Bliss Brothers: The Complete Series Boxed Set, page 39
We’re going to be screwed.
“So,” Leta says, in the particular way she has of speaking like there’s been an ongoing conversation even though you broke up and never talked to each other again until this very moment, “where are you headed? I’m assuming it must be—”
“Work.” I stand up tall, look her in her blue eyes, and nod definitively. “I’m going to work. We won’t see each other again.”
Leta blinks, surprise melting into confusion. “I mean, I wasn’t following you here. I didn’t know you still worked here. When all of it happened, I—”
“No. Nope.”
I sound like a fucking idiot, but I can’t do this.
We can’t do this.
She can’t tackle me like a linebacker on the street and settle back into chatting like everything is fine. It wasn’t fine when we broke up, and it’s never been fine since, and I will be damned if I admit that to her now. Or ever.
“Nope?” Leta echoes. “That doesn’t sound like you, Charlie.”
“Nope.” Christ. “How would you even—” I straighten up and give her the kind of smile I’d give any random guest. It’s not worth it to go there with her. I don’t sound the same as I did when I was in college. I sound a thousand times dumber, clearly. “Welcome to the Bliss Resort & Club. Let us know if you need anything.
I turn on my heel and walk away.
Leta
So, that happened.
Charlie walks away down the gentle slope of the street, right in the middle of the road.
“You’re in the middle of the road.” The words are aimed in the general direction of his back, but it’s anyone’s guess if he’s heard me because he doesn’t react at all. “I’m in the middle of the road.”
I’m out here because the slip of paper with Aunt Mari’s handwriting blew into the street like the feather from Forrest Gump. She’s the kind of woman who would hold her head up gracefully and walk away from this without ever letting the sting in her heart show.
I don’t have anyone to show it to, necessarily, but I feel it. His dismissal—welcome to the Bliss Resort—as if he didn’t know me at all, and never knew me at all, cut deep.
Like, ouch.
I’m more than a little struck by how sexy he is. I thought he was something else when we were in college, but the intervening years—not many of them, not in the scheme of things—have gently kissed his cheeks and probably licked his abs. He looks good. He looks so good that it reaches into my chests and squeezes the shit out of my heart.
It’s probably a good idea to get out of the street, even though the traffic here is so reduced as to be almost nonexistent. Either people here don’t need to drive much, or they prefer to walk if they leave their houses. Win for the environment, right? Yet standing around in the middle of the road can’t be the status quo.
I look both ways and dart back across the street, taking the path in front of my aunt’s house to the porch. The wicker chair awaits. It creaks underneath me as I sink into it. This may not have been as romantic a destination as I originally thought.
The slip of paper from the front-door notepad is slightly crumpled on one side from my vigorous snatching, but otherwise unharmed. I flatten it out between my thumb and forefinger and settle in to read my aunt’s list. My heart aches at the familiar curls of her handwriting, which graced many a birthday card in my time.
Fix the fucking toilet upstairs
The first ha explodes out of my chest like a firework, followed by a belly laugh that rattles my entire skeleton. Fix the fucking toilet upstairs is not something I can imagine Aunt Mari saying. Not because she was old—she wasn’t. She was four years younger than my mom. But because when we were together, she was…measured. She wasn’t prone to road rage, or getting wild at the Paint & Sip, or wearing loud patterns.
Could she have been that different here? I guess so.
Numbers—
The next item on the list, complete with a helpful dash next to it.
Bliss Maintenance, (518) 555-2547
Pizza, (518) 555-9023
Below the first two numbers is one more, crossed out so heavily that I can’t make it out, even if I hold the paper up to the sun. The sun has no effect, and I don’t know why it would. Mari didn’t block it out with something like permanent marker. She scribbled over it, with heavy loops.
After that, there’s a gap of about an inch, then one final entry on the list:
Will
It’s bizarre.
I let it settle down into my lap and survey the street. It’s serene here. Calm. The houses are meticulously maintained. They can’t all be freshly painted, but they seem that way. Every yard is carefully mowed, and it’s quiet. So quiet. Except for the occasional echoing noise. The vestigial shouts must be coming from the beach, or the pool, even though it’s September. But then…so what if it’s September? People vacation in September. I’m here in September, though this is not what I’d call a vacation, exactly.
I crane my neck to look in the direction of where Charlie came from, my heart leaping back into my throat. If he’s my next-door neighbor, I’ll die.
Because there’s no way.
He was not overjoyed to see me.
With a groan, I let my head fall back against the wicker chair. A piece of it cracks off and stabs me in the skull.
Very nice.
I don’t want to dwell on what happened at the end of college. I really don’t. And maybe I’m the idiot for coming here, knowing that this is his family resort, and expecting not to run into him. I honestly pictured it as something more…sprawling. More corporate. The kind of place where you can go days without seeing the same person twice.
The Bliss Resort is not that kind of place, and the Club…
Well, it’s a very small world if Charlie Bliss walks by my house on the regular.
