Total pages in book: 78
Estimated words: 74078 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 370(@200wpm)___ 296(@250wpm)___ 247(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 74078 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 370(@200wpm)___ 296(@250wpm)___ 247(@300wpm)
Reaching for the remote, I turned off the office TV.
“What’s up?” I asked, giving her a smile.
“I asked how things with Cato are going,” she said, hearts all in her eyes.
“They’re… good.”
“Why the hesitation?”
“I’m not used to all of this,” I admitted, shrugging. “I don’t know what to say.”
“I mean, you’re spending every spare minute together,” she said.
That was true.
Some nights, he drove out to Miami. Others, I went to Golden Glades.
“We do. It’s nice. It’s kinda two different worlds, there and here.”
When I was at the clubhouse, we spent a big chunk of our time around his club brothers. I wasn’t complaining. I loved them. Even the crazy-ass new guy, Coast. And the standoffish, quiet lumberjack named York. Velle, he was harder to decide what my feelings were regarding him.
I mean, he was very nice.
Very easy to talk to.
Too easy to talk to.
Within thirty minutes of sitting next to him by the pool, I was suddenly confessing all sorts of personal shit about my nonexistent relationship with my mom. And I just… I didn’t do that kind of thing.
It was almost unsettling how easy he was to talk to.
Hence the not knowing how to feel about him.
“But when you’re in Miami?” Josie prompted after I babbled for a long time about the club.
“It’s like we’re playing house,” I told her.
It was interesting how easily we fell into a comfortable rhythm. Picking places to order from, eating while watching one of my action or horror movies.
While I fed the cats, he would take out the trash and wash up any dishes we used.
We’d brush our teeth side-by-side.
If I was sweeping the main space, I would find him cleaning the bathroom.
It was all just so… easy.
“I don’t understand,” Josie said. “Do you want it to be hard?”
“I think I just assumed it would be.”
“I mean, to be fair, this is kinda the honeymoon stage, right? I think the harder stuff comes when things need to be negotiated and decided on. When someone doesn’t get one hundred percent of what they want.”
“That’s fair. We haven’t really done a lot of talk about the future. But it’s still really new.”
“But you are thinking about the future?” she asked, trying to hold back a smile.
“Yeah.”
“With him?”
“Yes,” I admitted, the first time I’d really done so aloud.
“Like… white dress and baby booties kind of future?”
“Josie, come on. Get real. It would be a black dress,” I said.
“And would your baby live like that goth baby I see all over social media?” she teased.
“I mean, if it lives with me, it won’t have much of a choice.”
“Have you informed Cato that he has to dress up with you for Halloween yet?” she asked.
“No, I haven’t told him that yet,” I admitted.
“Told me what?” Cato asked, making us both look over to find him standing there with a tray of coffees.
“That you’ll be forced to dress for Halloween if you want to stay with Rynn,” Josie said, accepting her iced latte with a smile.
“Is that right?” he asked, brows quirked as he looked at me.
“Yep. And I will also drag you to every haunted house, haunted hayride, haunted woods, basically anything with Halloween vibes in a hundred mile radius.”
“Sometimes, she is one of the serial killers in the haunted woods,” Josie piped in.
“You ever scare the pee out of a bunch of cocky teenagers? It’s a blast,” I said.
“So what am I dressing up as?” Cato asked.
That was something you just had to love about the man. He just kind of… went with the flow.
“You should do a couples costume!” Josie said, beaming.
And, bless her for bringing it up. Because, obviously, that had been all I’d been thinking of. I’d never had someone to do a couples costume with.
“What’s a good couples costume?” Cato asked.
That answer was really simple.
“Gomez and Morticia.”
Cato - 3 months
I thought she’d been exaggerating about the Halloween thing.
She… had not been.
And since she didn’t really have an outdoor space to decorate, she’d decided to go hard at the clubhouse.
“No one’s gonna see it all the way out here,” Levee said as he helped her drag the dismembered body of a giant skeleton toward the center of the yard. “This isn’t a very busy road.”
“Um… we’ll see it,” she said, rolling her eyes at him, refusing to let him dull her enthusiasm. “Besides, Huck’s and Che’s kids live here. Everyone else’s kids visit here. They will see it. I hope they’re made of tough stuff, because I’m going to make this spooky as fuck,” she declared as I hefted what had to be the twentieth bag of decorations out of her car.
There were lights and gravestones, fog machines and cobwebs.
And, apparently, there would be several deliveries over the next few days of life-sized animatronics meant to scare the bejesus out of anyone who walked past and triggered their motion sensors.