Page 12 of On the Run
I ran my flashlight beam over the wood floor, even patting under Rafe’s stool, but my bracelet was nowhere to be found. It was like it had just… disappeared.
I blew out a breath.
“Beale!” Dale insisted again.
“Fuck,” I muttered. I nearly brained myself on the underside of the bar, and I had bigger fish to fry than spotting some lookalike of Rafe’s ex-wife’s brother. “Still kinda busy here, Dale. Rafe, come help me look for my bracelet?”
But even with Rafe using his phone flashlight, too, and crawling around on the floor alongside me, my bracelet was nowhere to be found.
“Cheer up,” Rafe said distractedly as we left the bar a little while later. “Silvio said he’d keep an eye out for it. And maybe it’ll shake out of your clothes when you get home.”
I glanced down at my T-shirt, cargo pants, and boots and patted my pants pockets just in case.Nada.
I didn’t have a lot of possessions I cared about—a few books, a couple of bigger crystals, some photo albums—but this bracelet was special. It was more than just a bracelet of protective stones; it felt like a connection to my future. And while I wasn’t foolish enough to think I was cursed without it or anything, not having it made me feel sort of lost.
I didn’t like it.
When I pulled into the driveway outside Mason and Fenn’s place up in the Heights, I was in a full-on mope, which was totally unlike me. I sat in the Jeep in the driveway, staring up at the house for a long minute.
Outside, the house looked the same as it had a couple weeks ago when they bought it—two stories of buttery stucco with a tower in front that glowed in the moonlight like an Italian building that had survived a renaissance or two.
Rafe and our dad, Big Rafe, had given Fenn a generous helping of shit over the giant fountain burbling in the center of the semicircular driveway, since Fenn was not generally a fountain-owning sort of person. But Mason’s entire being had been so purely happy, I was pretty sure even Fenn had felt it, and he hadn’t found one single fuck to give over their teasing.
Honestly, I wouldn’t have either. From the second floor of the tower, you could see east, past the waters of the intracoastal waterway to the mainland, and west over the Gulf to the horizon. Around back, a bougainvillea arbor led to a giant pool and guesthouse. Let people tease if they wanted to, but Mason and Fenn had invested part of their treasure windfall into buying themselves acastle.They were living the dream here.
Or they would be, once the inside of the house was as beautiful as the outside.
I took a quick peek in the windows from the porch and verified that the contractors had left everything in good shape for the weekend, and then I wandered under the bougainvillea to their huge backyard. I threw myself down on a lounge chair near the pool and stared at the underwater lights, thinking.
Earlier, when I’d gotten the house keys from Mason, he’d been stressed out about the renovations—understandable, since every floor in his precious house had been stripped down to the subfloor, with the remains thrown in a dumpster in the side yard—stressed about leaving his practice so soon after moving the clinic to a new building, and stressed about having Fenn meet his family.
I’d tried to talk him down, but it was like he couldn’t hear a word I said. I’d told him, “I’ve got the house under control. Taffy’s running the clinic. Everything’s gonna be fine!” But he’d paced up and down the echoing, empty front hall and stared at me like I was speaking Klingon. I could almost see the intensity of his brain waves spiraling up a notch.
Then Fenn had come downstairs with their suitcase, dressed nicer than I’d ever seen him. He’d taken one look at Mason’s anxious face, grabbed him around the waist with no preamble, and twirled him in a half circle, ignoring Mason’s protests.
“Remind me, Loafers. Is tonight the night we visit your old high school and recreate your swan dive into history, or is that tomorrow?”
I’d had no clue what he was talking about, but it was clear Mason did, because he’d gotten that super-severe look he got when he was trying not to laugh at Fenn’s bullshit. He’d pushed half-heartedly at Fenn’s chest. “That’s never. Tonight we meet my sisters. And my nephew.” He blew out a nervous breath. “You have the things for the girls, right?”
“Packed in the suitcase,” he’d confirmed. “It’s like a unicorn threw up in there. Competition for best bonus uncle will be fierce, but Constantine’s no match for my shock-and-awe campaign. He’s going down.”
Mason had burst out laughing, burying his face in Fenn’s collarbone, and when he’d emerged a minute later, he’d looked more like his usual calm, level self.
“Love you,” Mason had said looking Fenn dead in the eyes, casual but not.
“Loveyou,” Fenn had replied, and if you’d known the man even half as long as I had, you’d understand why I almost felt like I wanted to cry, I was so genuinely happy for him. Fenn and Mason were halves of a single unit, consciously vibrating at the same frequency. No one, except maybe Rafe, could look at them and not believe that a benevolent Universe had meant for them to be together. No one could believe there wasn’t a soul mate, a perfect complement, out there for each of us.
Even if sometimes we got impatient, waiting for it.
Even if sometimes we sort of worried that the Universe had forgotten us.
I clasped my hand over my wrist where my bracelet used to rest and felt that pang of emptiness I’d felt earlier at the bar. “Please make it soon,” I whispered.
The only reply was the gurgle of the water in the pool and the chattering of the night insects in the trees, so I sighed and made my way to my temporary home for the next week.
I’d accidentally left the kitchen light on earlier, but the living room was cool and tidy, apart from a couple of boxes tucked in the corner. It even smelled like expensive air freshener I didn’t recall smelling earlier, and just inhaling that sweet, spicy fragrance, I felt my whole mood shift back into the right alignment.
How fucking lucky was I? To be here on this island, the most beautiful place in the world, with a roof over my head?
