Considering the fact that, during New Year’s, Joan had waxed whimsical about how it would be great to get out of the LA traffic and move up to Washington (and away from her mother), and how nice that big house looked up on the hill, visions of my fantasy coming true danced in my head.
Jace was already slowly moving up to the log cabin.
Jess was giving me time to finish my book, on which I’d informed my publisher I was definitely going to miss my deadline (and again, considering the cause, my publisher was okay with that for me), while Bohannan renovated the upstairs guest room that had a view to the lake into an office for me.
I could make do with my laptop in a pinch, say, when someone was running around murdering people.
But I preferred to write in quiet solitude at my PC.
Bohannan had broken that solitude with his visit.
He was carrying a manila envelope.
He dropped it on my desk.
He launched in with minimal preamble.
“After that shit hit, I called my attorney. I also called Grace. She hadn’t missed what was going down in Misted Pines and the news you and me were a thing. We had a couple of seriously fucking annoying conversations. Then she told me to tell my attorney to send her new papers. There was some back and forth as she tried to get me to intervene for her with the boys, since she’s tried to be in contact with them, but they’ve blocked her. I told her you and me were shacked up, I didn’t give a fuck if her and me were legally divorced or not, and you didn’t either. Don’t know if that’s true, didn’t matter, she didn’t know it. I just wasn’t gonna let her use my love for you to get her what she wants from my boys, and not only because she didn’t ask to talk to Celeste. She realized she wasn’t going to get what she wanted, she signed the papers.”
He tapped the envelope.
And that was it.
“All that went down, and you didn’t tell me?” I queried.
“It isn’t all that,” he refuted. “She doesn’t matter. It was just a thing I wanted to do so if some reporter got interested in you again, they couldn’t talk trash about it.”
I said nothing, even though I felt a lot.
He did say something.
“You should know, I don’t wanna get married. Not that the last one wasn’t easy to get out of so I want it easy for me to get free if this doesn’t work. This works. It’s always gonna work. I just love who we are and how we are and how huge it is and how we don’t need that. It’s huge just us. And I’m seriously fuckin’ down with that.”
“I am too,” I whispered.
“And I can keep calling you Larue. It’d get confusing if we both called each other Bohannan.”
He was so my B.
I grinned up at him. “Yeah.”
He bent to touch his mouth to mine.
And that was just who we were and how we were and how huge it was.
Because once he did that, with no further ado, he grabbed the envelope and walked out.
But there was further ado.
Because I knew, it was just me for him and him for me.
Always.
So I was thinking about that, and it was part of the “a lot.”
But another part was Bohannan mentioning reporters, so I harked back to the fallout of Tony Romano and Betty Keller.
Swarthy, handsome, ex-army sniper run amuck and his sexual manipulation of a wronged housewife on the heels of a massive small-town sex scandal that involved more vengeful housewives, cheating husbands, murdered girls, a devoted father-to-be clinging to his life, a famous profiler and his more famous girlfriend, the town had been overrun with media.
And it didn’t die down in a week.
I mean, the guy burned himself alive after a shootout and standoff in the woods with the FBI and local law enforcement.
It had all the hallmarks for enduring public fascination.
And all the consequences.
Kimmy was beside herself. The media and all their crew, not to mention the murder and scandal enthusiasts hitting town meant more foot traffic in her shop.
It also meant some of them were conspiracy theorists, so she had plenty of people to talk to about her thoughts on Castro.
Megan was incensed. “Misted Pines is so much more than Tony Romano and Betty Keller. He isn’t even from here! He’s from Maryland!”
(Megan, by the way, was the front runner to win against Kenneth Warner. She was so far ahead in the polls, rumor had it, Kenneth was going to save face by retiring. I hoped he did. She had a lot of ideas that were really good, and it’d be nice for her to hit the ground running).
It was refreshing not to be the focus of the story.
But Bohannan had had seven approaches from writers who wanted to write books about the story where he was the focus.
Unsurprisingly, he’d declined.
Things had just begun to settle down.
Audrey now lived in Spokane.
Since Will and Celeste were still together, and Dale continued to reach out to (unsuccessfully) make amends to his son, I knew Dale was down in Bend, Oregon.
Sarah remained in town, also unsuccessfully attempting to make amends with her son.
Bobby never returned.
Ed filed for divorce from Betty.
Betty was in jail. Having confessed to being accessory to two counts of murder, she was awaiting sentencing, but she probably wouldn’t be home in a while.
Lana and Dean bought a bigger house and moved into it with her sons.
Ray apparently took my advice, and although he remained an ancillary character in this drama, his role had shifted because the town rallied around him, defending his right to his privacy and his sexuality. Now he was just the hot guy who picked the wrong playmate. So he was riding it out, and could, because his job was secure and the kids were coming back to the center.
Indeed, I’d run into Shelly a couple weeks before at the grocery store, and she was beaming because she got an engagement ring for Christmas.
But it had been a wild ride.
And it was unsettling because I understood where Bohannan was coming from.
There was a high to it, no matter how terrifying and appalling and sad it was.
The days weren’t routine.
Anything could happen.
And without knowing, you could get addicted to that.
And miss it when it was gone.
But that wasn’t all the “a lot” I had on my mind.
The final part of that “a lot” was, instead of working on my book (I really had to get that done…eventually), I was driving to the place on the outskirts of Ash Peak that I’d looked up, because I thought the finalization of Bohannan’s divorce needed celebrating.
And Celeste was sleeping over at Phoebe’s that night.
And Bohannan’s bed was most assuredly a playground.
It was time.
We needed toys.
Considering this was a spur-of-the-moment decision, I couldn’t online shop.
This meant my only choice was hitting up the only sex shop in the county.
However, I was Delphine Larue.
It could be some young person was working there. One who’d never seen Those Years and never heard of or didn’t know what the author of We Pluck the Cord looked like. So I could get away with hitting a sex shop and finding something fun without that news spreading near, or even far.
Or it could be I could not.
I was struggling with this, and the fact that I should not be discomfited with going to a sex shop.