Just Like Home(60)
Too bad. This needed doing.
This particular store was a ninety-minute drive from home, which seemed far enough that she probably wouldn’t be recognized. She wondered if maybe she was being paranoid—that awful bartender hadn’t recognized her, after all. Still, it paid to be cautious. The risk of being hated at top volume in close quarters was motivation enough.
“Hey, wait up,” James Duvall called, jogging to catch up with her. Vera flinched at the sound of his shoes squeaking on the concrete. He’d intercepted her as she was leaving the house, and he’d insisted on tagging along. As little as Vera wanted the company, she’d suspected that James would be useful when it came time to lift her purchase into the car.
Her suspicion was validated even further when he offered to drive, unlocking his pickup truck with a click of the remote keyfob in his pocket. She didn’t want to need help, least of all from this man, but the truck would make things easier and today she just needed something, anything to be easy.
The drive gave her time to think. She’d remained silent in the passenger seat for the duration of the trip, letting Duvall rattle on and on about how challenging it was to attune himself to the energies of the Crowder House. Vera didn’t mind letting him talk; she spent that time trying to come up with an explanation for what had happened to her in her childhood bedroom.
An explanation for her blanket being ripped from her hands in the night and pulled beneath the bed. An explanation for the gouges in the wood.
Vera walked fast, trying not to let Duvall keep up with her even though he had the longer stride. She shouldn’t have dawdled in the entrance to the store, shouldn’t have left enough time for Duvall to finish the snub end of the almost-dead blueberry-scented cigarillo he’d been smoking on the way there. She followed the marked-off path that wound through the store, through staged kitchens and dining rooms, living rooms, samples of couches and chairs. The plush cushion of a yellow velvet wingback beckoned her, promising a warm soft nest she could curl up in to take a nap. She reached out to run her hand over the nap of the velvet—but then warmth stirred the fine hairs on the back of her neck.
“Gorgeous.”
Vera spun around to find herself eye-to-eye with James Duvall’s full, parted lips. She tipped her chin up so she could meet his gaze and very nearly wound up bumping his nose with her own. His breath smelled raw and floral.
Heat fluttered behind Vera’s solar plexus, at her fingertips, between her thighs. Foulness, she thought. Grease. He needs help. She didn’t want to let the thoughts in, but there they were.
“That chair,” he added, after much too long a pause. “So vibrant. It would go well in your bedroom at home. Don’t you think?”
Duvall cocked a brow at her, one corner of his mouth twitching with something between challenge and invitation. He was close enough to bite. She knew that if she were to reach out and yank up the hem of his artfully weathered shirt, the skin of his belly would be as smooth and pliant as fresh taffy under her fingertips. The taste of sweet lemon ghosted across her tongue. She swallowed hard, once and then twice, as saliva flooded her cheeks.
Vibrant.
“I don’t think so,” she replied, her voice coming out low and even. “I think it looks uncomfortable.”
She was glad when that tart yellow color was out of sight behind her.
Duvall didn’t say anything else as they passed through the home-office section, full of smooth-topped desks and mesh-backed rolling chairs. He just stayed at her heels, following a little too close, never letting her lose awareness of him.
Fortunately, after the filing cabinets, they were where they had been heading all along: the bedroom section.
It started with life-sized dioramas of kids’ rooms. The aesthetic was unfamiliar, different from the primary-color brand-explosions of Vera’s youth. There was lots of birch and lavender and sage, forest-creature-themed plush toys. Everything was genderless and faux-handmade and vaguely foreign in a way she couldn’t put her finger on.
Vera was in the center of a path that led between a princess-themed room with a big foam throne in it, and a space-themed room with a rocketship tent in one corner. Both featured bunk beds with plastic guards over the ladders, warnings not to climb.
Vera wondered, briefly, what the instinct was that drove children to climb. She and Brandon Gregson had spent hours and hours climbing as kids, scaling trees and fences and stucco walls, trying to get as high as they could just to prove that it was possible.
She tried so hard not to think of him that way. It was a forbidden corridor in her memory. She was allowed to think of him as an abstract concept, as a tense conversation topic, as a subject to be avoided. She could think of him as the son of a woman she needed to dodge in public. She could even occasionally think of him as someone she missed.
But she tried never to let herself think of him as a person who she’d spent time playing with, as a person she’d goaded into scaling the fence around the abandoned quarry so they could see if it was really filled with radioactive slime. She hadn’t thought of him as her friend, who she loved and hated and spent her afternoons chasing, in a long time, with the sole exception of the moment when he’d appeared outside the Crowder House a few nights earlier.
That had been a failure. She couldn’t let herself think of him that way. It was too dangerous.
Vera ducked into the space-themed bedroom setup and sat hard on the edge of the constellation-printed duvet on the bottom bunk. She was flooded all at once with memories of sitting on Brandon’s bedroom floor, reading books about dinosaurs and eating fruit leather. Gathering boxelder bugs in an old margarine container to watch them climb on each other, the bright X’s on their backs making them look like comic book heroes turned insectoid. Signing each other’s wrist casts a year apart, and then hitting each other with their casts and being surprised each time at how much the impact hurt them both.