If I had thought that maybe I would have gotten a break from
my Streak of Shit, I would have been mistaken.
Big-time.
Thankfully, as much as I might have hoped things would be different and my luck might have turned around, I hadn’t expected for even a second that that would be the case. I knew how my luck worked, and in my life, when it rained… there was a hurricane coming. In this case, the thing with my sister had been the warning it was headed my way—I just hadn’t seen it for what it was soon enough. The break-in had gotten me to the eye of the storm, and now I had the other half to live through. So I was expecting not to have the best day, or days, of my life, the morning I woke up holding Rip’s hand.
The morning following the evening in which he’d basically admitted that he had been in a gang, or something close to that, based on his words.
But we weren’t going to talk about that, not until he was ready. If he ever was.
If anyone knew how hard it was to admit intensely personal things, it would be me. After all, I had a handful of people in my life that I trusted very, very much, and I had never told them about my dad and the gun. I had never told them about calling the police on him. They just assumed I’d gotten fed up and ran away.
So, I wasn’t going to think about it. I wasn’t going to bring it up again, and I didn’t when he woke up after I rolled out of bed, or when we rode to work together again, and when our lunches overlapped by thirty minutes and he sat next to me, quietly reading through his magazine, his elbow brushing mine often.
The following morning, after he’d spent another night in my bed with me, neither one of us brought up any piece of our admissions… or
commented about sharing the mattress again, except this time I had used my pillow instead of his shoulder like I had that first night.
Unfortunately, in the days since the break-in, Jason forgot he was on strike two, or he’d decided he didn’t give a crap about his job and had taken being an obnoxious jerk to a totally different level. He’d been even more moody and snarky than before, and I could barely handle him when he simmered with it. He’d started disappearing for long periods of time during the day, and when I asked him about it, he’d claimed having diarrhea as to why he would disappear for twenty minutes at a time every hour.
I had timed it: twenty freaking minutes. That’s how on edge he had me that I would time his poops to have as evidence if it ever came down to it. A part of me couldn’t help but genuinely hope that, sometime soon, karma would come back and bite him in the ass in the form of him actually getting really terrible diarrhea for being a big, fat liar.
Jerk.
So on that Friday, the last day before he was supposed to go on vacation for a week, a day I’d been counting down from what felt like the day I’d been born, I wasn’t surprised when he showed up in a rotten mood. I could tell just by looking at his face that he was about to unleash a jackpot of bitch faces, sighs, and under-his-breath comments.
That alone had put me on edge.
I wasn’t completely surprised when we hadn’t even made it to noon before we got into it over him not agitating some paint I’d asked him to prep for me while I’d peeled the tape off a hood that I’d done matching, thick white stripes on—Shelby stripes.
“I was ordering paint for you,” he’d tried to claim when I came out of the booth and found the paint sitting in the same spot it’d been in before.
I knew he was full of it instantly. “So you ordered it for me?”
His blank stare confirmed my answer. “They put me on hold and I hung up.”
Patience. Patience.
I touched the charm bracelet on my left wrist and asked, “Who put you on hold?”
“Somebody.”
“Man or a woman?”
The expression he shot me made me think he thought it was a trick question, but it wasn’t. “Man.”
“What was his name?”
Jason rolled his eyes and shook his head. “How the hell should I remember what his name was?”
“If he put you on hold, I want to know who did it. We do a lot of business with them, they shouldn’t be putting you on hold,” I lied. Of course sometimes even Hector put me on hold when I called in an order, but that was beside the point. My gut said he was lying. “What was his name?”
“I don’t know,” the asshole replied.
“Think about it. Was it Andy? Larry? Hector? Clarence?”
“I don’t know. Clarence, I guess? I didn’t ask him for his last name and where he lives or what his blood type is, if you’re gonna ask that next.”
Nobody named Clarence worked at the paint store. Nobody named Andy or Larry worked there either. And as much as I told myself to be patient with him, that patience was wearing out real quick with that tone. This was the wrong period in my life to come at me with this crap.
As much as I wanted to be a good person, and as much as I tried to have people, if not like me, then at least respect me, I recognized the signs when they pointed at a pointless endeavor.
Jason was just that.
“And you just hung up after being on hold?” I asked him slowly, still trying to cling on to being better to him than he was to me by not being rude in return.
The flick of eyebrows he gave me had to be a yes. This lying little shit.
I took a breath through my nose and told myself to be patient, to let it go. But it was hard. It was so hard I was honestly tempted to go tell Mr. Cooper about how dishonest he was right in that instant.
