I laughed, “Exactly. And did I detect a slur, you were in the bar celebrating?”
“Yep, glad that part is over. Man, I was wound up over it, drank a lot, now I gotta sleep so I’m fresh tomorrow. It’s exciting. Blue Ridge Cabins and Adventures is happening, Lexi, I can feel it.”
“Good, me too, can’t wait.”
“Once the investments roll in I’m gonna be flush. It’s going to be grand.”
“I can’t wait to celebrate. I invited some people over, I’ll have dinner waiting for you, we’re going to have champagne to celebrate your first check.”
“Getting ahead of ourselves, might take a few weeks before the first check.”
“Well, fine, but I’m still popping the champagne. I’ll let you go so you can get some rest, Coop, love you.”
“Love you too, Lexi, see ya tomorrow night.”
We hung up and I went to watch some TV in the living room. The Bachelor was on, but it was a repeat, so I kind of paced the house, checking the back-shack through the window — the lights remained on.
About ten pm,I called Jen. “So what’s happening? Did you ditch Mr Passable?”
She answered, cryptically, “Oh, how are you, is everything okay?”
I said, “Is he right there? Do you need an excuse, because Dude is missing if you do. I need you to come help me find him. If not, I just wanted you to know that Dude says hi.”
She said, “Tell Dude I said hi, also how did Cooper’s meeting go, did he call you?”
“Went great, think he’s going to get the investors.”
“Great, okay, I’ll talk to you later.”
We hung up. Apparently the date was going well and she didn’t plan to ditch him.
My eyes drew back down to the back-shack, fully lit, and wondered if I ought to be nice and go down there and turn off the lights.
Then I wondered if I had lost my mind.
There was a sword-wielding mean guy around, and a nicer one sleeping inside the back-shack. I was just going to saunter around in the dark? He was right, I did not have good enough guards.
Just going down to the back-shack in the middle of the night to ‘check’ on him?
It was a ridiculous idea.
But then again... it wasn’t the middle of the night.
I heard a soft jostle of my screen door and my heart dropped — but then Dude meowed. He sounded pissed that I had locked him out.
I let him in. “Sorry, Dude.”
He brushed past me and headed straight for his food bowl.
As I closed back up I looked up at the sky. Would there be another storm? I hoped not, this was all plenty of excitement for one night.
I checked the back-shack again. Light still on, door still open.
I returned to the study, feeling kind of bored. I had three different half-finished projects — a stained-glass window of a field of purple flowers that was near finished; a cross stitch of a family tree —the trunk was done but I needed to add the family names on the branches; or the Heritage scrapbook I had started two years ago, a few months after I lost my parents.
I sighed. A lot of my hobbies were so damn sentimental. The last thing I needed to do right now was be melancholy. I had real things to worry about.
Like the dangerous, hot guy in my back-shack.
