“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 fucking 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.
I probably would have fallen asleep if it hadn’t been for the pounding at the door.
“Uggghhh…” I groaned as I hauled myself off the couch to see who was there. I opened the door to Yolanda’s sour face, which immediately soured my mood. “What do you want?”
“Checking in on you,” she replied as she walked past me. “You did say if I didn’t think you were eating right, I should just come by and check.”
Fuck! I did kind of remember saying that. Now she had totally called my bluff.
“You could have called first,” I grumbled before I sat down. Once I was back on the couch, I couldn’t stop the additional groan from slipping out of my mouth.