But somehow I managed not to. Instead, I figured I would give him another subtle warning, even though I realized it was more than likely going to be in vain. “Jason, I don’t like liars, and neither does Mr. Cooper.”
Something flashed across his face—annoyance.
He didn’t like getting called out, but I didn’t like being lied to and played even more.
“Please don’t lie to me ever again and definitely don’t lie to him either,” I finished, giving him a blank expression that would hopefully hide how frustrated he made me. “I don’t need to tell you how Rip feels about liars either.”
That had him flushing. “I’m not lying!”
I didn’t hold back my own eye roll then. “Look, I’m not arguing with you. All I’m telling you is that you shouldn’t lie to anyone here. None of us appreciate it, especially not me.”
“I’m not lying!”
I almost told him to lower his voice but managed not to. “You’re lying to me right now, and you were lying to me about making a call.” He opened his mouth, but I kept right on going. “Don’t bother, I know you were. There are only two employees who answer the phone at the store, and none of them are named any of the names I told you.”
“You tricked me?”
I shrugged. “Yeah, and I didn’t like it, but you made me. I just wanted the truth. I asked you to do something and you didn’t. That’s not okay, and that’s the point. I’m not trying to get you in trouble or get you fired. I don’t want you to lose your job, so I’m trying to help you right now by telling you what not to do in the future. Regardless of whether you called or not, you should have done what I asked you to do. I’m not your boss, but I am trying to teach you because they asked me to.”
“But I’m not fucking lying!” he shouted.
Patience and kindness, Luna. Patience and kindness.
I swallowed and reminded myself again. Don’t let him get to me. “All right. If you aren’t lying, I’m so sorry for accusing you. So, do you want me to hit the redial button on the phone or do you want to help me carry the hood out of the booth?”
It was his turn to press his lips together. Lying sack of runny crap. What the hell was there to think about? He knew he was lying. I knew he was lying. He was just not going to admit it. Not ever.
When a few seconds passed and he didn’t say another word, I said, “Help me carry the hood out, and then you can put the paint to agitate while I go to the bathroom.”
In my life, I’d had plenty of people give me looks that might have killed me if they had that kind of power behind them, but the one Jason gave me right then… it was honestly one of the worst. And all it did was piss me off. I wasn’t trying to have a contest with him. I really wasn’t. If I wanted to get him in trouble, I had more than enough beef with him— and could scrounge up proof—to do just that.
But I didn’t.
I just wanted him to do a decent job and treat me with a little bit of respect.
And I wanted him to not act like a prick. Apparently, that was asking for too much.
If I had been raised by different people, I might have been devastated at the facial expression he gave me, but I’d survived meaner looks from people who actually mattered in my life, so this twerp wasn’t going to even get a frown in return.
Not even a blink.
He didn’t know who he was messing with.
“Come on,” I said, sounding almost as stony and tough as Rip. I didn’t give him an option to tell me that he wouldn’t follow.
I had learned over the years that if you wanted something, you didn’t make it a question. If you made it into a question, sometimes the other person would take it that they had an opportunity to voice an opinion to. You were basically giving them an opening to say no.
The fact was, the last thing I wanted was for this idiot to back talk me more than he already had.
It only took about ten seconds before Jason’s nostrils flared and he jerked his chin down in agreement… angrily.
What a sweet, lovely man-child, said no one ever.
Trying to keep my body loose and my mouth closed, I led the way to the booth. I’d already opened the double doors when I’d gone in to take the tape off, so I walked right in and stopped by the hood. Walking slower than a freaking zombie with one leg and intestines hanging out of his belly, Jason went around to the other side and stopped.
He didn’t look at me, but it didn’t matter.
“On three, let’s lift.” He still didn’t say anything. Okay. “One, two, three,” I called out, before lifting it. Luckily, he didn’t fight with me over that.
I backed out, carrying my part, keeping my attention over my shoulder to make sure I didn’t back into anything. In no time, we had set the hood down on top of old five-gallon buckets covered with old rags. For a second, I thought about reminding him of what I’d asked him to do but decided against it. He was a grown man and there was nothing wrong with his memory.
So I went to the bathroom, took my time a little and decided to stop by the floor and tell Rip that the hood was ready for them to come get. Instead, I found one of the builders crouched by a Hummer and told him. By the time I got back to my room, the sound of a paint can being shaken filled it, but Jason wasn’t in the room.
Where the hell had he gone?
I had originally planned on letting him paint the engine block that was next on the schedule, but after his attitude, I wasn’t sure I wanted to
do that.
But….
