Page 177 of Story of My Life
Hazel crossed her arms. “You aren’t really going to deny a man baby formula and M&M’s, are you?”
Swearing under my breath, I faced Junior through the glass. “Stay there.”
Junior cupped his hands to the door and peered in. “Oh, hey, Hazel! I’m not interrupting date night, am I?”
“No,” Hazel called.
“Yes,” I countered. I stormed into the baby-toiletries-battery aisle and snatched a big-ass canister of formula off the shelf. Then I hit up the register display and grabbed all three kinds of M&Ms we carried. I hustled back to the door, opened it, and threw the lot at Junior.
“You just saved my behind, that’s for sure. Tessa’s exhausted and the babies are fussy. Lemme just get my wallet. Oh, I’ve got the cutest dang video from dinner tonight. It was spaghetti?—”
I slammed the door in his face and locked it. “Let’s go,” I said to Hazel.
“Bye, Junior,” she called.
“See y’all later. I’ll stop by tomorrow and pay my tab. Maybe I’ll bring the girls by?—”
I snagged Hazel’s wrist and dragged her into the back.
“That was very niceandincredibly rude of you,” she observed as I towed her up the stairs to the second floor.
“I keep telling you, I’m a complicated man.”
“A complicated pain in the ass,” she muttered.
“I heard that.”
“I wanted you to.”
We arrived on the utilitarian second floor. The back half of the floor was storage for the store. The front half was a small apartment that I’d claimed as my temporary home after Laura kicked me out of her house post-accident when the close quarters put us at each other’s throats.
I opened the door to the apartment and gestured for Hazel to enter.
“Why can’t we do this someplace public?” she asked, stalling in the hallway.
A slow, satisfied grin spread across my face. “You’re nervous.”
“I am not!”
“You’re worried you can’t trust yourself around me. Admit it.”
“You’re the worst. I’m mad at you, in case you forgot. I wouldn’t get naked with you again if you were the last big-dicked man on the planet.”
“Then you’ve got nothing to worry about. We’re just two adults discussing town business,” I said, giving her a helpful push across the threshold.
I tried to see it from her point of view. Where Hazel was turning every inch of Heart House into a home, my apartment was basically a receptacle for laundry, food, and books.
It was a one-bedroom, one-bathroom bachelor pad that was borderline cliché. There were no personal mementos. The furniture was struggling-grad-student quality. The fridge held nothing but beer and take-out leftovers. And the TV was big enough to cause vertigo if you sat too close. My things from my last apartment were still in the storage unit that I hadn’t gotten around to emptying yet.
I’d managed a twenty-minute cleaning spree between jobs. The place wasn’t exactly sparkling, but the permeating scent of Pine-Sol was working its magic.
“Well,” she said, looking around the room.
There wasn’t much to see. The kitchen was the size of a cafeteria lunch table. There was a crappy four-seater dining set under the windows that looked out over Main Street. I used it to hold stacks of mail and packages. The living room consisted of an ugly green couch and an uglier brown chair. I’d put up bookshelves on both sides of the TV but left them unfinished.
The apartment, the open-ended stay, it had all been a temporary solution. But a year later, and I still felt like I was living in some kind of limbo. In fact, the only thing that stood out in my mind from that year was standing in my living space, judging it.
“It’s no Heart House,” I admitted.
