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“K asia, what do you think?”

Well, I was thinking that light pink would be nice. Miss Gail had a name for the color…what was it? Blush! Blush pink would be very pretty, because who said you had to wear white? Although, it was hard to argue with millions of beautiful brides.

Miss Gail herself spoke, somewhere in the background of my thoughts. “There’s a lot of natural light, which is lovely.”

“And the windows are new,” Iva said, leafing through the disclosures. “They’ve redone a lot of this house but it was a family place, not flippers. I wonder what’s under this carpet…Kasia, wake up!”

“What? I like it,” I told them, and then realized that they’d moved on. “No, I don’t like the carpet,” I said. It was much the same color as my mustard dress.

“It’s all in great shape, though,” Miss Gail put in. “You can see that they were taking care of this place.” Baby Balderston, still just baby Balderston, made an unhappy noise in his carrier and they both focused on him.

This was a nice house, but it was also the third one we’d seen and I felt much the same as he did. I was ready to go, although I wasn’t going to cry in the same heartbreaking way. I had some homework to do because no, I hadn’t quite dropped out yet. When I’d had the meeting with the registrar at the college the week before, she had given me more to think about.

“You don’t have much to go to complete your degree,” she had told me as she looked over my transcript. “I would be much happier if you took a leave if you’re absolutely not able to continue this semester.”

I was able to continue, because I could still handle all this—but the point was, I didn’t know if I wanted to. More like, I didn’t know if I should. I had told her about the full-time admin position I’d applied for, the one with benefits and better pay, and she had suggested that I wait until I knew if I got it before I made any decisions about school.

“You have a little more time. Actually, I’ll put a note here about giving you a longer grace period,” she said, but it was coming down to the wire and I hadn’t heard yet about the new job.

The funny thing was, it was hard to be too worried about any of that, because…Tyler. I realized that I was smiling all the time, like at strangers in the grocery store and at my professors in class. I’d even smiled at Oren before I’d realized what I was doing and wiped it off my face. That time on the beach when Tyler and I had kissed? It hadn’t been a singular occurrence; we’d been kissing every chance we got. He’d come into the trailer office, look at me, and pull me into his arms. I’d say that I needed to go upstairs to check on something, and we’d end up on his bed, our mouths crashing together, our tongues tangling, our hands reaching beneath each other’s shirts and…

And Zach Santiago had been right. It was impossible to have “time alone” when neither of us was really alone. It was awkward to break apart in my office because a delivery had arrived that I needed to sign for, and it was embarrassing to walk down the staircase of his condo and lie to Iva, saying it turned out that the weatherstripping around his window really looked great. No maintenance issues after all!

“We can’t tell people?” Tyler had asked me. “You know what? I really like this mustard dress.”

It was because he could run his hand up the back of my thigh and grab onto my butt. It was hard to hold a conversation when he was doing that, and it got worse when his fingers started dipping into the top of my leggings.

“Hold on, wait,” I had gasped. There must have been a reason…oh, right. “I don’t want to rub this in Iva’s face and I don’t want to make your mom uncomfortable.” Also, I didn’t want my dad to know because he would have thought he was right and that Tyler had finally realized that he was in love with me, since I was the prettiest and smartest girl in Michigan. That wasn’t what was happening between us.

And that was why I put all my ideas of blush pink wedding gowns firmly out of my head as we ended the house tour and said goodbye to Miss Gail’s real estate agent. “I really like this one,” Iva said to us in the driveway. “It’s close to the stadium, close to the hospital, and close to the condo complex. That will be nice for you, Gail, to visit Tyler.” She paused. “I’m not sure why I’m even giving my opinion, since this will be your house and I’ll only be renting a room from you.”

“Don’t be silly. Of course you want to like where you’ll live!” Miss Gail told her. She shivered and checked on baby Balderston. “I think we need to start bringing down blankets for him.”

It was fifty degrees above zero and not below, but Iva agreed that he might be cold and got busy putting him in the car.

“I like this house, too,” I volunteered to Miss Gail. “It’s really nice.”

She nodded. “I think this is the one. I don’t want to say yes until Ty sees it, though, since it will be his purchase. If he agrees, then I guess I’ll spend a while in Georgia to pack. I planned to go this weekend anyway, since I’m doing so much better with walking.”