Kindness and patience. Kindness and patience. I’d wait for him.
And that was what I did. I waited, going through some files, checking my supplies… but when my watch told me it had been half an hour and he still hadn’t come back, my irritation went through the freaking roof again. First he was pushing it with twenty minutes? But now thirty?
Patience, Luna, patience.
But patience didn’t mean I had to wait around.
I was going to look for this turd and tell him to come paint the block. If he got another attitude with me, well then, maybe it would be time to go tell Mr. Cooper what was going on with him. Maybe I’d even tell Rip depending on how ugly he talked to me. At this point, I was over the fact the only person under twenty-one I could trust was Lily.
Sighing, I headed out of my room and down the hallway, stopping at the men’s bathroom to kick it open and call out, “Jason?”
But it wasn’t Jason that responded with, “Luna! I’m taking a shit!”
Even being in a little bit of a bad mood wasn’t enough to keep me from snickering. “Sorry! I’m looking for Jason, Owen!”
“He walked by me when I was going down the hall,” he replied, sounding… strained.
I covered my mouth so he wouldn’t hear me laugh at him. “Okay, thanks!” I backed out of there and made my way toward the main floor. Going up to the tips of my toes, I tried to look around to see if I could spot him… but he wasn’t anywhere.
Where was he?
I jogged up the stairs and looked in the break room, but he wasn’t in there either. I thought for a second about going to ask Mr. Cooper if he’d seen him but decided against it. From the stairs, I still didn’t see him. I had never smelled smoke on him before, but maybe he was outside?
I should just go back to my room and do the work myself. I really should. Or go tell Mr. C first and then do that.
But for some dumb reason, I crossed the main floor, heading toward the door that would lead outside.
“You all right?” Miguel asked, peeking his head out from around the front end of the Malibu he was detailing as I walked by him.
“Have you seen Jason?”
He tipped his chin toward the door. “He was on the phone. He went out that way.” Miguel made a thoughtful face. “That was a while ago though. Right after Mr. C took off.”
This little shit. “Yeah, it’s been over half an hour since I last saw him.
Let me go see if he’s out there.”
My coworker shook his head, and I made a face at him before cutting the rest of the distance toward the door. I saw Rip stop where he was, right by the SS he was working on, and I waved at him. He didn’t wave back, but I’d swear his mouth moved and his dimple popped.
Good enough for me.
Three steps later, I shouldered the door open and standing in the doorway, called out, “Jason?”
I could swear I heard voices. “Jason?” I called out again. Still, I could hear… something.
I needed to go ahead and tattle. I really did. I let the door shut behind me as I walked across the lot, trying to figure out where the voices were coming from. The lot was filled with employee and customers’ cars. I had probably gotten across half the main lot when I spotted Jason’s head over the top of his Mitsubishi Eclipse.
“Hey,” I called out, stopping in place.
He turned to look at me, and I could see the hesitation on his face before he seemed to nod to himself and start walking toward me.
“What are you doing?” I asked. “I’ve been waiting for you.”
Jason was busy looking at the ground as he approached, and he didn’t respond.
I said his name again just as he passed by me. He still didn’t even bother looking over at me. I stayed where I was and tried again. “Jason.” Still nothing.
What was going on with him?
I turned around to watch him as he walked toward the door I had just come through and opened my mouth to say something—I wasn’t even sure what—when I heard the pounding footsteps.
But I wasn’t sure what I was thinking. Wasn’t sure why I slowed down so much to look over my shoulder to figure out why it sounded like someone was running up behind me. But the point was, I didn’t turn around. Not fast enough.
I didn’t put the pieces together until way too late.
Until I got shoved forward from behind so hard I went flying. Until my hands stretched out to break my fall, them and my forearms scraping the concrete when I landed what had to be ten feet away. It wasn’t until then that I figured out what the hell was happening.
I wasn’t sure why, I wasn’t sure I would ever know why, but the first thing out of my mouth was a shouted, “RIP!” at the top of my lungs. I yelled it again the second I could get another mouthful of letters into my body.
But it was the second that name was out of my mouth that I heard the grunted, “Fuckin’ bitch” that triggered some part of my brain a second before a hand dug into my hair, my short freaking hair that barely passed my chin when it was wavy, and jerked my head back, giving me a split- second view of a face I recognized.
A face I made a plan for spitting into a second before my cousin backhanded me like the piece of crap he was.
Stars flashed across my eyes just for a moment, just for a second, as that stupid ring he always wore bit into my cheek.
“What the fuck are you doing, Rudy?” a voice I didn’t recognize shouted, panicking. “You said we were going to talk to her!”
