Page 9 of My Favorite Lost Cause (The Favorites #2)

MAREN

E ven in my earliest memories, I have a sense of being on the outside.

Perhaps because it was so obvious that Henry, my stepfather, preferred Kit to me.

He tried hard not to show it, but there was something in his gaze when he held her, something I’d now claim was reverence.

I can’t believe I’m a father , he’d said when Kit came home, unaware that I was in the room.

My mother, my father, this tiny new baby—they were the family unit, inside the windows of a warm and cozy home—and I was the beggar sitting just outside the door.

I’ve worked hard to become adaptable and pleasing, trying to make sure I have a place wherever I find myself.

Oddly, Charlie is the one person I’ve never felt compelled to do this with.

Even though he’s sort of a dick during dinner, and he continues to be a dick at the Stop-n-Shop, I have no urge to back down at all.

“We could be at a five-star hotel, Maren,” he says, walking behind me as I throw some poor-quality sheets into our cart. “We won’t even have A/C.”

If anyone else said this, under these circumstances, I’d cave. I’d apologize and scramble to see if we could still find rooms. With Charlie, though…I just don’t. “Fortunately there are lots of broken windows so that will take care of the airflow.”

He throws his head back like a sulking teen.

“Come on. We’ll go to Hilton Head. You can get some incredibly overpriced massage and spend tomorrow sitting out at the beach drinking a nice glass of hydrogen water or whatever the latest fad is, which I will mock you for until I’m too drunk to be witty. That’s fun for us both.”

“You’re not that witty sober,” I reply, slightly stung by the hydrogen water comment, though I shouldn’t be.

This is who I am now. Or who everyone thinks I am.

Some health-obsessed stoic so busy pureeing vegetables and researching fluoride side effects that she’s forgotten how to have fun.

“I know it seems incredibly lame, but I don’t have a lot of adventure in my life, and this feels like an adventure.

Harvey didn’t even want me to come on this trip.

He was talking about how the air quality might affect my eggs. ”

Charlie rolls his eyes. “That’s because he’s a gaslighting prick.”

I ignore this. I gave up trying to convince Charlie to tolerate my husband years ago.

“My life has gotten narrower and narrower with every month we don’t get pregnant,” I continue. “And I just want to do something big, something wildly different, even if it’s only for a few days. Does that make sense?”

He pulls the spatula I just grabbed out of the cart and sets it back on the shelf.

“Then do something wildly different, Mare. Eat a bunch of candy, drink your weight in margaritas—go to some nudist resort and lie out naked for a week. If you’re going to expand your horizons for a few days, there are more fun ways to do it. ”

“This is fun. It’s an adventure. I’m camping out in this amazing, definitely haunted old Southern mansion with my cranky stepbrother, and possibly helping him pull a house together.

I’ll make us shitty meals on that old stove, and we can tell each other ghost stories at night.

It’s…something I’ll never be able to do again. Can you please try to enjoy it?”

He laughs begrudgingly. “Okay, but if I was right about it being a brothel and all the ghosts are dead prostitutes, you might regret the way I attempt to enjoy it.”

I briefly picture Charlie with a ghost prostitute, which is surprisingly titillating. “Please don’t dry hump the mattress until we’re no longer sharing.”

I buy several things Charlie insists we won’t need—two clean pans, the spatula I put back into our cart, a set of cheap plates—and then we go to the grocery store, where I buy more stuff Charlie insists we won’t need. I think he’s mostly disturbed by the vegetables.

It’s dark by the time we get back to the house, and…it looks a lot less charming and a lot more haunted by moonlight. Our jokes about the ghosts we’d encounter tonight were funnier when they didn’t seem probable.

The chandelier only has one working bulb, so we put sheets on the mattress in the dimmest light imaginable, and then I brave the downstairs powder room to pee and brush my teeth.