I have a vision of myself running across the street, wild in my harem pants, and resist the urge to drop my head back onto the broken wicker. No wonder he wasn’t happy to see me. That kind of behavior is so not Charlie, so not what he was interested in putting up with, and I just confirmed that I haven’t changed at all. Charlie, I’m sure, is the kind of man who still believes in a modicum of decorum. Being decorous has never been my thing.
I stand up from the chair and brush at my pants, though there’s nothing there to brush away. It’s not like I rolled in the dirt, Charlie.
Time to stop thinking about him. I can get in, get out, and get on with my life without spending another second on him.
Right?
4
Leta
In the deepest, darkest part of my dreams—the part that involves cotton candy and somehow also a decaying funhouse, even though the last funhouse I was in was a shoddy trailer at the country fair a thousand years ago—I hear it.
Water.
Rushing through the pipes, singing out onto porcelain, an incessant whoosh. What this has to do with the funhouse, I have no idea. It’s obviously the worst funhouse in the world if getting sprayed with water is on the agenda.
It sounds so real.
The noise drags me up from the weirdo funhouse oblivion into something resembling consciousness.
Hold up.
There is water running somewhere in this house. It’s not for show, it’s not part of a dream—there’s water running, and there shouldn’t be. Jesus, it’s loud.
I leap up from the bed, tangling myself in the sheet in the process, and stumble blindly onto the floor. Water water water. What sink did I leave on? My heart thumps in an offbeat carnival rhythm. This would happen. Of course it would. I would flood the house the third night here. I claim to be a solitary artist, but in reality my survival skills are lacking if I can’t keep a house from flooding.
Moonlight carves a path through the hallway and glistens on water that’s seeping into the hall from the upstairs bathroom, one guest room removed from the one I’ve been sleeping in.
“Shit,” I shout, then clap my hand over my mouth. The other houses are pretty close. “Fuck,” I shout into my hand. They water is frigid and my bare feet recoil when I step into it. And then, like an idiot, I open the bathroom door.
There’s water spewing from the toilet.
I shriek at the sight of it—it seems that impossible.
“What are you doing?” I wave my hands at the toilet, pleading at the top of my lungs. “Stop. Stop.” I can fix a clogged toilet any time, day or night, but this catastrophe doesn’t involve a mishap of the diet or an overabundance of toilet paper. It’s the wall. The water is coming from inside the house. Inside the wall.
Towels. My first thought is to get a towel, so I wrench open the narrow linen cabinet built into the wall and pull out a stack of towels. They come free along with the familiar scent of my aunt’s laundry detergent. “I’m so sorry,” I murmur to her past self’s efforts. This is not how she intended them to be used, I’m sure. “So sorry, Mari.”
The towels do nothing but stanch the flow. They’re soaked almost immediately, and I have no earthly idea what to do.
“Think, Leta. Don’t be a fucking idiot.” I crouch next to the toilet, my pajama pants soaked, and peer behind the bowl. A chunk of the wall has come loose. No—it’s paneling. It’s a purposeful panel, framed with white trim, and it’s burst under the pressure of the water.
Someone has to have planned for this. There’s no way a group of professionals came together and put in plumbing with zero foresight.
I summon all my mental fortitude and shove my hands into the water.
“Holy shit.” It’s cold. It’s really, really cold, and god knows what’s behind it. Probably pipes. I’m praying that there’s a valve that I can turn. My hand connects with a thin piece of metal and I scream out loud. It’s so creepy.
I turn it with all my strength.
It doesn’t budge.
Lefty loosey, righty tighty.
Other direction, genius.
I wrench it to the right.
The water slows, then stops.
I sit back on my ass with a wet squelch, the cold water connecting directly with my crotch. “Okay, no. Bad idea. No.”
With as much dignity as a person can have when covered in toilet water, I rise from the floor and go into the hallway. At the edge of the water I strip off my clothes. Everything is tainted by the water now, from my tank top down to the hemmed ankles of my pajama pants. I leave the clothes in a pile and walk solemnly downstairs.
I should never become a homeowner. Renting is for me, now and forever, because if I have to be in charge of fixing this shit…
Maybe I don’t have to be in charge of it.
I’m not sure why I’ve come into the living room until I spot the piece of paper from the door on the coffee table, right where I left it earlier. There was something there that could help me. I’m sure of it.
And yes—there. The second thing on the list.
Bliss Maintenance, (518) 555-2547
Surely, they have an answering machine. Surely, a place like this might even have someone on-call for emergencies. In the adrenaline haze of saving the house from imminent toilet collapse I take the stairs two at a time and rush into the bedroom. My phone, blessedly, has not fallen victim to any of this situation and when I snatch it up from the bedside table it does exactly what it’s supposed to do: it lights up and prepares to do my bidding.
I dial the number by the light of the phone screen and hit send.
The call connects.
One ring.
Two.
Halfway through the third, a muffled clicking comes over the line and then a man’s voice, far away at first. “—lo?” He clears his throat. “Hello. Bliss Resort & Club.”
“Hello. Yes.” I stand up straight, my own nakedness making this phone call seem weighty in a way it absolutely shouldn’t. “My toilet has exploded,” I begin. “No. The wall by my toilet exploded. There’s a bit of a flood, and I haven’t managed to get dressed yet.” I shake my head. “It’s a flood-mergency.”
