She looked at the coffee, then at the fridge. “Only if you have an insane amount of creamer.”
“No, he does not,” Lindy snapped.
I felt my eye twitch.
So the bitch could drink all my milk, eat my cereal, pilfer my muffins, but I couldn’t borrow any of her creamer?
God, I seriously hated her.
Even when I went out of my way to hide my food, she still found it.
She was like a damn bloodhound.
“Let’s go grab a cup from Silver Bullet,” I suggested.
Silver Bullet was a new coffee shop that’d literally just opened last week.
I hadn’t tried it yet, seeing as I could make black coffee at home better than someone else could make it, but I’d heard good things about it.
Mainly that they had amazing coffee that could rival the large coffee chains and had better food for more affordable prices.
“Sounds good,” she said. “I have an hour or so before I really need to head out.”
It’d take me five minutes to take her home, and even less at the coffee shop since it was so late in the day.
I jerked my head toward the door. “Then let’s go.”
I poured my coffee out and set the glass in the sink, causing Lindy to growl under her breath. “You need to wash that.”
“And you need to chill the fuck out,” I heard Iris mutter under her breath.
“I’ll wash it when I get home.” I kept walking.
Lindy’s words stopped us, though, at the kitchen door.
“I’ve thought about your offer, but I cannot move to something smaller. I’ll only upgrade,” Lindy said through clenched teeth.
She had a travel mug of coffee in her hand—why she needed it, I didn’t know. She drank fuckin’ cold coffee, and a regular cup would’ve done the job—and she was staring at Iris like she wanted to literally throttle her.
I didn’t know why she would get so offended by what Iris asked last night, but you could tell it literally killed her to thank her for anything.
I groaned on the inside, wondering if I could move into Iris’s old place and Iris could move in here.
But then I thought about all the shit Lindy did to me, even when she ‘liked’ me, and I realized that putting anyone in the same house as Lindy was cruel and unusual punishment. And I didn’t get my jollies off hurting innocent women.
“Bummer,” she shrugged. “Just trying to help. I wouldn’t think,” she looked between Lindy and me, “you’d want to torture yourself with something you can’t have.”
“I could have it if I wanted it,” Lindy snapped, no longer playing nice. “I just don’t want it.”
I caught Iris by the belt loop and started tugging her toward the door.
Iris rolled her eyes and moved backward to the front door. “You do want it, Lindy. That’s painfully obvious to me. Maybe not so much to him, but us women can see through the veils quite easily. That’s why you’re so mean to him. You’re mad that he doesn’t want you back.”
“I’m not mean to him,” she snapped.
Iris outright laughed at that. “Sure, just keep telling yourself that.”
I opened the door and helped her out of it, pausing at the front stoop to run back inside and get the old helmet that I’d purchased for Lindy.
Lindy, eyes on me, watched me come back out with her old helmet, and swear to God, fire started to shoot out of the top of her head.
“When you get back, you need to clean up this fucking house,” Lindy snarled.
“Can’t,” I said as I closed the door behind me. “Have to work. If you’d let the damn cleaning lady come while you were here, it’d be clean already.”
“I don’t want some stranger in my house, going through…” I closed the door on the old argument.
“She won’t let a cleaning lady come inside to clean?” she asked curiously.
I handed her the helmet. “Lindy’s old one. It’s clean, though. Hasn’t been worn in a year.”
Iris took it and fitted it onto her head, grinning as she did.
I watched her get it on perfectly before answering her question. “Lindy likes to find anything that’ll make my life miserable. I don’t clean. I hire a cleaning lady for seventy-five bucks to do it for me. Lindy hates it that I don’t clean, so she refuses to let her inside the house when she’s there. I have to take time off my job to let her in when Lindy is gone.”
Iris shook her head but looked at me seriously. “You know she’s still in love with you, right?”
I shook my head. “What Lindy has for me, those feelings? That’s not love. I don’t know what it is, but people that love each other don’t treat each other like crap. And Lindy is definitely in the ‘treat him like crap’ stage.”
With that, I helped her onto the bike.
And when I dropped her off after coffee, my first stop that day was at a police station where one Police Chief Teller Kincaid worked.
Once the warning was made, I headed home and went through my window to do it.
My room still smelled of Iris, and I knew that today wouldn’t be the last time I saw her.
CHAPTER 6
Ivorced and looking for the D.
-Text from Iris to Shine
IRIS
The last freakin’ thing I wanted to do was drive two hours home.
Today had been a day from hell.
There weren’t many days that I considered quitting before I’d even made it on the plane, but that particular day was one of them.
And that all had to do with a certain flight attendant that I’d been working with.
She was ambitious, flamboyant, and so totally weird that sometimes it was hard to stand next to her and listen to her talk.
The passengers literally loved her— but, to me, she was too upbeat and oddly in your face with her upbeatness.
Even worse, I had her on the flight there, and back.
Meaning, when I landed at Dallas Love Field, I had a headache the size of Montana, and the need to eat a freakin’ taco in the worst way. Or, possibly, maybe it was just the margarita that they gave away with the tacos.
Whatever the reason, I drove home in a daze, thankful that the asshole who usually rode with me had called in sick.
Meaning, there were no weird stops, no music, and no awkward breathing in the car that was sure to set me off.
When I arrived in my little city, I drove straight to the T Blancos and parked right in front.
It was a little after three in the afternoon, and though there were a few random customers, it was nearly empty.
I grinned and walked right in, heading to my favorite booth in the corner where there was great ‘people watching.’
After ordering my margarita, I started to peruse the menu, even though I knew exactly what I was going to get.
It didn’t matter whether I came here once or three days in a row.
I always got the white queso, guacamole, tortillas to dip in the queso, and then the Mason’s Mix that came with two nachos—beef fajita—and a chicken enchilada with sour cream sauce. The only thing that changed upon occasion were my drink choices.
Today, for instance, I ordered a strawberry margarita and a Mountain Dew.
The margarita arrived before the Mountain Dew, and I’d sucked nearly half of it down before she arrived with my drink and to take my order.