Page 33 of Bossy Mess

Was that him joking back at me? Being playful in his curmudgeonly, cynical way? It seemed to be.

I watched him get dressed. There was nothing particularly special about the way in which he did it other than it was him. And I loved every second of it.

He brought my clothing over to me and leaned down, kissing me in the process. It was a long kiss. A good kiss.

I was proud of him for it. This was a man who was so distracted by work that he couldn’t experience a moment’s pleasure. And now, with his career very much on the line, being put in a position where he had to do something that was, at the very least, fairly sketchy, he was still able to kiss me like he didn’t have a care in the world.

For the first day in a very long time, I was looking forward to work. Yes, I was tired from the all-nighter I pulled and possibly even slightly hungover from the bottle of wine I drank, but I had my sexy boss keeping an eye on me and I’d just sold a house.

The streak of bad luck was broken!

I got dressed with a big ol’ smile on my face and let Wesley lead me out of the room, closing my eyes to take in all the other sensations of the morning. We were about to head down the stairs together when—

“What the fuck?!” he shouted.

It was shocking to hear such a big reaction from someone who was so restrained normally. I thought it was completely out of character and uncalled for until I opened my eyes and saw what he did.

“What the fucking fuck fuck fuck?!” I shouted.

The entire downstairs was covered in a thin layer of water.

“The sandbags,” I said, “they didn’t hold.”

“Uh huh,” he said, as though he had a different idea in his mind.

We plodded through the water and out the front door and, indeed, for a moment, it seemed like I was right. One of the sandbags had fallen off.

“Maybe from the force of the water?” I said, but he shook his head.

“Nah, they did this.”

“How can you be so sure?”

He pointed to the damage. “Only one bag fell out of the dam. The others are perfectly in place. Marty must have kicked it off.”

“Not Rebecca?”

“Nah,” he said. “Rebecca’s awful and vindictive, but she’s not petty in the way Marty is. Dollars to donuts, it was Marty. I’ve got a GoPro on my dash that might have picked it up.”

We made our way through the muddy front lawn and into his truck where he pulled the GoPro out and switched it to playback mode. The unit was a bit clunky, but Wesley seemed to know his way around it, rewinding it until he saw the two figures rapidly walking backwards into the house.

And then he pressed play.

Clear as day, Marty leaned over and kicked the sandbag out of the way and the water slowly flowed through the opening he’d created into the front patio area. The picture was too small to tell, but it probably went underneath the front door and oozed into the house.

“We’re going to need to get a guy to come in here for water removal.”

He pulled out his phone and was about to call when we saw something possibly even more shocking than Marty’s act of destruction: Rebecca embraced and kissed him.

“It’s like they get off on being the worst possible human beings on the planet,” I said.

Wesley shrugged. “That’s probably what they saw in each other to begin with.”

* * *

Wesley had the water damage team saved on his phone and called them as he drove back to his house. They promised to get a van out to the house within the hour and do what they could to minimize the damage. It was amazing what water vacuums and high-powered fans could do if you got them in there quickly enough.

Once we made it back to his place, Wesley was thoughtful enough to make a quick breakfast for the two of us, which gave us a few moments to talk as he scrambled the eggs and fried the bacon.

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