And now I was driving her home, and the uncertainty of how she’d react was eating away at me. The mood in the car wasn’t tense, though, it was more relaxed than I thought it would be as she stared out of the window quietly.
“How are you feeling, Ari? How’s your head?”
“I feel tired and like my legs are filled with lead, but I’ll survive.”
“That’s goo—Fuck!” I shouted, slamming my foot on the brake as a white Lexus pulled in front of us, only just missing my vehicle. In the process of stomping on the brakes, I’d automatically put my hand out to stop Ari from going forward and hitting the dash, only realizing what I’d grabbed when a chuckle burst out of her. Her tit! “Shit, sorry. I didn’t mean to grab it. I just didn’t want you to—”
The laughter that came out of her cut me off and was so infectious that I started doing it, too.
“I don’t think I’ve ever heard of someone being saved by someone else grabbing their boob,” she snickered, her cheeks flushed in the light from the dash. “Can you imagine a lady falling off a building and Spiderman swooping in on his web to catch her by the tit?”
I couldn’t say for sure, but there was probably fanfiction out there where that had happened.
“That car just came out of nowhere.”
Then, with all the history between us, she said something that reinforced why I wanted to divulge what I was going to tonight to her. “I’ll allow it.”
I don’t think she’d ever know how grateful I was when I reached out and grabbed her hand. Ariana was the type of woman who just made everything okay. Even when the earth moved or I felt off-balance, Ari was my anchor without even knowing it.Dropping her purse beside the couch, Ari gestured to the kitchen with her head. “Do you want a drink?”
A bottle of Jack with a straw would be awesome right now, but I needed a clear head for this.
“Have you got any carbonated water?”
I knew that it was like asking her if she had oxygen in her house because it was pretty much all she drank.
Giving me a wry look, she headed into the kitchen and grabbed two bottles of water out the fridge. Movement coming out of the pantry distracted me from watching her straighten up from her bent position—her two Dachshunds. The second their paws went from whatever flooring had muffled them in the small space to the wooden floors of the main house, their legs started moving at a faster rate. I want to say this was because they wanted to get to their mama quickly, but in actual fact, it was because they had no traction on the varnished surface, so they needed to double time to maintain any speed.
Grinning, I watched their little legs whirling as they started making the weirdest squeaks with excitement. The only part that confused me was when she glanced nervously at the pantry and then over at where I was as she chewed on her lower lip. Whatever was going through her mind ended up with her closing the door to it with her hip before walking toward me, stopping when the excited canines almost tripped her up.
“Y’all are going to hurt yourselves one of these days,” she murmured, putting the bottles on the top of a counter and bending down to catch them, only just managing to avoid their excited tongues as they got close to her face. “Put those Fruit Roll-Up tongues away. I know where you put ‘em, and I keep telling you sharing isn’t caring with that shit.”
When I’d first moved here, I’d stayed in a guest house on the Townsend’s land until I found a place of my own. The invite to remain in the property was there, but I’d wanted to find the perfect home for my new beginnings. I was currently renting the place with the possibility of purchasing it after a year, but I wasn’t sure.
Ariana’s place had originally been a large barn that’d housed three tractors. She’d loved the amount of space available and the overall design of it, so she’d had the contractor make it into a house instead of knocking it down. It was like a one-bedroom version of the house from Little House On The Prairie. Downstairs, it had an open plan kitchen and living room with a guest bathroom. Upstairs, the attic conversion was stunning with old oak beams and a bathroom that even I’d fallen in love with the one time I’d used it when I was helping her brothers move her bedroom around for her. Her bedroom took up the whole upper level, and it all just worked perfectly.
Mine was an older house that’d been remodeled by the owners three years ago. It had three bedrooms with en suites, a half bathroom downstairs, and a small room that I’d turned into a study. The yard would have been hell to look after if it wasn’t for the small guest house with an open floor plan like Ari’s place. My brother was going to use it when he came to visit, something I’d made clear I wanted to happen so that I didn’t bump into any of his ‘guests.’ Then again, the improvements I’d made this year to my life had spurred Dale to make some of his own, too. He didn’t have issues for the same reason I did—his were more survivors guilt related. I’d made sacrifices for him, and it tore him up. Neither of us had led the life of a saint, but those days were long behind us now.