“Can you give me your name and address?” That voice. It’s so low and husky and tired, and it makes me want to curl up inside of it and take a nap. A very filthy nap.
“Leta Quinn,” I say. “149 Cherry Street. I really need to find some clothes. Can you send someone to deal with the flood?”
Charlie
Emergency calls from the club side are rare, which is probably why Roman insists on keeping it on our personal rosters instead of farming it out to the security team right away. Some of these calls do go to the security team, but the Bliss Brothers are always the ones to make the call.
But three things shut down my brain:
Leta Quinn.
I really need to find some clothes.
Can you send someone?
“Leta,” I say gruffly, still caught somewhere between restless sleep and a waking dream that now involves the naked curves of her body. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen her that way, backlit by the moon with her hips in my hands, and every muscle in my body tenses toward that vision. I’m harder than a rock. On the next street over, she’s standing there naked or half-naked and waiting for someone to come help her.
Damn it, and I swore I would wait her out. I swore I wouldn’t let myself get involved with whatever it is she’s doing at Bliss.
And now, less than forty-eight hours later, it’s my duty to jump back into the flames.
“Charlie?” Her tentative voice almost undoes me then. “Oh, god,” she groans. “I wouldn’t have called if I knew you were going to answer.”
That’s a knife through the ribs. A perfectly justified knife. Nope, I said to her two days ago like the planet’s biggest asshole.
I open my oath to tell her I’ll get someone else. I don’t know which of my brothers I’ll haul out of bed, but I don’t care.
“That’s not what I meant,” Leta says in a rush. “I only meant that…my toilet exploded.” A burst of high-pitched laughter. I can’t help but recognize it as Leta’s nervous laugh. I’ve done my best to keep her out of my memories and obviously I have failed. “Like, the wall. I should have listened to the note.”
What note?
“Anyway, there was a number for Bliss Maintenance. I thought it would be a repairman who was on call, not that anyone can fix this tonight. It’s the middle of the night. I just thought—”
“I’m the one on call.”
“You answer calls like this in the middle of the night?” Total disbelief rings through her tone. “Aren’t you, like, one of the co-owners of the resort? Aren’t you guys way too rich for this?” A muffled grumbling. “That’s not what I meant to say. What I meant to say is—”
Everything she’s said catches up to me in one instant. “Leta, did you say your house is flooded.”
“Mm-hmm. Yeah. I mean, not the whole thing, but I feel like that’s a matter of time. There’s water in the hallway, and I don’t have enough towels to catch all of it, and if it goes down the stairs—”
“I’ll be right there.”
I knock on Leta’s door less than five minutes later.
I hope she’s dressed almost as much as I hope she’s still undressed. It’s terrible and wrong to think of how sexy it would be if she were still clothes-less, hair slightly disheveled from whatever insane thing that happened, but I think it anyway.
The door opens to reveal…
Leta. With disheveled hair, an enormously fluffy robe draped over her shoulders and tied tightly closed around her waist.
“Hey.” She holds the door a few inches open, looking out at me like I dropped by unannounced.
“Hey.” I hate how easy it is to talk to her like this. I hate how easy it is, in the middle of the night, to feel my own body slipping into those old habits. “Did you want me to come in?” I brandish my phone like it’s proof I’m only here because of her exploded toilet. Or the wall. Or whatever.
Leta blinks at me, taking in a huge breath through her nose. “Yes. Right. Yes. Come on in.” She steps back and beckons into the living room.
“Where’s the problem area?”
“You always cut right to the chase, don’t you?” Leta chuckles.
“It’s three in the morning.”
“I know.” She puts a hand to her forehead. “This whole thing has me way off-balance.” It’s not the exploded wall that makes me feel off-balance. It’s standing this close to her, wondering what’s beneath that bathrobe. Knowing, in a way, what’s beneath the bathrobe and not being able to see it. “It’s up here.”
I grit my teeth. If there’s one thing I know from managing the resort’s finances, it’s that anything upstairs is going to be worse than downstairs. There’s more to wreck beneath the surface when it’s on the second floor.
Leta pads up the stairs, her bare feet quiet on polished wood, and I’m seized with the memory of lying in bed with her in my dorm room. It was early—the kind of morning sunlight she preferred not to see—but somebody coming in drunk had woken us up. The way she bent her knee so that her toes could brush against mine…
It gives me a full-body shiver, even now. It doesn’t help that her ass is right at face level. I look studiously away.
She reaches the top of the landing first, and I step up beside her. “I’m sure it’s not—oh.”
The hallway is a mess of towels, sheets, other cloth. It’s almost an inch of water she’s trying to keep contained to the bathroom with a makeshift dam.
“I turned off the water,” Leta says. “But…”
I wade into the sheets, my feet sinking in with every step, and make my way over to the open bathroom door.
Leta was right. The wall behind the toilet did explode. She did turn off the water. But she turned it off way, way too late.
The creaking is what warns me first.
“We have to go,” I tell her.
