Near & Far (10 page)

“Some of us believe in monogamy. Being faithful.”

“Some of pretend to believe in it, but none of us really want to live that bullshit.”

“Ever tried it?” I asked, tossing a few more pieces of wood into the fire.

“And ruin the good thing I’ve got going?” Garth extended his arms wide. “Why would I want to do that?”

“Because you have few redeeming qualities other than your dark charm and looks. And you’re not getting any younger.”

Garth replied with his middle finger. “Jess, Rowen’s a solid girl. About as solid as I’ve ever met, and one of the few who’d even make me consider settling down, but we’re twenty.”

“So?”

Garth’s eyes widened like I’d just gone mad. “You’re telling me you’re good with knowing your dick will never get up close and personal with another girl again? You’re ready to throw away all of the fine conquests in your future for one girl?”

“Something tells me you think I’m the crazy one, but if you’d step into my boots for a second, you’d see that you are.”

Garth made a face. “Whatever, Spineless.”

“Whatever, Heartless.” I leaned into the pack behind me. Maybe talking with Garth Black wasn’t what I needed. Hoping to focus my attention on identifying constellations, I stared at the night sky for so long I was sure Garth was asleep.

“Just so you know, if you need a partner to kick city boy’s ass into next year, I’m your man,” Garth said over the dimming fire. “No one messes with my best friend.”

“Best friend, eh?” I glanced over at him. He was still curled up, eyes closed and expressionless. Showing physical emotion was toxic to Garth.

“You’re my only friend, Jess. You win the best title by default.”

GIVEN THE HEALTH food madness rampant in America, a doughnut shop whose specialty was a bacon maple bar should not have been thriving. Especially in Seattle, where people rode bikes to work and ate kale chips for dinner. We should have had hoards of picketers out front preaching about how Mojo Doughnuts was clogging arteries in the Greater Seattle area and spreading diabetes like it was going out of style. I would have thought the whole food extremists would have burnt the place to the ground before allowing their children to enter a building where, no kidding, I got a sugar high just from sniffing the air.

But Mojo Doughnut was alive and well—it was Seattle’s dirty little secret.

Alex had hooked me up with the job. She’d worked at Mojo through high school, and when she saw me filling out applications for the million and a half coffee shops in town, she uttered a
Hell, no
, ripped the stack into pieces, and basically dragged my butt to Mojo. She didn’t ask the boss, she
told
the boss that I was working there. The boss, Sid, hadn’t argued. He didn’t even bat an eye. He told me I was starting that night.

Sid was a cool enough guy, I suppose. He was one of those rich Seattle people who paid a lot of money to look like they lived out of a tent. He lived in one of those modern condos down on the water and drove a brand new Volvo. He wore a lot of hemp, smoked a lot of pot, and his dreads were longer than my hair by a solid six inches. For a guy who sold close to four thousand doughnuts every day, he looked like he’d never eaten one. He wasn’t scrawny, but if he lost ten pounds, he would have been.

Despite the I’m-homeless exterior and the fact he smelled like pot masked with patchouli, the guy was like damn catnip to women. Thankfully, not my kind of catnip. Even if I didn’t have Jesse, if that was the brand of dude I was attracted to, I would have needed an exorcism.

Too bad my roommate didn’t have the same opinion. Neither she nor Sid advertised their relationship—they were basically one relationship ring above fuck-buddies—but they sure as hell didn’t do much to hide it, either.

As Alex, whose eyes were focused on Sid’s closed office door, could confirm. I didn’t mind working the late nights at Mojo, but I did mind closing with Sid and Alex. I shouldn’t have to worry about feeling like a third-wheel at work . . .

Alex sashayed up to a life-size cardboard cutout. “Oh, Chewy, make wild Wookie love to me.” Wrapping her leg around it, she gyrated against the cardboard to the beat of the disco music in the background.

I groaned and cleaned out the display cases of the remaining doughnuts. Whatever we didn’t sell that day got tossed out. Every doughnut was made fresh that day.

“Chewbacca? Really?” I scanned the room that was as eclectic and strange as the doughnut selection. “You’ve got Luke. Han. Hell, even Vader”—I pointed at a few of the other Star Wars cutouts staggered around the room—“and you choose Chewy as your main squeeze?”

Alex couldn’t have looked more offended. She draped her arm around the cutout that was a good foot taller than her and gave me a
Your point?
look.

“He doesn’t even talk. He . . . roar-growls . . . or something like that.” I’d seen Star Wars once and, after working at Mojo, I knew I’d never, ever want to watch it again. Sid was a hardcore movie paraphernalia collector—his favorite being Star Wars. I felt like I was living Star Wars thirty hours a week.

“He doesn’t have to. His eyes say it all.”

“Sure, they do.”

Alex flounced by me, her outfit concocted of so many metals rings, grommets, and snaps she was a one-woman orchestra every time she moved. “You’re lucky you make such kickass huevos rancheros or else you’d have earned the silent treatment after dissing my Chewy.”

“Lucky me.” I didn’t hide my sarcasm.

When Alex kept heading for Sid’s office door, I grabbed the remaining doughnuts double-time. Even with the disco music streaming through the place, I’d learned the hard way that I didn’t want to be inside the same building when they got it on. I’d even tried earplugs, but I’d come to accept that they only way to save my innocent(ish) ears from that “earful” was to shove out the back door and wait in the alley until they came to their screeching, cursing end.

