Page 65 of Fish out of Water
The girl looked like she was going to die of traumatization.
“I don’t have a basement.”
“Crawl space, whatever you want to call it.” Collette smiled. “Can I get a Venti latte?”
The girl kept her eyes on us until we were out the door.
“She’s going to have nightmares now.” I buckled up as Collette sucked down some of her coffee.
“You never answered me.” Collette shoved her giant cup down into the holder. “Does Grant know about your dicks?”
I looked out the window. “Maybe.”
“Lemme guess.” She rolled her eyes my way. “It’s not like that.”
I stuck my tongue out at her.
She stopped at the light just before the turn onto the long lane leading to the employee parking. “Maybe I should hit Grant up then.”
“I’ll kill you and make it look like an accident.”
Collette whipped my way. “I knew it.”
“There’s nothing to know.” I dug into my purse for my badge, clipping it to the waistband of my shorts as Collette pulled into her designated spot. “He’s just not into me.”
“Impossible.” Collette grabbed her coffee and her purse and her own badge before climbing out of the car at the same time as me.
“It doesn’t seem like it is. We made out once, and he’s been weird ever since.” It was a little depressing when I thought about it too hard. Now that I could finally date the way I wanted to, I was still just as limited as I had been before.
Only this time it was my darn picky tendencies instead of my overbearing parents screwing the pooch.
Collette frowned. “I take it all back then. He’s not allowed to be a nerd. He’s a dumbass.”
Since meeting Collette I struggled to think of the wordnerdas anything besides a compliment.
Nerds were smart. They had their shit together. They had interesting things to talk about.
Hence Collette’s determination to find one of her own.
“Just because I’m not what he’s looking for doesn’t make him a dumbass.” I’d seen Grant’s type, and I definitely didn’t fall into the same category as the woman on his phone.
Or probably Valentina.
If he liked women who got airbrush tans and always remembered to wax their buttholes then I was definitely not his girl.
I dropped Collette off at the gift shop and went to the back-most corner of the property. The building I worked out of was tucked into a sloping man-made hill to keep it from detracting from the natural landscape of the grounds.
Andrew was already in the room we used to test samples for anything that might threaten the trees and plants that had been collected over the almost hundred years since the gardens were established. He glanced up as I came in. “Morning, Julia.”
“Morning.” I tucked my bags into my locker before going to where he stood, looking over something I hadn’t yet seen. “What’s that?”
“We’ve got a set of trees that look like they might have root rot.” He held up a small mushroom. “I found a few of these around their bases this morning.”
“Shit.” I turned to the large, laminated map of the property taped to the wall. “Where are they?”
Andrew grabbed a pen and circled a spot in the northeastern corner. “They’re right along the edge where the new development is going in.”
“Those asshats are messing up our drainage.” The gardens tried to buy the property for our own expansion, but we were outbid by a housing developer intent on building mansions that would do more than damage a few trees. “I’ll call Jeff and tell him we need to figure out a new way to control runoff.”