“I—” my cousin started to say as the sound of a door being opened filtered across the lot. I opened my eyes against the tiny dots filling my vision, every single thing that had gone wrong in my life lately refueling me in that split second… and I swung my leg out, sweeping my cousin just perfectly… just enough that I heard him hit the ground.
I got up as fast as my hands and feet would let me, adrenaline and fucking anger like I had never felt in my life before burning a hole through me.
The bastard was trying to jump me.
My own fucking cousin was trying to jump me. Why was that surprising? Why did that make me mad? I wondered as I finally stood, looking down at the man blinking up at the sky on the ground, in a daze, groaning.
“LUNA!” Rip’s voice roared from across the lot, the sound of multiple sets of feet hitting pavement telling me he wasn’t alone.
But neither was I.
“Fuck!” the man with the voice I didn’t recognize hissed, forcing me to look at him just as he turned around and started running toward the lot’s gate. The gate that happened to be in the process of closing.
I’d swear on my life that my vision went red.
But the next thing I knew, I reached down and pulled my work boot off—thankful I never tied them too tightly—and I chunked it as hard as I could at the man trying to get away. I watched as my steel-toed boot hit him right between the shoulder blades, heard the “Oh!” escape him as it was his turn to go flying toward the ground, arms stretched in front of him. Heard the “Fuck!” that exploded out of him that told me it wasn’t just my boot that hurt him.
And all I could think of was good.
Behind me, I heard the footsteps stop, heard the sound of something hard hitting flesh.
But nothing could have prepared me for the sight of Miguel and Rip kicking the crap out of my cousin. My cousin who was on the ground, curled up on his side in a tight ball. Like the coward he was and always had been.
I added another thing on my list of stuff I was never going to feel bad over, and that was standing there watching them kick him. At least until I cut the distance between us and then aimed a hard kick right at his tailbone with my booted foot.
“What the fuck, Rudy!” I shouted at him, reeling back and kicking him in the ass again, seeing out of my peripheral vision that Rip stopped and took a step back, watching me, his handsome, harsh face flushed red, his hands hanging at his sides.
“You okay?” he asked, eyes going down to my forearms and wrists, taking in what I hadn’t even seen were scrapes all across and down them. I looked at him, breathing so hard, I couldn’t catch it, breathing so hard I didn’t appreciate Miguel aiming another kick at my cousin’s lower half. “He just… ran up behind me and pushed me…” I tried to explain,
losing my words between my breathing and just how fucking mad I was.
My cousin was going to jump me in the parking lot of my job. He’d put his hands on me.
“Stop! God! Fucking stop!” my cousin yelled. “Jesus Christ!”
Miguel looked up at me, foot poised in midair, his normally easygoing features rearranged into genuine freaking anger and disbelief. “Want me to stop?”
“No,” I told him without thinking. “What are you doing, Rudy?”
The man only a little older than me stayed in the fetal position as he said, “Fuck you!”
“My wrist is broken, Rudy!” the man I’d thrown my boot at cried. We all ignored him.
Rip kicked Rudy in the ass that time, way harder than I had.
“Fuck!” my cousin shouted again. “Stop!”
“What are you doing here?” I repeated, totally caught off guard by this entire situation, by the fact that he was here. In Houston. At my job.
How did he find out—
My dad had found my number. How hard would it be to find out my job in that case?
Had my dad put him up to this?
“We told you not to go back to San Antonio!” Rudy had the nerve to yell in his raggedy but pained voice. “We told you what would happen if you did!” he tried to use as an excuse, but all it did was make me freeze. “Should have gotten you outside your fuckin’ place—”
He was here in retaliation for me going back there? For Grandma Genie’s funeral? Was he for real?
This terrible sensation of dread hit me right then. Should have gotten you outside of your fucking place. Something clicked inside of me, and I looked down at my cousin and wanted to kick him in the balls as hard as I could. I didn’t want to believe it, but this was him. Them. None of this should be surprising.
“Rudy, did you break into my house?” I saw his hand jerk. Saw him flinch. “Did you break into my house?”
“Am I gonna get kicked again if I answer that?” he had the stupid nerve to ask.
He’d done it. This little asshole, sack of shit had done it. It hadn’t been random burglars.
It wouldn’t even be the first time I’d overheard about him going into someone’s house to rob them. He’d been doing stuff like that since we had been kids.
I was too busy staring at him to look and see who kicked him again, but I knew it happened because he cried out again, “Goddamn it!”
He had been the one to break into my house.
