Page 1 of The Love You Hate
CHAPTER ONE
Nate
She has powder on her nose. No, not cocaine, it appears to be sugar, flour, or some kind of fluffy confection used in baking. Though at one point, I’m sure she’s had cocaine on her nose. Presley Cohen is behind the glass counter laughing animatedly about something her coworker said. The bitch is flirting her ass off and the dude is not having it as he rolls out a long strand of dough on the powdery surface in front of him. I smelled the bakery when I was three blocks away, the sweet aromas of baked treats wafting through the smokestack on top of the ancient building. I’ve categorized it as perhaps the only pleasant attribute to my new town.
I placed the listening bug next to the thin paned window, and it’s picking up their conversation and transmitting it to my earpiece. There’s a ratty film on the windows to protect from sunlight that’s peeling at one corner, so I have a view of them from the side as they converse. I lose my footing on the broken ten-gallon bucket I’m perched on, and stumble, catching myself on the rotting wood of the sill above my head. If Denver is shiny and splendid, this shanty Colorado town is a dusty, old-fashioned village that God has long but forgotten. Gold Hawke, Colorado. Population: 110. Now 111, because I’m here now. Pathetic. Even the bank’s façade looks like it’s forgotten what money is.
“If you roll it too flat, it won’t bake up big enough,” Presley says, waiting for this uninterested man to take her bait. Even I see the gleam in her eye through the dirty ass window.Here she goes again.She’s a new employee and she’s telling him what to do. The woman is on her own brand for sure.
“Oh, I thought I was doing an okay job with it,” he counters. “The last batch was fine.”
This woman can’t control herself, she can’t. I’ve been watching her for three days, and one thing is for certain,thejoke is coming. “That’s what she said!” Her voice is nails on a chalkboard loud, and she snorts as her laugh screeches into my earpiece. I remove it, annoyed, and hold it away from my head until I’m sure she’s finished hawing like a donkey.
“Good one. Got me there,” the guy replies, eyeing her from the side. His scowl when she’s not watching makes me grin widely. I’m in good, exasperated company. Everyone in this place thinks the woman is several screws short of a hardware store. Everyone. It’s why I’m in the dungeons of this Podunk drive-by town, ordered to protect, and keep an eye on this woman. This assignment is my punishment, one I’m just now realizing is going to be a son of a bitch to endure.
“Oh, come on Ryan, you knew you had it coming.” I mouth the words as she says them, because they’re the words she always says afterthejoke.
Sighing, I sit down on the bucket and continue to listen. Presley talks nonstop, and so far, nothing has been of interest. She’s safe here. No one visits, and if they do, they definitely don’t want to fucking stay. Not when all the glitzy, beautiful ski resorts are right down the highway, luring you with… life. Presley Cohen’s father, Michael is a billionaire who got wrapped up in a fraud scandal so huge it took down half of Wall Street. Powerful billionaires and millionaires were left on their knees begging, terrified because they’d been caught. The U.S. is still trying to bounce back from the economic recession it threw us in.
The men responsible are locked away, but that doesn’t mean the rest of the world forgot. In fact, the family members of those responsible are sitting ducks just waiting to be picked off for the wrongdoings of their family members. They fucked with a lot of people’s wealth. Money, man, it’s the only thing nice people shed blood over without a second thought. An entire task force formed to oversee the aftermath of this monetary disaster. The innocent family members were sent to minuscule towns all over the United States to start over, and try to live normal lives, and we, The Charge Men, are their protection and only line of defense against cellular groups that cropped up to enact swift justice. Sometimes it’s easier when our Principal doesn’t know we’re around, and we live life in the shadows. Other times, like with my former Principal, the one I’m currently being punished for, he should have known I was there for him. He took his own life in a ratty apartment in a gritty neighborhood in Maryland. I didn’t know why he’d ordered the harmless household powder from the internet, but I should have. His name was Cecil, and he didn’t adjust well to his new surroundings. He didn’t have any friends, and couldn’t keep a simple job because of his depression. I lived in the apartment next to his and he’d be holed away for days and weeks without leaving—without having a single phone conversation. I knew he was alive because I heard him shuffling about.
It was an easy job. One I took for granted. When he killed himself, I was in shock for a solid week. The Charge Men do not take this kind of situation lightly, in fact, I could have been booted from the program altogether. Worse, I could be targeted myself by henchmen working for the elite behind prison bars. No one wanted to go to Gold Hawke, and my boss decided to send me here instead of terminating me because it was a hard fill. No one wanted to be responsible for Michael’s daughter. If she does something crazy, I am most certainly dead this time. No second chances with a Principal this prominent. Maybe they’re trying to get rid of me once and for all. I sigh when I hear Presley snicker.
