"Eddie, I thought we established that you aren't going to steal my woman with your food," McCoy said, coming up from the basement where he'd been wet vacuuming up the water from the last storm while grumbling about what idiot put a basement in a house in Florida, no matter how high the water table was supposed to be in the area.
"I don't know," I said, offering him a quesadilla. "He's really outdoing himself," I added, watching as McCoy smirked at me as he took a bite from the quesadilla I was offering him.
"Take it back a notch, Eddie," McCoy warned playfully. "There's only so much I can do to keep her with genuine affection and multiple orgasms," he added, getting a laugh out of both me and Eddie. "Was that Belle I saw riding around the front yard?" he asked, stealing a quesadilla off my plate.
"Yeah."
"She's doing really well."
"She is. I don't know if I should be proud or worried with how well she is taking up all this biker stuff."
"Biker stuff," McCoy repeated.
"Shooting, riding, fighting. Biker stuff."
"Hate to break it to you, babe, but that biker stuff is shit you are going to need to learn to do eventually too."
"I don't see why that would ever be necessary. I'm a nail tech."
"You're with me," he said, shrugging.
"Yes, exactly. I have you. For the shooting and fighting and driving things."
"Okay. But what if I'm down."
"Don't say that," I demanded, feeling a piercing sensation in my chest at the suggestion.
"No, let's be real here. Say you and me, we're out somewhere. And someone hits me. What are you going to do? Stand there and get taken, shot, or worse?" he asked, brow raising.
Damn him and his realism.
I liked my daydream world with its soft edges a little better than his cold, hard reality.
But he had a point.
"No, you reach down, you take my gun, and you shoot with it. Say that doesn't work. You need to know how to fight someone off. And once you get him off, you need to know how to drive my bike out of there. That's all shit you need to know how to do, and feel comfortable doing. So, it is shit you are going to learn eventually. It's good that Belle is getting the jump on it now. Frees everyone up to teach you when it's time."
"When is it going to be time?" I asked.
"Soon. But not today," he added.
"Why not today?" I asked.
"Got church."
"You go to church?" I asked, getting a snort out of him. "It's not even Sunday," I added. And with that, I got a genuine smile.
"Church, for bikers, means a meeting. Arty is coming over to talk to us too."
"Oh, okay. Still learning the terms," I told him. He'd thrown a lot of information at me all at once. And only maybe three or four things managed to stick. I figured I had time to learn it all, since everything was pointing toward the two of us having a future.
That fact never failed to make my heart squeeze.
Which, again, reminded me that I had no one to share that news with since Belle wasn't really talking to me much. At least not like we used to talk. She would answer direct questions, but didn't carry on a conversation like she once would. Back when we would sit up at night gabbing about some guy we were crushing on or dating, dissecting everything said and done, deciding what those things meant, what the future could hold.
But I immediately felt selfish for longing for that when Belle was clearly going through something.
"Hey, what's the dark mood about?" McCoy asked when I put my plate down, suddenly not hungry.
"It's nothing."
"Bullshit."
See, McCoy didn't mince words. He didn't tiptoe around feelings. He called it like he saw it, and he expected direct answers too.
And, well, I'd been born a woman in a society that mocked female emotions and, to an extent, expected us to be undemanding and pleasant all the time. It was taking some getting used to for me to realize McCoy wasn't going to judge me for my feelings, and he actually liked it when I expressed myself.
I jerked my head toward the living room, and McCoy pressed a hand to my lower back and led me there, dragging me down on the couch next to him, draping my legs over his lap.
"What is it?"
"I guess I'm just... I think I'm mourning the loss of the sister I've always known," I told him. "I know how selfish that sounds, but I—"
"Doesn't sound selfish to me," McCoy cut me off. "It's not like she slowly transitioned over the course of weeks or years. Within a week, the sister you have known and counted on and loved your whole life is very different. It would be weird if you didn't have a little whiplash about that. It doesn't mean you love her any less, right?"
"Right," I agreed.
"It's okay to be sad, babe."
"It makes me feel bad, though. Like anyone would think I don't like this version of her as much. Which isn't how I feel."
"Look, I know I don't come across as the most sensitive person, babe. But you can say this kind of shit to me without worrying about me judging you for it. And, for the record, I don't know if you need to assume Belle is always going to be this exact version of herself either. She's trying to find ways to cope. Once she works through her trauma, there might be a mix of the old and the new Belle. So don't mourn the loss too much right now. No one knows what the future holds."
That was true.
And where the idea of that might have filled me with anxiety in the past, all I felt was a sort of relief in knowing that anything could still happen.
For a guy who, by his own admission, wasn't the warm and fuzzy sensitive sort, McCoy had a way of helping me cope with my emotions. He made room for my feelings. He didn't judge them. He let me talk about them, but reminded me not to harp on them, to let them move through me instead of trapping them inside.
His steady, stalwart ways had made it surprisingly easy to adjust to this brand new reality, this new house with new people and new dynamics.
"Have you seen Franklin?" I asked, just realizing I hadn't caught sight of him yet that morning.
"He and Oscar are sunning in the kitchen window," McCoy told me.
"I, ah, I think I might have two cats now," I said, not entirely sure how I felt about having a potentially murderous cat to call my own. But what could I do? Franklin had decided that was his friend. They'd been inseparable since. "He even let Oscar play with Mouse Baby."
"Must be love," McCoy declared, making my heart squeeze.
Because, well, Oscar and Franklin might have been falling for each other, but I was pretty sure I was falling for McCoy too.
Actually, scratch that, I knew it.
I might have been nowhere near saying that out loud yet, but there was no denying how I was feeling, either.
I knew that any normal, rational person would likely raise a brow and roll their eyes at me. Because it was new. Because no one fell for someone that fast.
But normal people didn't live with their new love interest almost from the beginning. They didn't get that crash course in how you clicked—or didn't—with someone else. It would have normally taken me months to figure out the things I'd learned about McCoy in a matter of weeks.