Chapter 15

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Maisie had always worried what would happen if anyone discovered her secret about River. Anyone other than Molly and Mary, anyway, because they’d known for years. But Finn had caught her at a low moment and guessed the truth. Now, Adalia and Blue knew too, and life wasn’t any different. Adalia had kindly told her that she’d already guessed, and Blue had sighed deeply and said she understood the drive to keep a secret better than Maisie could ever know. Surprisingly, they had both supported her decision not to tell River.

Maisie had gone to Bro Club on Tuesday, after spending half of Iris’s training session showing her the best way to clean poop out of the pens and the other half making up for it by teaching her how to train puppies to sit. Part of her had worried it would be weird to hang out with Finn and River, like maybe the fraying threads of Finn’s filter would completely rip free now that Adalia openly knew what he had done, but he didn’t say anything, and River was too pumped up about the plan to (hopefully) disinclude Prescott from the engagement party to talk about much else.

She hadn’t told the others, but she’d had another reason for suggesting they hold the party on Christmas Eve. Christmas had always been a hard time of year for River. His mother had left him with Dottie two weeks beforehand…and he’d never seen her again. And while they were inviting Georgie’s estranged father to all of the festivities, no one had breathed a word about Esmerelda. Nor would they, she was sure. Everyone involved knew better.

By the time Thursday afternoon rolled around, she was feeling pretty good, until Mary called her at ten until five.

“Hey,” she answered, washing out some dirty bowls. Iris was with Beatrice today, and the other volunteer who was supposed to be helping out had called in sick, sounding so hung over she’d almost accused him of pregaming for SantaCon on Saturday. “What’s up?”

It wasn’t usual to hear from Mary at this time of day, on a workday, no less. Mary was a lawyer, and she always insisted on a firm separation between her work life and her personal life.

“I’m sorry,” Mary said, sounding flustered, “but your gift got delivered early. The deliverymen were supposed to carry it inside for you, but apparently no one was home, and the dogs were barking, and they just left it there. That is so against the rules, and I’m going to write them a scathing Yelp review, but that doesn’t change the fact that your gift is sitting out there.”

“Um, I’m sure it’s fine,” Maisie said, not going into all the ways her sister’s explanation was crazy. It was almost three weeks before Christmas, for one, and for another, the house was set back from the road enough that it was highly unlikely any teens would happen along and steal her packages.

“No, you don’t get it.” A pause hung on the other end of the line. “I got you a new bedroom set.”

“What?” she squawked out, dropping a bowl to the bottom of the sink. One of their new rescues, a hound dog, started howling. “Can it, Ruby,” she called out fondly.

“It’s just…you still have the same furniture in there you’ve had since you were a teenager. You have a double bed , Maisie. Don’t you want an adult set?”

She refrained from saying the obvious—if she’d wanted it, she would have bought it — because then Mary would make some stuffy sort of comment along the lines of saving dogs never made anyone rich, Maisie, and you don’t have to pretend otherwise. And sure, no one would call her rich, but she wasn’t some destitute pauper in a Charles Dickens novel, wearing rags and eating gruel. She sent her sisters rent checks for God’s sake, to pay out their portions of the house, and she was never late. And okay, Mary had never once cashed one of the checks, but Molly needed the money and took it. As far as the shelter building went…they’d worked it out so it could be hers, fair and square. Molly and Mary had both gotten significantly larger portions of the life insurance money.

“How’d you even pick it out?” she asked. As a question, it was beside the point, but she was honestly curious. Mary’s house looked like the love child of a hotel room and a museum, and she so did not share the same aesthetic.

“Molly did,” Mary said, and if that wasn’t a knife in the back… “Maisie, we’re not telling you to get rid of the rest of the stuff, but there’s nothing wrong with having a nice, updated room for yourself.”

She wanted to argue. She’d opened her mouth to argue, but then she had a flash of that dish that had broken at Thanksgiving, and how good it had felt to hand it over to Adalia. Then another flash, of Jack’s feet hanging off the end of her bed. Maybe they were right. Maybe it was time.

“Okay,” she said.

“Okay?”

She could practically hear Mary’s excitement, so she shut it down fast. “Only a bedroom set. And thank you. I guess.”

“What are you going to do about getting it inside and getting the other furniture out?” Mary asked worriedly. “Do you think River and Finn would help?”

Yeah, she was pretty sure they would. But the last thing she wanted was for River to move a bed into her room. She might be feeling pretty good, pretty over things, but there was no point in pushing it.

“I’ll figure it out,” she said.

“Great!” Mary said. “Um. How are things going otherwise?”

Her voice sounded strained, though, and Maisie knew she was likely looking at the clock. Thinking about how she was really supposed to be working for another five minutes.

“It’s okay, you can go,” she said. “Love you.”