Alex had just closed the door when I snagged the garbage with one hand and the box of leftover doughnuts with the other. My pace quickened when I heard a growl coming from behind Sid’s door. I couldn’t tell if it was Sid or Alex. Scary.

Once I made it to the back door, I kicked it open and hustled into the alley. I made sure to prop open the door with a crumbling brick to keep from getting locked out. I sucked in a breath of the cool, rain-soaked air and felt excitement bubble up. I’d be breathing different air tomorrow night. We’d just had the last day of the quarter, which meant spring break was in session. If I could have caught a bus right after my classes, I would have. Unfortunately, the earliest bus to Montana wasn’t scheduled to leave until the butt crack of dawn the next day.

Jesse. Willow Springs. One whole week. If there was a heaven, I was about to find it.

Snapping out of my daydreams, I heaved the bag of garbage into the dumpster. I was about to toss the box of doughnuts in when a strange and surprised sound came from inside the dumpster. A strange and surprised
human
sound.

Instead of running back inside Mojo, I grabbed hold of the rim of the dumpster and pulled myself up to peek inside. It maybe wasn’t the smartest thing for a young woman in a dark alley all alone to do. Whatever had made that sound wasn’t in a hurry to crawl out.

“Hello?” I called. The sight of the nastiness inside the dumpster was enough to level me, and that wasn’t even taking into consideration the smell. Toxic sludge. That was the only explanation. “Anyone in there?”

Right then, the bag I’d just flung inside of it flew back out at me. I dropped down from the dumpster to avoid taking a direct hit.

“Yes! Someone is in here,” a raspy female voice called out. “And where do you get off thinking you can just toss your garbage anywhere you want?”

With so many out-of-the-norm things coming at me all at once, I couldn’t decide what was the most odd. That someone was yelling at me from inside a dumpster, that someone had just used a bag of garbage as a weapon against me, or that I was accused of disposing of garbage in a . . . dumpster.

“Um, are you okay? Do you need a hand out or anything?” I wasn’t used to talking to people camped out in dumpsters. I wasn’t sure what common courtesies were customary.

“Since your hands are the ones that just dumped a sack of garbage on my head, no . . . no, I do not need a hand from you.” Finally, a head appeared over the edge of the dumpster. Even though the alley was barely lit, I could still see that the woman had not seen the inside of a shower in weeks. Possibly even months.

“Oh my god. Are you okay?” I’d just tossed a bag of garbage on a person. I’d had plenty of low points, but that was another one to chalk up on the list.

“Do you see anything about me or my situation that would lead you to believe I’m
okay,
Girlie?”

I wasn’t sure if she’d called me Girlie as a term of no-endearment, or because a few wires had been crossed and she thought that was the name on my name tag. That didn’t seem like the time to clarify. Or correct her. “Here, let me give you a hand.” I held up my hand and stepped closer.

“I don’t think so. You’ve done enough.” Then, in a not-so-graceful motion that had me biting my lower lip, she crawled up and over the lip of the dumpster. Her clothes were as dirty as she was, and they were really only hanging on by threads. Her canvas shoes were so worn her toes peeked through. Nothing about that woman, from her deep wrinkles to her emotionless eyes, said she’d lived anything but a hard life.

“Um . . . what were you doing in there?” My vocab skills were seriously lacking.

“Cleaning house,” was her clipped response.

My face fell as my stomach twisted. “That’s . . . that’s your . . .
home
?” I’d been tossing garbage in that dumpster the entire school year. The thought that I’d been depositing refuse onto the poor woman’s head for months did nothing to alleviate my upset stomach.

“Easy there, Girlie, before you pass out on me.” The woman stepped toward me. “That’s not my home; that was just my dinner reservation.”

“Dinner reservation?” I said to myself, but she answered by pulling a half-eaten granola bar, a brown banana, and an almost-empty bag of sunflower seeds from the pocket of her worn trench coat. On their own, the snacks would have turned my stomach, but knowing where they’d come from made me feel the burn of bile rising in my throat.

“Are you hungry?” I was asking and saying some super stupid things.

“If I wasn’t hungry, do you really think I’d be dumpster diving?”

“Probably not.” I don’t know if I was more bothered by her ironic tone or that I felt ashamed to have clean clothes and a full belly when people like her existed. My head dropped, and I noticed the box of marginally stale pastries between my hip and arm. “Here. Do you want these? They were made earlier this morning. I was just going to toss them.” I didn’t feel much better offering a hungry women a few dozen old doughnuts—what she needed was a balanced, nutritious meal—but it was all I had, and all of the fast food places within walking distance had closed a couple of hours earlier.

“What? Are those doughnuts?” The woman took a hesitant step forward, her eyes flicking my way every other blink. She almost reminded me of a feral cat, like she didn’t trust anything or anyone.

“Yep.” I held out the box.

Another careful step forward. “Are they . . . poisoned?”

The skin between my eyebrows creased. “No.”

“What’s wrong with them then?” The woman inspected them like every last doughnut was suspect.

I shrugged. “They’re almost twenty-four hours old.”

“That’s all?” She said it like she didn’t believe they were blemish free, but her hands were reaching for them.

“That’s all. I swear.”

When the box was about a foot from her hands, she lunged, snatched it right out of my hands, and dodged back toward the dumpster. She cradled the box like it was a baby and leaned into the dumpster. As she decided which doughnut to devour first, she kept one eye on me, watching, waiting, like it wasn’t a matter of if but
when
I’d do something underhanded to her. After settling on an apple fritter, she downed that sucker in three bites. She was on to her second fritter before I’d released the breath I’d been holding.