“If he buys this house, will you stay up here all the time?”

Now she hesitated. “I’ll need to think about it more. I have a life down there that I put on hold for a while, and I’ll have to decide if I want to make it permanent. It would be a change for Ty, too, to have me around all the time. This is a lot for him to do for me.”

“He would love to have you here, and he’s so happy that you’re considering it,” I said, because I was sure that was true.

“He’s generous, but I don’t like to feel as if I’m taking advantage. He doesn’t owe me anything just because I’m his mother.”

“You’re not taking advantage,” I assured her. “It makes Tyler really happy to know you’re comfortable. He wants Iva and baby B to have a good place to live, too.”

“My son is a sweet boy,” she told me, and I watched her tear up. “I’m so proud of him.” She hugged me and added, “I’m so glad that he—”

“Are you ready, Gail?” Iva asked. Baby Balderston was secure in the car and they had some doctor appointments to get to, both for him and for Miss Gail. “It’s going to be a cold winter,” she commented, and then explained something that her shell-expert friend Oisín had told her about ocean currents affecting our weather. “He’s so smart,” she added admiringly.

We agreed that he sure seemed like it, and took off in our separate directions. As I went, I carefully kept my mind clear of wedding dresses. Was I bananas? There was no way that I’d be needing one of those! No one, not anyone at all, was considering marriage. There was no way that I could leave my dad, either, so it wasn’t even worth thinking about.

So I wouldn’t, and I also wouldn’t think about the kissing because those memories made my whole body heat and get trembly inside. I felt another smile start to lift my lips. I drove to the condo complex and didn’t really notice the thumping sounds that came from the back of my car every time I went over a bump, because some of the wire must have loosened and things weren’t quite as stable as I would have liked.

Anyway, I made it all in one piece (or, at least, I didn’t leave any pieces behind me on the road). There were several messages and emails from residents and various vendors and I scrolled and listened, taking notes as I did. It was only the usual, until…sweet Jesus. There was a message from the big boss, two levels above Iva. I had never dealt with her before, and Iva never had either. We only knew the person below this woman, the man we’d had to talk to when the last maintenance guy had quit without notice, and then our onsite snowblower had disappeared. Luckily, it had been spring and only a week or so later, Oren had arrived and the boss above Iva had told us that “this guy has connections in the office, family stuff. Don’t bother him too much.” That had been about a year and a half ago, and we’d been dealing with Oren’s lack of work ever since.

But this couldn’t be about him, because I hadn’t submitted the documentation that Iva had been keeping regarding his total lack of ability to do his job…unless it did have to do with Oren. Maybe he’d finally ratted on me for working for Tyler when I should have been sitting in the trailer office, watching dust motes in the sunbeams and waiting for the phone to ring. Was I getting fired from this job, too?

In ninth grade, after Cody had humiliated me in front of the band with stories about my messed-up vag, I’d played sick and stayed home for a few days while my dad went to work at the pickle factory. From that experience, I’d learned that things wouldn’t get better if you put them off. By the time I’d made it back to the high school, the stories had gained traction and had gone much too far for me to do anything about them. A new rumor had even spread that I had been out of school because I was in Detroit for corrective surgery.

So, I called the big-boss woman back right away. I got her assistant instead, who told me that she had just left for the Woodsmen game, which was midweek and away in Utah. “She’s making it a vacation,” the assistant explained. “She’ll be out of the office until next week.”

“Do you have any idea why she was calling me?”

His voice muffled slightly and I heard him say yes, he would love to go for drinks! They were all cutting out early. “Um…this is about the Wilder Road complex, right? I assume she’s calling about the thefts.”

“Wha—yes,” I said, catching myself. “Yes, the thefts.” The thefts?

“Yeah, I think she just wanted to touch base about police involvement,” he told me. “That’s all the information I currently have, but she’ll call you back first thing next week…no, I see that she’s out until Tuesday, so expect to hear from her then.”

“Great. Thanks,” I said, and hung up and stared at my phone. The thefts? Well, that girl had lost her gold bracelet. I had told her to call the police, that the FBI and CIA wouldn’t care and she should stick local. Was that the issue?