He’d gotten onto private property to jump me. To hurt me. And it wasn’t the first time.
If I had thought things had gone red a minute ago, I would have been mistaken, but things definitely went red then. Anger surged through me. So strong, so piercing, I couldn’t breathe.
But somehow, some way, it also calmed me to know it had been him. It calmed me to know I knew exactly what I was going to do.
And so it wasn’t so hard to stand there, staring down at him. It wasn’t hard to say, “Rudy, my dad never told me not to go back to San Antonio.
He told me never to go back home. If you want to play the specifics game, he never said San Antonio.”
Because it was true.
Maybe my cousin hadn’t come to kill me, but he had come back to wreck my life. To wreck me. To hurt me.
I wasn’t okay with that. I was never going to be okay with that.
A Miller never went back on their word, and maybe I was an Allen now, but I had been a Miller first. My cousin reminded me of that. Unfortunately for him.
“Fuck off, you stupid bitch,” Rudy kept venting, stupidly. But I was past it.
“Do you remember what I told you at the funeral?” I asked him, calmly, knowing I wasn’t going to get a response. He didn’t let me down. So I crouched by him, not close enough to be within striking distance if he was dumb enough to try and get another shot in, but close enough so I could speak more quietly, so he would know I wasn’t talking irrationally. Rip had taught me how much more effective that was than yelling.
And just in case he had forgotten, I answered my own question. “You came and you tried to hurt me, and I’ll live with that. But I told you at the funeral if you ever put your hands on me again, I was going to break your hand.”
His entire body froze, and I heard a noise from Miguel, but I didn’t turn to look at him. I was too focused. I was in this zone I had forgotten how well I was familiar with.
“And you know what that means, don’t you?” I asked him again. “Oh, fuck,” I heard Miguel mutter.
But I didn’t look away as I asked my boss and my friend, “Will one of you hold him for me?”
Miguel didn’t hesitate. He dropped to my cousin and kneeled over his curled legs, pressing his hands down on the arm Rudy had closest to the ground. If he was a little too good at that, I was going to ask him later about it.
Just as I reached for Rudy’s hand, another one landed on my shoulder, and Rip’s voice was clear as he asked, “Let me do it.”
I didn’t look at him. Instead I took in my cousin’s face, pained and angry and furious—a reminder of a time in my life I never wanted ever again after this. “I can do it,” I told Rip.
“I want to,” he assured me quietly.
And it was that that had me glancing up at him again. His face was still red, his breathing was still pretty off, and he looked… furious.
For me?
“Go take care of your scrapes. We’ll handle this,” Rip said in that cool, cool voice, watching me with a face that I had never seen before. One that made the hairs on my arms stand up at the same time it made my chest tight.
There was an emotion behind his eyes that I didn’t know what to do with. That I didn’t know how to handle.
I nodded at him, knowing I was leaving my cousin to get his hand broken.
And all I could think was that he deserved it. After everything he’d done and had been willing to do, he deserved it.
But I knew there was one more thing I needed to do, and I glanced down at the man on the floor, thrashing by then, and said, “Tell my dad that if I ever see any of you again, if he ever calls me again, I’ll do more than call the cops and tell them there are drugs in the house. Tell him that I still remember a whole lot of things from ten years ago, do you understand me?”
“Fuck—” Rudy started to hiss before crying out loud when Rip took his hand.
“Remember what I said,” I warned him, taking a step away. It should have bothered me how okay I was about all this. I’d think about that later. Maybe. “I asked you to leave me alone, Rudy. Remember that. I warned you.”
“Grab your boot,” Rip said quietly. “Then go in, Luna.”
I nodded at him, looking at the big man crouched over my cousin, holding his hand in a position I knew well. I heard a moan from somewhere in the lot and I headed toward it, finding my boot just feet away from a man sitting between two cars, holding his forearm and looking at his hand, or wrist, with horror.
I wasn’t going to worry about him, I thought as I grabbed my boot. I knew Miguel and Rip could handle their own.
A little too well.
Or just well enough. Huh.
Reaching up to touch my now aching cheek, I couldn’t help but shake my head at the figure on the ground as I slid my boot on and headed back the way I had come.
“We got it,” Miguel assured me, still covering my cousin as I walked by them. His gaze was thoughtful and somehow mad at the same time.
“Thanks, Miguelito,” I said carefully, wondering just for a second what he was thinking right then. I’d worry about what those thoughts
might mean to our friendship later.
I didn’t feel bad, I didn’t feel even a little bad, I thought as I walked away.
I was only feet away from them when I heard Rip strangely ask, “You remember me?”
