to the confessional, and the last thing I needed was to feel the heat rolling off Junior’s body.

Even looking at him was a problem, so I fixed my gaze across the street, where his bike was parked. “Do you live in the neighborhood?”

“No,” he said, voice low and rough, and, god, I was so fucked if even the sound of it was enough to make me shiver. “I just come here sometimes to check up on you.”

“How did you even know where I live?”

“I’ve kept tabs on you over the years,” he said.

Part of me relaxed a little at the confession. I’d been expecting an argument, was ready to pry information out of him bit by bit, because he’d always been such a closed book, but him offering it up so freely was a nice surprise. “And the tracker? How long has it been in my purse?”

“Only since our firstrun-inat church.”

I nodded. That made sense. I’d been so distracted when he pinned me to the wall that he would’ve had plenty of time to plant it on me.

“Don’t do that again,” I told him.

“I won’t put any more trackers on you,” he said.

Well, this was going better than I’d hoped. Time to rip off the Band-Aid. “Did you slash a bunch of old women’s tires just because they were mean to me?”

He smirked. “I heard the tires slashed themselves.”

“Oh my god, you did, didn’t you?”

He looked unrepentant. “Let it be their only warning.”

I reared back. “What are you going to do if they’re mean to me again? Burn their houses down?”

“I would never,” he said, the world’s most untrustworthy smile spreading over his face.

“Really? Because your grin is psychotic.”

He smoothed it out, letting the façade of the reformed mobster slide back into place like a second skin. “I don’t think it’ll come to that.”

No, it definitely wouldn’t, because I was never going back to that church again. I couldn’t imagine trying to sit through an hour of Mass with the confessional booth at my back, knowing what I’d done in there. In my mind, Jesus Christ himself popped out of it in the middle of the priest’s sermon, finger pointed as he accused me of blasphemy.

“What else have you done over the past decade?” I asked Junior, because it was clear his interference hadn’t ended with Kelly and our principal.

His eyes were so dark in the shadows that they almost looked black. “How long are your friends willing to wait while I answer that question? We might be here a while.”

I blinked at him. “My parking tickets?”

He nodded.

“The smashed side mirror on my car that got magically replaced overnight?”

Another nod.

My mind raced, thinking back to every problem that had mysteriously righted itself. I thought of our last apartment, and our landlord’s refusal to fix anything for six months straight before suddenly showing up at our door with a crew of three men and getting it all done in a day. After that, not a week went by that he didn’t ask if we needed anything else.

I narrowed my eyes. “Our landlord at the old place?”

A nod.

---