Mary released a sigh of relief. “Thanks. Love you too.”

As soon as Maisie signed off, she texted Finn: Help a bro out? Some surprise furniture arrived at my house, and while Einstein is good at many things, he is no pack mule. There’s a beer in it for you.

He responded almost immediately: Surprise furniture? I have so many questions. Unfortunately, no can do. In Charlotte for a meeting. River?

“Ughhhh,” she said out loud.

But it was almost five, and she wanted to see how Iris had fared with Beatrice today, so she gave Ruby some pets to stop her baying, then washed her hands and headed down to Beatrice’s office.

She knocked on the door, surprised when Iris was the one who said “come in.”

Both of them sat at their computers, Beatrice at her monitor, Iris pulled up to a laptop with an intent look on her face.

“Oh, is it time already?” Iris asked.

Which wasn’t what Maisie would say if someone asked her to do accounting, but hey, she was happy for people who enjoyed that sort of thing. They made her work possible.

“Yup,” Maisie said. “And knowing your brother, he’s probably been out in the lot for five minutes already.”

He’d gotten here early on Tuesday, at least. But he hadn’t come in. He’d texted Iris to come out to him. Maybe he was offended by what she’d said to him at the restaurant. The stuff about Iris, at least. But if he were so easily offended, he surely wasn’t a match for her, so she’d tried to shake off any hurt feelings.

“You got that right,” Iris said with a sigh, shutting the computer and stuffing it into her bag.

“How’d it go in here?”

“I wish we could get rid of Dustin and keep her, that’s how it went,” Beatrice said with a smile.

Iris beamed back at her, and goodness, she hadn’t known the girl had a look like that stuffed away.

“She came up with some great ideas for outreach,” Beatrice said. “She’s going to take over the Instagram account. About time we got a young person handling that.”

“Hey,” Maisie said, “I’m young.”

Beatrice just gave her a look. Which, fair enough, the Instagram account had all of four pictures on it, and one of them was of Dustin eating one of his infamous blue cheese Danishes.

Maisie lifted her hands. “Okay, fair enough. I can’t hashtag to save my life. Nor would I want to.”

“Well, we’re lucky we have Iris here,” Beatrice said. “But I bet she’ll be getting a letter from Northwestern any day now.”

“Oh, did you do Early Decision?”

Iris nodded emphatically. “I’ve wanted to go there since I was ten.”

Imagine that, having a university you’d wanted to attend since you were ten. Maisie hadn’t finished college. She’d been at the end of her second year at UNC-Asheville when her parents had died. Although she’d stayed the course for a while, she’d failed some classes in the fall, and then the idea for the shelter had come, and she’d dropped out of school. Mary always made noise about her going back, but she didn’t see the point. The shelter was her life. If she finished school, it would only be to make other people feel better about her life decisions, and that seemed like a pretty stupid reason for doing anything.

She had a sudden image of the several large pieces of furniture literally sitting on her stoop.

“Hey, Beatrice, you know everyone. You think you could rustle up a couple of people to help me move some furniture tonight? My sisters apparently took it upon themselves to get me some furniture for Christmas, but it arrived early, and it got left outside.”

Beatrice twisted her mouth to the side, thinking, but Iris jumped in before she could say anything.

“Jack and I can help you. He used to move furniture as a side hustle.”

She liked the image of Jack lifting her new furniture, those impossible arms of his looking even better while lifting…what came in a bedroom set, anyway? How much furniture were they talking? But then again, Jack had been weird on Tuesday, and if he was pissed at her or had resolved to stay away from her, she didn’t exactly want to throw herself in his face.

“I doubt he’d like to do it in his free time,” Maisie said, but Iris was already texting. God, she was fast. She found herself shifting on her feet a little while, waiting for the verdict, which pissed her off preemptively.

But Iris looked up from her phone and said, “He’s in if there’s pizza involved.”

Maisie grinned. “What do you take me for? Of course there’s pizza involved.”

“That’s settled, then,” Beatrice said. She made a shooing motion. “Now y’all get out of here. I need to wrap things up for the night.”

But she hugged both of them before they left the office, saying something softly to Iris that Maisie couldn’t hear.

Maisie and Iris headed for the front together in silence, but Iris broke it by asking, “Jack said you have dogs, too?”

Interesting. What explanation had he given Iris for being at her house?

But she just said, “Yeah. They’re going to love you.”

Then they were leaving the building, and Jack was standing against his car, arms crossed in a way that made his biceps strain against his sweater, and she felt a suspicious flutter in her belly that she refused on principle to call butterflies.

“I hear you have furniture that needs moving?” he asked.

“I hear you’re a man who knows how to move things.”

“Ugh,” Iris said with over-the-top disgust, “are you guys flirting? Let’s get over there so I can meet the dogs.”