But then I started thinking more, and farther back. We did get thefts here, sometimes. A group of teenagers had rifled through unlocked cars to steal crap, but that had gone on at least three years ago, right around the time that my dad had started refusing to go to any additional physical therapy. They had been caught—but there was more, I realized.

I started to make a list of missing items, and then I expanded it to include when residents had complained that things had been moved in their units, touched, or messed with. By checking my notes and emails, I made more than twenty entries in my list. I hadn’t connected them because they’d mostly sounded dumb or minor, like the guy who’d said that someone had bothered his plants, or the woman who had told me that things were disturbed in her bathroom due to mice. There was the guy who’d claimed that all the quarters were missing from his spare change jar…but what about the prescription drugs that had been disturbed in that pirate chest? Some of them had been spilled on the walkway, and what about Hilary and Stu, who had told me that their medications had also gone missing but it had been raccoons? I had been more focused on their smelly bin of rotting compost and had thought they were bananas.

“There’s a ton of stuff and I feel so stupid that I didn’t notice it before!” I told Tyler. The chair he had brought to my office was large enough for two, if one of us was on the other’s lap. That was my position and I loved it, but I was also concerned.

“Hm,” he said, and kissed my neck. Then he picked up his head to look at me. “It’s little stuff.”

“Yes, except for the earring.”

He realized what I meant, and his eyebrows raised. “The diamond? That was lost.”

“Maybe, but Shay Galton said that she lost it in the condo. We looked everywhere and we couldn’t find it.”

“She doesn’t know what happened to it.”

“The pictures proved it,” I reminded him. “She took one on the steps going in, which she posted. You can see a little of my best outfit in the background, and she had both earrings on. But in the picture she took on the way out, one was missing. She didn’t mention that to us, though, and you left, so there was a big window of time that someone else could have snagged it. I know that there was someone skulking around instead of doing his job that day, because I found him later in the laundry room.”

“You mean Oren.” He frowned. “There’s something wrong with him.”

“Obviously, but I never suspected him of stealing!”

“I thought he was the person who pointed out the pills dumped all over the path,” Tyler said.

“He was also the person who was supposed to go in and fix the bathroom fan in the unit next to yours. The owner kept complaining about how loud it was, so I took a ladder and checked it myself. And do you know what was wrong? A screw had fallen down into the cover and was rattling around, vibrating and making noise when the motor was running. All I had to do was find it and put it back where it belonged, and she never complained again. Oren must not have even looked at it. So what was he doing in her condo when he was supposed to be fixing the problem?”

“Did she report anything missing?”

“No, but…” I frowned. “Remember him and the underwear? Maybe he was up to that again. You know, up.”

“I don’t want to think about that. Did the stories about moving plants and missing quarters start when he came to work here?”

“There were a few that predated him,” I said. “The snowblower went missing before he started, and that was the biggest incident until Shay Galton’s earring.”

He was frowning too, but it was probably because I’d said his girlfriend’s name. He never seemed to like to hear it. “I have to go to the hotel tonight.” The team all stayed together at the Wequetong Inn before games or their flights out. “I’m leaving this afternoon.”

“Oren hasn’t done anything to me, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

“I’m worried that now, he might know something’s up. You told me he had a family member working in the main office and that was why he couldn’t be fired. If the employees there are openly talking about the police, then his grandpa, aunt, or whoever probably told him. He might run, but he might also get mad.”

I looked over at the walkie-talkies, three of them lined up on Iva’s old desk. “He didn’t take his radio and I haven’t seen him today. Maybe he got scared and already bolted. That would be great, except we’d never get your earring back. I’m sure you bought that pair for Shay Galton.”

“I don’t want to hear her name come out of your mouth again,” he told me, and he made sure that I wouldn’t say it by kissing my mouth until I could hardly breathe.

“Ok,” I said, and put my cheek on his shoulder. If I didn’t keep stopping myself, I would rip off his clothes for sure.

“So I have to go to that inn,” he reminded me, “but I think you should come.”

“Because of Oren?”

“Because I’m tired of having to pull away when I kiss you,” he answered. “But if I don’t stop myself, I’ll start to take off your clothes in this trailer and I know you don’t lock the door.”

