Crash Lights and Sirens, Book 1 (27 page)

His hip is right up against hers, solid. Taryn shakes her head.

“We were going anyway,” says Skinny, shuffling back across the stacked porch. His hands come out of his deep pockets, palm-up in surrender. Belatedly, Taryn wonders what he could be keeping hidden in there, drugs or cash or worse. “No need to be like that.” Both guys clomp away down the stairs with the parting shot of, “Tell Jesse we said hello.” As soon as the truck is out of sight, Taryn sags.

“Wow,” she says, leaning her whole self back into Nick. “You get a weird vibe from that too?” She feels stupid now that Skinny and his friend are no longer darkening the doorway, like maybe she overreacted. She didn’t, she knows she didn’t—Christ, it’s not like she ran for a shotgun—but still. Her first instinct is to play it down, like maybe it won’t be a big deal so long as she doesn’t treat it that way.

Nick’s arms come around her, skating underneath the loose sweatshirt. It’s his, now that Taryn’s paying attention. “They said they were looking for Jesse?” he asks. “Any idea why?”

Taryn shrugs. She does have an idea, actually—more than an idea, the way Jess comes and goes at all hours, the random handfuls of cash he sometimes hands her with no explanation—but she’s not sure, on top of which she isn’t dying to throw another member of her family under the bus quite so soon. “Oh, who knows,” she says, trying to recover. She feels shaky and unsettled, like her bones are jangling around inside her skin. “Jess probably fucked that guy’s girlfriend or something.” She slides her hands down Nick’s back, pinches his ass. “We should get ready to go, yeah?”

For a second Nick gets that expression like he knows she’s full of shit but isn’t going to push her, sad and curious at once. Taryn hasn’t seen it on his face since everything unraveled with Rosemary—hasn’t had occasion to, she guesses, how she’s basically been bombarding him with her every unfiltered thought and feeling. It’s a step backward, maybe, but right now she can’t bring herself to confess to anything else. “Yeah,” Nick says after a moment. “Probably should.”

Jess is predictably vague when she brings it up with him later that night, cornering him in his drafty attic bedroom, complete with a ladder that pulls down from the ceiling on the second floor. The roof’s pitched so sharply that even Taryn can only just stand up straight. “Are you dealing?” she asks, once she tells him what happened earlier. “Forget dealing, Jess, are you dealing out of this house?”

Jesse’s expression darkens. “No,” he says loudly, getting up off the bed. He’s lost weight, Taryn notices, sharp cheekbones and hollows underneath his pretty eyes. “I’m not—I would never—you think I’d do something so stupid with the kids here?”

“I don’t know!” Taryn explodes. God, she’s so frustrated with him. She’s frustrated with her whole life. “I don’t know what the hell you’d do, honestly, because you don’t talk to me. You just turn up whenever you want, and—”

“I was here all night!” Jesse fires back. “I’m here while you’re at work, and while you’re with your fucking boyfriend—”

“I’m allowed to have a boyfriend, Jesse!”

“—and I’ll be here, probably, for the rest of my goddamn life.” Jesse shakes his head. “Don’t act for a second like you’re the only one stuck, Tare. ’Cause you aren’t really, are you?” He knocks his knuckles off the ceiling, low for Taryn but ridiculously low for him. He looks like that hunchback king out of Shakespeare. “Some guy has a nice house, a nice dick? You’re good to go.”

“Wait a minute,” Taryn protests. Jesse knew who those guys were, she saw on his face that he did, but now he’s trying to turn it around into something else. “That’s not what I’m—”

“We’re broke, Taryn!” Jesse shouts. “We were broke when you were gonna move out with Pete too, but it was okay then since you weren’t gonna be here anymore, with the shitty heat and the shitty water. You were scott fucking free.”

Taryn pulls herself up to her full height, feeling her head brush the ceiling. When she and Jess were little and it was just the two of them, they used to hide up here whenever Rosemary was on a bender. “We talked about this, Jess. I said I was still gonna help—”

“No, you talked.” Jesse crowds her, his skinny boy presence hulking and pathetic all at once. Taryn remembers when she was taller than him. The boyfriend between their dad and Caitlin’s called him squirt, made him cry. “You had this stupid plan, Taryn, maybe to make yourself feel better, I don’t know, but it was never going to work. There just wasn’t enough money. Isn’t.” He sags, thudding back to the bed. “I read the bank letters too.”

