Page 156 of By A Thread
I held her hand as she directed me, first to an all-night convenience store for surprisingly decent green tea and an armload of snacks to stave off the hunger caused by our sex marathon and then on to her father’s house.
It was still dark when I swung into the skinny driveway, but I breathed a sigh of relief. Google Street View hadn’t lied. The neighborhood was not terrible, and the house itself looked… comfortable.
“Brownie should probably wait in the car,” she said, unbuckling her seatbelt.
I was immediately suspicious. “Why?”
“It’s a bit of a construction zone inside. I don’t want him to step on a nail or something.” She hopped out of the car and carefully closed the door in my dog’s face.
Brownie looked crestfallen for all of two seconds before he remembered it was an unholy hour in the middle of the night and curled up and went to sleep behind the wheel.
“Is it me, or is it colder here in Jersey?” I asked, following her up the walkway.
“I’ll keep you warm, big guy,” she said with an exaggerated wink.
I gave her ass a slap. And then immediately shifted gears into preparing a safety lecture with some significant yelling when she opened the front door without unlocking it first.
That lecture was put on the back burner when I followed her inside.
“What the… Tell me you don’t actually live here.”
What I assumed had been a living room at some point was a tidy ruin.
“It’s not that bad,” Ally said with a roll of her brown eyes. It wasn’t really her fault that she wasn’t taking this seriously. Basking in the glow of the impressive number of orgasms that I’d personally delivered, she hadn’t noticed how pissed off I really was. “Just watch your step,” she cautioned.
“There’s a hole in your ceiling.” It was the first of many, many problems I had with the room.
There was a gaping hole in the ceiling. The plywood floor was water-stained in a six-foot radius. The carpet had been removed at some point, but the strips of tacks were still in place, offering a nice dance with tetanus to anyone who ventured too close.
The spot against the wall where I assumed a TV had once been was bare, the drywall behind it stained and bowed. Capped wires hung out of a hole.
“It used to be a lot worse,” she said cheerfully. “There used to be a bathtub right there.”
She pointed to the spot.
It was freezing in the house. I blinked at the thermostat reading. Fifty-two fucking degrees.
“It happened right before Dad was diagnosed. He forgot he left the faucet running. It overflowed and ran all night. The tub fell through the floor. It wrecked the entire bathroom and part of the hallway and bedroom upstairs. Down here. Well, you can see. The worst was the piano,” she said sadly, gesturing toward the ruined instrument. “My father loves music. We used to play together, make up silly songs. Just the two of us. On his good days, we used to joke that he couldn’t have done more damage if he tried.”
“Why are you living like this?” I asked.
“You don’t really want to hear yet another Morales family story of woe,” she said lightly, but I could hear the note of strain in her voice.
Oh, but I did.I pinned her with my gaze.
“Geez. Fine. So my mother stealing my father’s savings was just the first problem.”
I needed to move, so I wandered around the room while she talked. I paused at the piano.
“No shit,” I spat. I was so fucking angry that the woman I’d spent my evenings lusting after from my warm, cushy Upper West Side townhouse had been living here. Likethis.
She picked up a box of drywall screws and put it on an end table.
I stopped pacing and leaned against the wall.
“Once upon a time, I had savings too,” she sighed.
I waited. Not trusting myself to keep the anger roiling beneath the surface contained.
