Takedown Teague (Caged #1)(56)

“How far?” She narrowed her eyes at me suspiciously.

“Well…um…close enough to take our Thanksgiving picnic there.”

“Thanksgiving picnic?” Tria looked down to the sack in my hands and then moved her eyes back up to mine before smiling broadly. “I think that sounds pretty nice.”

We gathered everything up and started the walk to the tree along my running path. It took a while to get there, but when we did arrive, I knew it was worth it.

The tree wasn’t very green anymore and had about half of its golden-yellow leaves still on its branches while the other half lay all around the little patch of dirt and weeds surrounding the trunk. I had no idea what kind of tree it was, only that it was thin and usually not something you would consider pretty at all. But with the yellow leaves all around it, the scene didn’t look too bad.

The main thing was, I could see Tria smiling.

“It ain’t much,” I admitted.

“It’s perfect,” she told me. She spread out the blanket, and we both sat down on it. I pulled over the paper sack and held it close to me so she couldn’t see inside. First I took out two heavy paper plates, which I swiped from Feet First, and a couple of napkins. I handed them to Tria, and she laid them out in front of us. Then I started bringing out the actual food.

Buttered toast. Pretzels. Jelly beans. Popcorn.

Tria busted out laughing.

“Oh my God, Liam!” she said through snickers. “Did you make a Charlie Brown Thanksgiving dinner?”

“Yep,” I replied. I was grinning like a nut and glad my idea had worked. It’s not like I could have really cooked anything, but it still counted as tradition in a warped and cartoonish kind of way, and she didn’t have to worry about going to any trouble.

“The tree is the perfect match for this,” Tria said. “When we first walked up here, I thought it kind of looked like the tree from A Charlie Brown Christmas!”

“Maybe in a couple weeks, we can come up here and decorate it,” I suggested.

We laughed, ate our feast, and talked about all of our favorite Peanuts characters until it got dark. With the exception of Tria’s pie plate and the blanket, the rest of the stuff was trash and went into the nearby dumpster at the abandoned warehouse.

“This dumpster is pretty handy,” I remarked offhandedly. “Got me wood for your bookcase, and now I don’t have to carry all this shit back to the apartment.”

“Wood for the bookcase?” Tria tilted her head to one side to look at me. “What do you mean?”

“Oh…um…” I hadn’t really paid any attention to what I was saying. I never said where the bookcase came from because I didn’t know what she would think of her bookcase being made from a bunch of trash. She seemed to like it, and I hoped this wouldn’t taint her view. “Yeah, I um…I found the wood here. There was this old dude cleaning out one of the factories, and he was just throwing the wood and shit away, ya know? He said I could have it.”

“You…you made the bookcase?” Tria said quietly.

“Yeah,” I said with a shrug. “Stacy at Feet First gave me the paint.”

“Stacy?”

“She cooks there,” I said. “She likes to think she’s everyone’s mom. She’s been working there since the day Dordy bought the place.”

I stopped rambling and glanced over to see her wipe her eye with the back of her hand.

“What’s wrong?” I asked. Fuck, she didn’t like shit that was made from trash. I should have kept my f*cking mouth shut.

“I had no idea,” she said as she quietly interrupted my thoughts. “I didn’t know you made it; I thought you just found it.”

She stopped in her tracks, and I did the same. Once again, I felt her arms around my neck and her lips pressed against my cheek.

“Thank you, Liam,” she whispered close to my ear. “I had no idea…none.”

She sniffed and wiped at her eyes again.

“You are so incredibly sweet,” she told me, and I had to snicker a little.

“Tell that to the guys I work with, will ya?”

“No, they scare me.”

“Scare you?” I questioned. “Why would those guys scare you? I wouldn’t let them touch you.”

“I’m not scared for me.” She corrected herself and continued. “I’m scared they are going to hurt you.”

I pondered that thought the rest of the way home.

*****

The very best days were Sundays because I didn’t work or work out and Tria usually had all her schoolwork done on Saturday. She would just read, or we would watch a movie on the borrowed cable. In the afternoon, she did grocery shopping with whatever money I had for that and did a much better job than I ever did of coming up with meals on a budget. Her cooking was awesome, and Yolanda was starting to give me shit about hovering too close to my maximum weight. I’d gone over twice in the past couple of weeks, and it was pissing her off.

Being Yolanda, she had to choose a Sunday to cross the line about it.

Tria had made some kind of casserole dish with rice and broccoli in it. I ate about four servings and then lay on the couch holding my stomach, thinking I was probably going to die and deciding it was all worth it. Tria just snickered and told me she’d take care of the dishes, too, since I was barely able to move.