Taryn rubs at the bridge of her nose. “That’s—that has nothing to do with drug kids running around our property looking for—”

“Why don’t you mind your own business and concentrate on making sure we aren’t homeless come the end of the month, huh?” Jesse interrupts. “If you need something else to worry about so bad?” He brushes past her then, disappearing down the ladder with a quick, vulpine agility. Thirty seconds later, the front door slams loud enough to rattle the house.

Chapter Eighteen

Once Nick commits to getting the bedroom done it doesn’t take a lot of time to do it. He moves the furniture out and spends a sweaty afternoon ripping up the carpet, another couple of days steaming the walls. At the last possible second he tucks a square of cabbage rose into the top drawer of the dresser, then shoves the rest of the mess into giant Hefty bags. He considers calling Bill or Ioanna’s husband Joe over to help him paint, but in the end it feels like something he needs to do himself.

Sure as shit, the room looks a whole lot brighter in white.

Once everything’s dry, he picks up some sheets at IKEA, plus a soft, piled area rug and a new light fixture to take the place of the ancient ceiling fan. Then he goes back for some new curtains and a fancy roll-up blind. Then back again for a new duvet. He leaves Maddie’s antique scroll mirror—it matches the four-poster and the armoire, neither of which Nick’s intending to replace—but folds away the triangle quilt from when they were newlyweds. It joins the square of wallpaper in the dresser, roses with roses. Nick sits on the end of the bed and surveys the final product.

He doesn’t feel any different. Not yet.

“Wow,” Taryn murmurs when he first shows her. She’s still in her jacket, how quick and impatient Nick was about dragging her up here, bright purple rain boots kicked off on the stairs. Her stocking feet curl on the newly sanded hardwood. “You’re going to be finished with the whole house in no time.”

It’s true. The downstairs is done, plus three of the guest rooms. Atlas has taken to sleeping upstairs, jumping in and out of the empty beds. Nick is thinking about turning the fourth bedroom into an office.

But. He doesn’t want to talk about that now. “Yup,” he says, sliding Taryn’s coat off her shoulders and nudging her toward the mattress.

Taryn giggles and lets him get her on her back, strip off her jeans. Spring has finally arrived in earnest, a stiff, bright breeze blowing through the open window. “Oh.” She laughs, wiggling out of her underwear. “It’s that kind of christening, is it?”

It is. Nick spreads her open and licks until she’s whimpering, only crawling on top after three orgasms—today has him wanting to prove something, maybe, or possibly just hide his face. Taryn’s legs are boneless when he finally bends them up to sink inside. Even then they go molasses-slow, his mouth fused to her neck and aching, drawn-out thrusts. Falvey scritches her fingers through his hair and tells him she loves him, like maybe she knows there’s something fragile about this moment, this room. Outside the window, a robin peeps impatiently.

It feels different then. Even lost in his own pleasure—yeah. It feels really, really different.

Afterward, getting ready for work, Taryn mentions that it’s her sister’s birthday. “Twelve,” she mutters, like it’s a dirty word. Nick watches as she braids her hair quickly and efficiently, a thick tail down her back. “Twelve is old. Plus it’s a big deal. I want her to have a nice party, but the house is just—” She waves a hand. “Even without Rosemary there. I never brought anyone home when I was her age either.”

Nick raises his eyebrows, picturing it, a younger version of Falvey celebrating every birthday alone. She might not have discussed Jesse with him yet, but she’s definitely still sharing other secrets. Nick tells himself that for now, that’s enough. “You could always use the diner,” he offers, fully expecting to be turned down. “One of my nights, I mean. When Alexandra and Ioanna aren’t there.”

Taryn brightens. “Really? Are you sure? She only has a couple friends, really, she’s such a bookworm, and they’d basically only need one pizza, and—”

Nick laughs, surprised. “Yeah, Falvey, it’s fine.”

Which is how he ends up with a gaggle of preteen girls at the front booth on Friday, Mikey and Connor playing soccer outside on the grass. Falvey herself is parked at the counter, eating a basket of steak fries and smiling in a way that suggests she’s going to pay him back big-time later. Nick tugs on the end of her ponytail and grins.

