Page 49

And…
And…
Someone got their throat slit!
I deep breathed. I lamented the fact we didn’t get any utensils so I couldn’t dig into my pad thai right then and there. I tried to reconfigure Jacob’s space in my head so everything fit and looked nicer in it (this was a gigantic fail, the treadmill had to go…and the furniture did too).
Fortunately, this took us to a time when Javi had parked at a modern townhome complex closer to downtown than the Oasis. He got out. I jumped down. He took our food and my hand and walked me to a door. He released me to unlock it and ushered me in.
In order to continue to keep it tight, I hyper-focused on Javi’s space, considering I’d spent months hyper-obsessing on where he might live (and now I knew) and what it might look like (and I was about to find out).
He turned on the lights and I saw there wasn’t much to it.
A lot of white walls with not much on them, though he had a mounted TV that I was pleased to see was large, but it fit the space. A brown leather chesterfield that was very long and pretty much kick-butt sat against a wall, facing the TV (though, the sofa needed a chunky throw tossed artfully in a corner, seeing as chesterfields eschewed the adornment of toss pillows). A bunch of white floating shelves were mounted on a wall. Some had a single athletic shoe on them (and that was kind of cool, considering I could tell all those shoes were the important collector’s edition type).
Rounding this out, in the open plan space, there were some stools at a bar to what seemed like a completely empty kitchen, save a coffeemaker and a toaster. But, even empty, his kitchen was a decent size (which meant about twice the size of mine, though the kitchens at the Oasis were tiny, still, we could both cook in his without bumping into each other) and attractive with black hexagon tile backsplash and white cabinets.
And that was it.
I turned to him and blurted, “You don’t have much stuff.”
“Until recently, I traveled light,” he quipped, gazing down at me. He immediately dispensed with any chatter about his place and asked, “You okay?”
My shattered mushroom sprang to mind. I felt my face scrunch up when my hold on keeping it tight slipped. I heard our food bag hit the chesterfield, then my face was shoved into Javi’s chest, and his arms were tight around me.
In his arms, feeling his heat, his strength, my hold on tight obliterated, and I lost it.
I clutched at his tee as I bawled into the fabric and exclaimed, “They broke my mushroom!”
“What?”
I tipped my head (way) back to look up at him, catching his gorgeous crystalline eyes with my watery ones. “My cute mushroom. They shattered it.”
“Yeah, babe. They did. I’m sorry,” he muttered.
“Why would they do that?” I asked him a question he couldn’t possibly have an answer to.
But he did.
“They were looking for something. They couldn’t know when you’d show, so they had to work fast, and because of that, they weren’t careful.”
That made my tears stop, since he seemed really in the know about this kind of thing. “Have you searched someone’s house before?”
“Once or twice.”
Hmm.
“Did you break anything?” I asked.
“I never did it stupid. I always had a lookout.”
Interesting.
“The key is not to let them know you were looking, or if you luck out and find what you want, not to let them know right off the bat you found it,” he went on.
“Oh,” I mumbled.
“I know this won’t help much, but they didn’t do a lot of damage, outside the mushroom. Just a rush job, leaving a mess.”