I like him.
Which I need to stop immediately.
"Well, it was nice meeting you. I'm sure I'll see you around." I go to finish the ice chest but Casey stops me.
"Are you walking home tonight, Gypsy?"
I nod.
"Why don't you let us give you a ride? That way you're not walking around alone at two-thirty in the morning."
Yes!
Oh, please give me a ride home!
My brain is practically screaming it, begging me to take them up on Casey's offer but my heart has other plans.
If I let them give me a ride home they'll want to talk. If we talk, we'll be a little more than acquaintances. That can lead to multiple rides, which could lead to friendship and that leads to a mess so big I may not be able to get out.
No it is.
"That's ok. I appreciate it, really, but I don't mind walking and..." I watch Andrej go right to his phone and aggressively tap out what has to be a text message since the reply seems to be immediate. "I'm staying in a weird area anyway, and I'm not sure if there's even a path for a vehicle."
Not to mention I have no idea if I'm illegally squatting on someone else's land with my broken down truck and tiny house.
"Oh come on, Gypsy girl, our company can't be that bad." Casey giggles. "Just let us give you a ride home. It'll make chatterbox over here feel so much better."
Andrej looks up from his phone and gives Casey the scowl to end all scowls and I crack up.
Until he looks at me with an actual, teeny-tiny, small smile.
Weird.
"It's ok. No worries, I'm a big girl, I can handle walking back home all by myself." Not really. The walk was terrifying at nine-thirty the other night when I left after my drink with Posey. I can't imagine how two-thirty or three in the morning will be.
I plaster on a fake-confident smile, watch Andrej go back to his phone, and then get back to my task at hand.
After a complete deep clean of the bar area, Travis divides our tips—I pulled almost one hundred and fifty dollars! Woo!—then offers to give me a ride home.
When I decline that, he offers to give me a different kind of ride, one that involves his lap, but I decline again. He is polite, despite his proposition and my rejection. Then I trek my way back to my tiny house. It wasn't so bad this time, just quiet and peaceful. Maybe I was too worked up last night to appreciate it or something, but tonight it was so much better.
Samson is eagerly waiting for me when I get home. So excited that he almost pees inside, which he hasn't done since he was a baby. And when I let him out he tears through the grass like a damn bat out of hell and disappears into the woods.
I’m not very hungry when I get home, so I only have a banana and honey sandwich, then change my clothes and go out to work on my truck.
Almost four in the morning is not an ideal time to get under the hood, but I don't want to go to sleep, don't want to fight my nightmares right now, so I set up my battery powered spotlights, jack up the truck, and lay a second tarp down underneath it then get to work.
So far I've done the basics.
A complete oil change, as well as the filter.
A flush and replacement of all other fluids.
I checked the tires and rims, then got them ready to be rotated.
Checked the charge on my battery, which is silly since I bought it last spring.
And now I'm plugging in my diagnostic meter to see if it picks up any issues. I know I need to do the brake pads and possibly the spark plugs, but outside of that I have no idea why it broke down.