“Players can’t have guests at the Wequetong Inn,” I said. I knew that for sure; it was one of the Woodsmen rules.

“César Hidalgo had his wife there all the time so they could have a night together away from their kids. She went to high school with the night manager and that woman let her in a back door and took her up to his room in the service elevator.”

“How do you know all this?”

“I talked to him. I texted Hidalgo the other day and he called me back.”

“Really? What did you say?”

“I told him that he might have heard that I had badmouthed him and I was sorry. I said I had acted like a booty hole because I was worried that I couldn’t step into his shoes.” He took my chin in his palm. “Kasia, are you going to cry?”

I was, so I nodded.

“Why, honey? Do you think I shouldn’t have done that? He was great about it, not pissed off at all. He even thanked me for the message.” Tyler wiped under my eyes. “Why are you crying?”

“Because it’s like…” I sniffed. “It’s like I see this change in you and I’m so happy about it.”

“I’m becoming a man?” he asked, grinning.

“No, you were always that…” I sniffed again and he kissed me gently.

“I don’t like the tears.” He kissed me again. “You say you’re happy, but you look pretty damn sad. When you cry, you get crap under your eyes, too.” He seemed surprised by that.

“I know.” I had never figured out how Shay Galton managed to be so perfect because even with waterproof mascara, I still turned into a mess.

“Listen. Come to the hotel,” he said, and stood up, setting me on my feet. I hung onto him for a moment, because I was aware of what he wanted to do there and yes, I was all in. I was part of a progression of women in his life, but I was also the one he’d just called “honey” and the one he was now holding pretty closely. I didn’t know what that meant, though, and I was trying not to think it meant too much.

He did have to leave for the stadium, after telling me not to go looking for Oren. I went out, too, locking the door behind me and then, yes, checking around for Oren but only in the open areas where it was safe. But he really wasn’t on the premises. Then I had to tell Iva all this, because it was more than I wanted to handle by myself.

“Damn,” she breathed. “Hang on, I have to switch breasts.” Little baby Balderston was doing great with that and was growing so much that she and Miss Gail were talking about getting him bigger clothes, very, very warm ones for winter.

“Damn,” she repeated when he was happily eating again. “Oren?”

“I don’t know, and he’s not here.”

“He’s missing work again,” she said. “Did you write it on the spreadsheet? Maybe we should get the private investigator to look into him, too.” She’d talked about that with me, after all. Stupid—just Dominic was living with another woman in South Lyon, downstate, in an apartment that held a lot of the furniture he’d moved out of Iva’s former home. He wasn’t working, shaving, or eating very healthily (because he’d looked terrible in the pictures the PI had gotten). She had also managed to find out that there was an offer on Iva’s former home, which might have meant some money for baby Balderston.

“I was so focused on Oren that it didn’t occur to me to ask a really basic question,” I told Iva. “How did the people in the main office even find out about this problem?”

“If one of the residents called the police, maybe the officers contacted them,” she guessed, but I only shrugged. Iva knew a few people who worked there due to dealing with them more, and she said that she would try to find out.

“Uh, by the way, could I borrow something to wear?” I asked casually.

“Sure, take whatever,” she answered, but didn’t question why and I found that odd. I thought that maybe she was preoccupied with the issue of the thefts—but it wasn’t that.

“So, I think I forgot to tell you that Oisín will be visiting,” she told me, equally casual. It reminded me a lot of our former conversations when we’d seen a Woodsmen player in our parking lot (“Hm, seems like John Hatcher and the girl next to him in Building C are getting together. They look pretty happy, I guess.”)

“Oisín, the malacologist from Galway?” I asked.

“That’s the one.” She was looking down at baby Balderston’s light brown hair, the same color as hers but a lot sparser. “He may start a study of unionid mussels here. Maybe.”

“Are you serious? He’s coming to Michigan, to stay?”

“Maybe,” she said, but she had turned bright red, and this was a situation that we needed to keep an eye on. After I went through her closet and chose something nice, I texted Miss Gail on my way out...and I realized that I was no better than Iva herself. I was a snitch, but it was because she was a good friend. I was worried about her future and her happiness, and I knew that Miss Gail was, too.