Both the toilet and sink are cracked. I’ve run a cleaning wipe over the surfaces, but everything remains filthy. I’m not sure why I didn’t take him up on the hotel. I really, really want to shower.

He waits until I’ve slid between the sheets to hit the lights, and then lands on the other side of the mattress.

“So are we telling ghost stories now?” he asks. I can just make out the flash of his teeth in the moonlight.

“It seemed a little more appealing when we were in a brightly lit store, to be honest.”

“And we don’t want to summon them by accident. ”

I laugh, and then shiver. I still, very much, want to go upstairs, in a way that doesn’t feel entirely… me .

“The powder room was in, uh, rough shape,” I say.

“That powder room is straight out of America’s Cleanest Homes Digest compared to what’s upstairs,” he replies. “You’re not going to shower all week.”

Oh God. I hadn’t thought about this, but I refuse to concede the point. Maybe I’ll sneak over to the hotel and pay to use their spa. “I’ll be fine. I’ll jump in the water if I feel especially gross.”

“There are probably alligators in there.”

“You’re making that up.”

He laughs. “Am I? We shall see. Imagine how much Harvey will blame you if you come back missing an arm.”

He’s laughing, but my stomach is in knots. He truly has no clue how far Harvey will go to blame me for a million tiny things.

“It was a joke, Maren,” he says after a moment.

“Harvey wouldn’t stay with me if I lost an arm.”

He’d find a way to blame me for it, and then he’d move on to someone else.

“If you’re married to a man who would leave you for suffering a tragic accident,” Charlie says unhappily, “then maybe the alligator will have done you a favor.”

I sigh as I roll away.

He might have a point.

It’s a tap that wakes me. Three distinct taps to the shoulder, in quick succession—the way an airline attendant might wake you if you were still asleep as the plane is landing.

My eyes fly open in the moonlit room, and I roll toward Charlie, wondering why the hell he’s woken me…except he’s fl at on his back and sound asleep. That’s when something furry brushes against my arm.

I scream, scrambling atop the only point higher than me in the entire room.

Which is Charlie.

His arms band around me tight and alarm sharpens his features. His body braces and his arms tighten further. “Is someone in the house?”

“No, there’s something in the room . Like, a rat or a mouse, or something. It just brushed against my arm.”

His features relax, and a half-smile stretches across his face. “And you decided sex with me would take your mind off of it. I knew we’d get to this point eventually.”

He’s joking, obviously, but there’s something large and firm pressed to my abdomen, which I shall politely ignore. “No, idiot. I want you to do something about it.”

“Like what? Accuse it of trespassing? Threaten to sue if it doesn’t leave?”

Skittering feet race past again near the top of our heads, and Charlie jolts at the sound, managing to headbutt me in the process.

“Ouch.”

“Sorry,” he says as he somehow climbs to his feet with me in his arms.

“Not so funny anymore now that you felt it too, huh?” I demand.

He starts walking toward the light switch, holding me aloft, with my legs around his waist. “I could put you down, you know, and let you walk on your own.”

“You are brave and strong, and I won’t even bring up the fact that you probably gave me a concussion just now.”

He flips on the light and, after confirming that anything living in here has departed, sets me down and checks his watch. “It’s three thirty. Probably not worth getting a hotel at this point. So our options are sleep in the car or take our chances with the mouse.”

Hardly even a decision.

Ten minutes later we’ve folded down the third-row seat of the car we rented and are huddled in the back. It would be an okay fit for small people, but neither of us are small people.

“It touched me,” I whisper, once we’re settled in. “Aren’t rats what spread bubonic plague?”

“If it’ll make this trip end faster,” he replies, “I hope they’re still spreading it.”

His breathing evens out within a minute or two—the long, unconscious breaths of someone who’s deeply asleep. It’s only then that I remember that tap on my shoulder. It felt like a warning.

Even if Charlie was awake, I wouldn’t tell him what I’m thinking. It’s too crazy to say aloud.