The diner doesn’t do cake, but Nick serves up a giant brownie with twelve candles on top instead, and it works about just as well. Caitlin puffs up her pink cheeks and blows out all but one. Her presents are all practical, hand-knit mittens and a bunch of gift cards to the same clothing store. Nick wonders if she asked, if she told her friends she needed the new clothes. He hopes so. He wants that kind of bravery for her.

After all the girls are picked up, Nick gets in the Tahoe and tails Falvey and the kids back to their empty triple-decker for a movie night. As soon as Taryn unlocks the door, Mikey and Connor thunder off ahead to get the best seats—on the floor, right in front of the TV—while the adults and Caitlin take off their coats. Nick’s just unwinding his scarf when there’s a commotion from the living room.

“Tare!” Mikey screams. “There’s glass on the floor!”

Taryn rolls her eyes. “Well, did somebody break something?” she calls back, heading toward the sound of their voices. Nick’s just following her into the living room when she stops short. “What the fuck?” she says.

Nick looks. Mikey wasn’t kidding. There’s glass on the floor and everywhere, in the couch cushions and on the coffee table, gleaming shards sitting on somebody’s discarded breakfast plate from this morning. The side window is completely shattered, damp April wind whistling in. It doesn’t look like anything’s been stolen—the crappy TV is completely unscathed—but there’s a brick sitting neatly in the middle of the living room rug.

“Fuck,” Nick echoes, before he can stop himself. Puts an arm out to keep Cait from getting any closer.

Taryn’s silent for the length of a heartbeat, and in that time Nick can see how frightened she is, all her color draining out and her chest moving with the force of her breathing. Then she rolls her eyes and recovers. “And this, children,” she says cheerfully, an overblown schoolteacher voice like she’s putting on a play, “is what happens when you live in a neighborhood full of lamewad troublemakers.” She shoos the boys out of the way, picks up a couple of the biggest shards with her bare hands. “Watch your feet, Con. Scoot back so I can clean this up, all right?” She motions with her chin back in the direction of the foyer. “Hey, there’s popcorn in the kitchen—why don’t you guys go put it in the micro, okay? We’ll watch the movie in a bit. It’s fine,” she promises Caitlin once they’re gone—Cait’s watching with big eyes, still holding her polka-dotted gift bag. “Run and get me the dustpan, will you? And then bring down Jesse’s laptop. Let’s pick out what to get you with those gift cards.”

Caitlin nods and follows the boys into the kitchen, comes back a minute later with a whisk broom and then disappears upstairs. Taryn digs the mittens and the tissue paper out of the shiny gift bag, dropping the glass inside. She lets Nick get close enough to help her, but when she sees him opening his mouth she holds up a hand. “Don’t,” she says, shaking her head and picking a couple of shards out of the carpet. “I know what you’re thinking, and I just—please don’t.”

Nick does anyway. “You should call the cops,” he tells her, using a well-thumbed Victoria’s Secret catalogue to sweep some of the glass off the table and into the bag. His heart is jackhammering away inside his ribs.

Taryn sighs. “And tell them what, exactly?”

“What do you mean, tell them what?” Nick’s baffled. “Tell them some punk fucking kids threw a brick through your family’s window, and you probably know who, and—”

“I do not know who,” she retorts. She’s got that cornered-animal look about her, same as she had the night he took her to dinner in Stockbridge, like she’s got a fucking secret and she’s gonna guard it with her life. “And neither do you, so quit looking at me like that and help me figure out what I’m going to do about the window, will you?”

“I’ll fix the window.” Nick takes a breath. “Falvey, if your brother is into something with those guys who came by that day, then—”

“Now you want me to call the cops on my brother?” Taryn snaps. She’s down on her knees with the dustpan, getting the glass along the windowsill. “Jesus Christ, maybe I should just start sending everybody in my family away when I don’t feel like dealing with them anymore. Next time Con’s got an attitude on I can just bundle him in the car and drop him off at juvie, maybe take a vacation.”

“That’s not what I said.” Nick concentrates real hard on not rolling his eyes. “Listen to me. That’s not what I said.”

Taryn exhales. “I know.”

Nick sighs too. He knows she knows—which, of course, begs the question of why they keep having this same conversation. For a long beat, neither of them says anything. The pop-pop-pop of the microwave pours into the silence, Mikey and Connor’s excited voices bubbling up underneath. Outside the bashed-in window, a car squeals by.