The Air He Breathes (Elements, #1)(53)

My eyes closed and each breath I took was more peaceful than I’d thought they would ever be. I’d never thought I would hear the word love from another man, but with Tristan, when he said it, I felt whole again.

He breathed against my lips; the air he exhaled became the inhales that healed me. We stayed in the rain for a second more before my footsteps led us both inside the warmth of the house.





Chapter Twenty-Six


Tristan



“I need your shit,” Faye said, standing on my porch in all black, wearing black cloth gloves and a black hat. It was late at night, and I’d just gotten back from working at Mr. Henson’s shop.

I arched an eyebrow. “What?”

“Well, not your shit exactly. But your dog’s shit.”

My hand brushed against the back of my neck, looking at her with the same confused look. “I’m sorry, but you said that as if it made common sense.”

She sighed, smacking the palm of her hand against her face. “Look, normally I would go to Liz with my issues, but I know she’s probably putting Emma to bed and being a grown up or something stupid like that. So, I figured why not try to reach out to her boyfriend and ask him for a favor.”

“A favor is giving you my dog’s shit.”

She nodded. “Absolutely.”

“Do I want to know what you’re doing with it?”

“Duh, tonight is ‘do it yourself’ spa night at my house. Dog shit works fantastic for a facial,” she said. The blank stare I delivered her made her smirk. “Dude. I’m putting the shit in a brown paper bag and burning it on my boss’s porch.”

Another blank stare from me. “If you don’t want to tell me the truth, that’s fine.”

She reached into her back pocket and pulled out a brown paper bag. “No. Seriously.”





“How long is this going to take?” Faye asked as we lapped around the neighborhood with Zeus on a leash for the fourth time.

“Hey now, you’re lucky that Zeus is even offering up his poop to you. He’s very selective about who he lets have it.”

While we took a few more laps, Faye told me her opinion on pretty much everything. “P.S. I think it’s stupid you named that little ass dog Zeus.”

I smirked. “My son, Charlie, named him. We read Percy Jackson and the Olympians, The Lighting Thief, and Charlie was just in love with the whole Greek god idea. After reading the book, we spent months studying the gods. He fell in love with the name Zeus, but then he fell in love with a medium-sized dog from the pound, who didn’t exactly fit the name of such a huge god. I remember he said, ‘Dad, the size doesn’t matter. He’s still Zeus.’”

Her face frowned for a second before she went back to her playful self and rolled her eyes. “Geez, did you really just play the dead son card on me, leaving me feeling extremely bad and awkward?”

I laughed, because I saw the playfulness in her eyes. “I think I did.”

“Jerk,” she muttered before turning away to try to hide herself wiping away a tear. I saw her, but I didn’t say anything about it.

Zeus paused in front of a fire hydrant and started doing his ‘time to poop’ moves. “Here we go!” I said, clapping my hands together.

Within seconds, Faye was scooping Zeus’ fresh poop into the bag and dancing around the street corner with it. “Way to go, you Olympic god, you!” she shouted. I’d never seen someone get so excited by what I honestly considered to be the nastiest stuff ever.

“Okay, let’s go,” she said, walking back toward my house.

“Go? Go where?”

“Um, to my boss’s house so I can be an adult and set this shit on fire and watch it burn.”

“I thought you were joking about that.”

She rolled her eyes. “Tristan, I joke about penis size, not about tossing shit on my boss’s porch.”

“But why do I need to be included with this? And aren’t we a little…old for these kinds of antics?”

“Yes!” she shouted, her voice cracking. “Yes, it’s completely immature of me to want to throw shit at my boss’s house. And yes, it’s completely immature of me to think that it will make me feel better, but if I don’t do this I’m just going to be pissed off and sad. And I can’t be sad because that means he wins. It means that when he called me tonight to tell me he was getting back together with his ex-wife, I realized he’d always had the upper hand, even though I thought I did. It means that the * allowed me to fall in love with him and trust him, only to rip my heart out. I don’t fall in love! I don’t get hurt!” Tears filled her eyes, but she refused to blink because she knew that would make them fall. Tears were a form of weakness to her, and I could tell the last thing Faye ever wanted to feel was weak. “But now all I feel is this breaking inside. I can literally feel every inch of me seconds away from falling apart, and I can’t even go to my best friend about it because she lost her f*cking husband and had a really shitty year. I shouldn’t have come to you because it turns out you had an even shittier year, but I didn’t know what to do! I’m f*cking heartbroken.

“I mean, why would someone do this?! Why do people fall in love if it means there is a chance of feeling this way? What the f*ck is wrong with humans?! HUMANS ARE FUCKING SICK AND TWISTED! I mean, I get it—it feels good, you know? Being in love, being happy.” Her body trembled as the tears fell faster than she could take breaths. “But when that magical rug is ripped out from under you, it takes all the happy and good feelings with it. And your heart? It just breaks. It breaks and it’s unapologetic. It shatters into a million pieces, leaving you numb, blankly staring at the pieces because all your free will, all the common sense you once had in your life is gone. You gave up everything for this bullshit thing called love, and now you’re just destroyed.”