I had time to run home and make dinner for my dad and me before…oh, good grief, before I snuck into the Wequetong Inn. It would be fine. I would just follow the instructions that Tyler had gotten from César Hidalgo about where to park and who to text once I was at the back door, and then I’d go sleep with him without any emotion at all.

“What’s got you so jumpy?” Dad asked when we sat down at our table to eat the meal I’d prepared.

I dropped my fork and it clattered against my plate. “What? Who?”

“You, Kasia,” he told me.

“I’m not jumpy, I’m fine.” And I wasn’t distracted enough that I missed how he wasn’t eating much, despite our recent trip to the nutritionist. “Please finish that,” I said, but then my mind flitted off to how I would try to fix my hair like Miss Gail had done it…

By the time my dad was asleep and I was dressed in Iva’s clothes, I was nearly crying again, and there was no reason for that. I was going to do something that millions and millions of people on the Earth were probably also doing right at this moment. It was normal, not anything to cry over, and on top of that? I really did look terrible and not at all like a social media star when I got overwhelmed by emotion. The tears and snot would ruin the makeup I’d worked on in the bathroom and I couldn’t open the window to get fresh air because it would ruin my hair.

I drove much faster than Tyler ever did and reached the Wequetong Inn sooner than I’d meant to, so I had to sit in the parking lot until it was the right time to text the night manager. She opened the door and smiled. “You’re César’s friend?” she asked softly, and I nodded, like I was supposed to. “He was so generous around Christmas,” she whispered, and I would pass that hint along to Tyler. We crept through the quiet back rooms, past the dimly lit kitchen, and to a freight elevator that carried us up to a storage area filled with towels and cleaning supplies. Then she looked into the hallway before pointing out where his door was propped open. It like being a spy and I would have loved it, if I hadn’t been so anxious.

I burst into his room and he turned and smiled. “You made it,” he said.

“Yes. Here I am, ready.” I expelled a breath and threw my coat on a chair.

“Is that Iva’s top?” he asked. “You look very cute in that.”

“I’ll take it off right now,” I said.

“I’m happy to help.” He stepped over to me, but he smoothed his hands up and down my arms instead of ripping away Iva’s shirt. “Relax,” he told me. “It’s funny what makes you get nervous. You were raring to go hunt down a thief this afternoon, but you’re worked up about sleeping with me.”

“It’s…” I shrugged and stopped. It just was.

“Did you bring what I asked?”

I nodded and took my autograph book out of my bag. “Why did you want this?” I wondered.

“Because.” Tyler sat down on the bed and I sat next to him. “You got a lot of guys to sign,” he mentioned as he flipped through the pages.

“I know. My dad and I went to Fan Day every year.” Since he’d done it with my mom, too, he allowed himself to have the experience. “There, that’s you.”

“To Casha,” he read, and winced. “Sorry.” Then he reached for something on the nightstand, turned slightly, and appeared to be writing or drawing.

I tried to peer around his broad back. “What are you doing?” I asked.

“I’m fixing it,” he explained. “You can look at this tomorrow morning.” He closed the book and returned it to my purse. “Now we’ll take off that top.”

He kissed me as he did, and he was careful because it was Iva’s—but clothes started to fling everywhere. “I wanted to see you,” he told me. “I wanted to touch your skin and not just your best outfit.”

That consisted of three pieces because there was a matching vest, and I was so glad I hadn’t worn it tonight. Iva’s clothes were sexier and much easier to remove, as were Tyler’s t-shirt and jeans. He looked just as good as I remembered from when he’d been in that bathtub. No, he looked even better because there were no bruises due to other Woodsmen hurting him, and I kissed where those had been and rubbed my cheek against his skin. I bit him gently, too, and he picked me up and tossed me back onto the mattress. It made me laugh and cover my mouth since we were supposed to be quiet tonight.

“Kasia,” he said, looking down at me and smiling. “It was worth the wait.”

“We only started kissing a few days ago,” I pointed out as he moved up toward me.

“I’ve been imagining you for weeks, though.” He reached behind me and unclasped my bra. “Weeks,” he repeated, his eyes on my breasts. Then he said, “Mmm,” and bent to put his lips on them. I turned on my side to press myself toward his warm mouth and tongue.