“What do you call a priest who becomes a lawyer?” Presley rasps, and I wonder again how it’s possible she came from the family she did. “A father-in-law, get it?”
Oh, God. I cringe, and I don’t even have to look to know Ryan is utterly disgusted. If she doesn’t stop, she’s going to get fired, and I can’t have that. I knew yesterday what I had to do; it just took twenty-four hours of mulling to gain the courage. Unlike with Cecil, I need to befriend Presley. If a friend is giving her pointers maybe she’ll calm down with her… personality. There are hazards to this method, of course. I can’t get too close to her, and she can never think of me as anything other than a friend.
“Ugh, okay fine, what about this one? Why did the bike fall over?”
Ryan grunts in response.
“Because it was too tired! Two tires?” She laughs so hard she snorts. Really, I’m not sure I’ll be able to be more than ten feet from her without breaking out in hives after the bad jokes she’s subjected me to unknowingly. Becoming her friend and earning her trust may be harder than I bargained for.
“I’m going to turn on my music and put in my headphones now. I’ll crank out the rest of these rolls, though. I work quicker this way.” Ryan is too fucking polite to tell her to shut the fuck up. “You good with the loaves? Remember the oven in ten minutes.”
Presley sighs animatedly, annoyed to be left alone with no one to talk to, but she agrees. Quiet isn’t in her repertoire though, so she starts humming a popular pop song, forcing me to listen to her as background noise. The mailman walks by every day at the same time. Glancing at my watch I know I’ll need to move so I don’t look suspicious. It’s another reason I’ve decided to befriend Presley. In a town this small where everyone knows everyone, I don’t have long before I’m discovered and make introductions with my Principal. I’d rather it be on my terms, with a firm plan in place. I stopped in the grocery store, no, that’s too generous a term, the gas station that has a general store rough added to the side. The old woman looked at me funny and was immediately suspicious.
Even after I told her I was new in town, she wanted to know where I worked, who I knew, why I came to Gold Hawke, what house am I living in, and when I’m leaving. She made it clear that she doesn’t take to strangers well. Presley’s cover is that someone gifted her a property in a will. Presley’s life is as if she has always belonged here. The funny thing is, she even looks like she belongs here instead of a billion-dollar mansion in The Hamptons where her family was rolled up and shook down. The job at the bakery was procured naturally and we didn’t have to step in. She walked in on her first day here and asked for work, Ryan’s aunt hired her on the spot.
My watch beeps to alert me of the time, and with Presley’s voice vibrating in my ear, I round the back of the old-ass building to hide out from the mailman. I can still hear what’s going on in the bakery, but her humming does cut in and out now that I’m farther from the transmitter. There’s a back door that only Ryan’s aunt uses, and she’s already left for the day. She lives in a cottage within walking distance. Almost everything is walking distance in Gold Hawke, and there are three main roads—the paved one that has all of the businesses, and the two dirt roads that have all of the houses, trailers, and domiciles in every different shape and size. My house is a little farther up the mountain away from the other houses because it was the only thing headquarters could find for sale at the time.
The mailbox squeaks, slams, and the mailman sets off down the road. It’s now that I formulate a plan to make my life miserable. Leaving the bug in the window, I remove the earbuds, grab one piece of mail out of the mailbox, and head into the bakery just as Presley comes barreling out of the old, glass-paneled door. She bumps into me so hard that I nearly fall over.
“Oh, sweet baby Jesus in a manger, I’m so sorry, sir, I didn’t know you were out here or I never would have danced out the door.” Well, this works too.
“Golly, I’m sorry to have been in the way. You’re a real force,” I say, watching her brighten at the use of the dumbass word.
“Here,” I say, extending my hand. “It fell out of your mailbox as I was walking by and I didn’t want it to get lost. I’m Nate.” She takes it, her green eyes crinkling in the corner.
“That was awful nice of you,” she says, lips twitching. Oh, God, it’s coming again. “Didn’t you know you should always be nice to glass windows?” Presley pats the glass door behind her. “If you don’t, they can come down with a bad case of window pain.” She presses her lips together, ready to explode into hee-haws.
I have to play her game first to get into her good graces. “I haven’t heard that one before,” I deadpan, forcing a fake smile to my face. “What’s your name?”
Her smile fades and she looks at me quizzically, a wary flicker of fear in her big eyes. Good, she should be on guard, she just got here. She was told to be wary of all strangers and those who weren’t in her initiation packet. I wouldn’t be in there because her Charge Man assignment came in at the tail end. The packet included a binder with all of the townspeople and I can tell she’s flicking through mentally, page by page, trying to place me. “I’m sorry, have we met before?”That’s what she asks?How odd.
“I don’t think so. I don’t know your name,” I reply.
Her eyes narrow. “I’m Presley. You from here?”