Jack’s face turned an adorable shade of pink, and he nodded to Maisie as he ducked into the driver’s seat of his car. She found herself laughing as she got into her Jeep. To her surprise, she wasn’t thinking about getting rid of the old furniture or adjusting to new stuff. She was just thinking about the fun she was going to have with Jack and Iris. And she was looking forward to it.

“Um. Feel free to change your mind,” Maisie said, gesturing to the enormous boxes and mattress and box spring set littering the front of her house. Why had they just left it here? She’d never heard of anything like that. Fear of Einstein and Chaco didn’t properly explain it, what with the fact that the two of them, together, wouldn’t be forty pounds soaking wet. There were so many things it looked like moving day. And sure, there was probably only a dresser, a bed, plus a couple of nightstands, but it was a lot for three people, and definitely a lot if two of them were volunteer helpers paid by pizza.

“Oh, he could probably do all of this by himself,” Iris said dismissively, already heading toward the door, where Einstein and Chaco were pawing at the glass.

“You have a corgi!” Iris all but shrieked, her enthusiasm contagious.

So Maisie opened the door, and Ein and Chaco bustled up to Iris to give her licks and tail wags, Chaco only showering her with admiration for a moment before she defected to Jack.

He crouched down to pet her, saying sweet nothings in a soft, gentle voice that did things to Maisie. She couldn’t help but think about the last time he’d been here, and when he looked up, she could tell from his smoldering gaze he was thinking about it too.

“What’s his name?” Iris asked, jolting her attention away from Jack. Einstein was still loving up on Iris, a little lady’s man like always.

“Einstein,” she said.

Iris’s eyes lit up. “Oh, did you name him after the corgi in Cowboy Bebop ?”

“I did,” Maisie said, surprised. Most people figured his namesake was the scientist, what with his old man ways. But the anime series, which could best be described as a space western, had been her favorite as a teenager, and to her mind, there was no other appropriate name for a corgi.

“It’s one of Jack’s favorite shows,” Iris said.

“Oh?” Maisie said. She looked back at him. He’d stood up again, but Chaco was pressed up against his side, like she didn’t want to break contact with him. “You didn’t say.”

He fidgeted uncomfortably. “I must have been…distracted.”

They both knew by what, and Maisie had a flash of the multiple orgasms she’d had that night. Had she really thought it a good idea for him to carry in her bedroom furniture?

“Are we going to bring out the old furniture?” Jack asked. “Or do you just want us to put it in the living room or something until someone can show up and grab it? If I remember correctly, there’s probably enough space.”

Iris glanced at him with an assessing look, and it wasn’t hard to imagine what she was thinking. Jack knew the dogs, and he’d seen the living room. But there were no cutting remarks, no teasing. It was like she’d made the observation and tucked it into her brain bank.

“Yeah, let’s do that,” Maisie said. “I’ll donate the pieces to one of those places that does pickup.”

“Pretty big Christmas present,” Iris observed, glancing back at the boxes while she continued to give Ein pets.

Maisie sighed, shooting another look at Jack. “My sister Mary is what you might call the bossy type. She doesn’t much approve of the way I live my life.”

“So she got you new bedroom furniture?” Iris asked with understandable confusion.

“All of the stuff in here was my parents’. She thinks it’s time for me to move on. Apparently, my little sister, Molly, agrees with her enough that she helped pick out the new stuff.”

“How long have your parents been gone?” Jack asked softly. And it struck her that it meant something, him asking that question. He wasn’t a man who pressed.

So she answered.

“They died in a car accident almost ten years ago.” A corner of her mouth ticked up. “So really, maybe they have a point.”

“Still,” Iris said, giving Ein a final pat and getting to her feet. “They shouldn’t press you before you’re ready.”

Meeting Jack’s eyes, Maisie said, “Sometimes it takes me a while to come around to things, but I think I’m getting there.”

“We’re still talking about furniture, right?” Iris said, but there was no bite in her voice. She was just a teenager being a teenager.

“Yeah, that and a whole lot more baggage.”

“We all have baggage,” Jack said abruptly. The warmth in his eyes startled her, but he looked like a man at war with himself. “Let’s move the stuff upstairs first. Then we’ll take this in. Should I order the pizza?”

“Hey,” Maisie said, giving his arm a fake punch, because, in all honesty, she really wanted to touch it. “That’s my job. If I’m not the one who brings the pizza, what do I have to add to this moving party? You two are obviously the muscle.” She gestured to Iris, who could probably, at most, move a nightstand.

“Fair enough,” he said. “But only if you get half pineapple and pepperoni.”

Iris made a face, and Maisie mimicked it. “I question your taste, but you do have those arms, so yes, I will make the call. Though I reserve the right to feel sad about it.”

“Agreed,” he said, reaching out a hand, and as she took it and shook, she had to wonder if maybe he wanted to touch her too.