It became clear that this was not going to be like my previous experiences. Tyler was working hard to show me exactly what he’d meant when he’d said that he wasn’t selfish—and he wasn’t. He touched me carefully until I gasped, “Do it more, please!” and then he kind of…lost it.

“Kasia,” he rumbled, and flipped me onto my back. His hands were everywhere, not gentle anymore but it felt so overwhelmingly good. He combed through my hair and molded his palms over my neck and shoulders while his mouth was back on my breasts and nipples, suckling. My hips jerked and I wrapped my legs around him as I used my arms to hold him closer and get even more.

“Shh,” he reminded me.

“Was I being loud?” I slurred back to him. My words had scrambled on their path down from my brain.

“I like that you like it.” He moved his body between my legs. “This all looks great to me,” he commented, and his palms slid to my inner thighs. He laid a straight line of kisses from my bellybutton down to my clitoris, and then he licked that and I knew I was loud. I put my knuckles against my lips and tried not to scream, and somehow that made the pleasure intensify. When he started to suckle there, my mind went past the point where I could think at all—I shook through my whole body. It felt like the entire planet was dependent on Tyler and his mouth, that we were all swirling in bliss and it centered on what he was doing with his tongue.

“Tyler,” I called, when I came down from that peak, and I grabbed him to pull him to me. “Sweet…Tyler, that was…”

“If you were worried, there’s absolutely nothing wrong down there,” he panted. “It’s all amazing.” He pumped his hips slowly against me and I reached between our bodies to feel his erection.

“I already saw, but not like this,” I said, and my words quavered just like my body still trembled. “I didn’t think I should touch you when I hardly knew you.”

“Now you can, anytime you—” He broke off as he moaned, and I massaged faster. “You can do that anytime—fuck, Kasia—”

I had just wanted to taste him, too, but in only a few seconds he was pulling me away and then reaching again next to the bed. “The condoms are my treat,” he said, as he put one on.

“We can spilt the cost. Nobody’s selfish here,” I gasped. “Hurry.”

Luckily, he was much speedier at that than he was behind the wheel of his car. A moment later, he held up my hips and drove himself into me, and my head fell back as I got overwhelmed again. Tyler’s mouth covered mine and he pumped again and again, and I started to get the feeling that now the whole universe depended on how he was massaging me inside and out.

We were kissing as he touched my clit with his hand, too, and that pushed me over into another orgasm, a shaking, screaming—oh, I wasn’t supposed to scream.

“Did I?”

“Did you what?” he asked drowsily. We lay together, intertwined.

“Was I screaming?”

“Yes, but I mostly muffled it. I loved it.”

“My screaming, or the sex?”

“I loved all of it,” he told me.

“Me too.”

“I know,” he said, and he sounded very satisfied. I felt the same way, just perfect. “I’m glad it was better.”

“From now on, I’m only having sex with you,” I answered, and then jolted slightly out of my pleasure-haze when I realized how that had sounded. “Well, I could—”

“No, just me,” he said, and I wrapped my arms around his neck as he kissed me. “I wish you could stay all night.”

“I don’t want to get you in trouble,” I answered. But I wished it too. “Wait a minute. What are you doing?”

“If we only have a little time, we have to make it worth our while,” he explained.

“Oh, good…sweet…”

He made it so, so worthwhile that he had to kiss me a lot to cover the screams.

Tyler walked me to my car after propping the door to the inn. “I’ll be home after the game,” he promised when we were hidden in the shadow of a tree. Its leaves skittered over the pavement and I shivered. “I’ll see you soon.”

“I’ll see you sooner, because I’ll be watching you play,” I said.

“I’ll blow you a kiss.” He gave me one now, too.

It was hard to leave, but I did, looking in my mirror until I made a turn onto the street and couldn’t even pretend to see him anymore. I dreamed about him until I got home, and it was only as I settled as quietly as I could onto my bed that I remembered my autograph book. I had to get up again and I winced at the noise I made.

But it was worth it to see what he had written. The prior words were crossed out, and he’d added, “To Kasia. I love you. Tyler Hennessy #62.”