I resigned myself to seeing Lee at Christmas, Thanksgiving, Fourth of July, every birthday celebration, most family parties and barbeques, over at Hank’s when we’re watching a game and the like (unfortunately, this means I see Lee a lot). Usually, there are always enough other people around to run interference.
If, on the odd occasion that he’s at his parents’ house for dinner (these days it’s less odd and more like Kitty Sue is getting a bit desperate and becoming far more obvious at playing matchmaker) and I’m also invited, I make my excuses (mostly lies) and leave as fast as my boots will take me. This usually pisses off Ally and Kitty Sue but they hadn’t thrown themselves at the guy for over a decade and been rebuffed repeatedly and then had to live the rest of their lives seeing that guy at dinner and on holidays. It’s mortifying, let me tell you.
Not to mention, Lee went from Bad Boy to Badass in half a decade. By the end of that decade he was Badass Extraordinaire. You didn’t mess with Lee. I may have been a bit of a wild child, but I knew enough about playing with fire and getting burned and Lee Nightingale had gone from a bonfire to a towering fucking inferno in ten years.
Don’t get me wrong, Liam Nightingale still has killer good looks only slightly marred by a small, crescent moon scar under his left eye. He also still has a killer bod that looks great in jeans, great in sweats, great in suits, great in anything. He also still has a killer smile on the odd occasions he flashes it. And finally, he also still likes women with lots of T&A and lots of hair (and I was still a woman just like that).
But he’s also dangerous.
I don’t know how to explain this, he just is, trust me.
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These days, I still go to rock concerts. I still listen to music way too loud. I still wear my red hair long and wild in a tangle of waves that fall in a deep V down my back. I still have some serious T&A. Let’s just say, my body is my gift and my curse. A body like mine isn’t difficult to maintain, just feed it loads of crap to keep the curves but keep in shape because you’ve got to lug it around everywhere.
These days, though, my parties have real, home cooked hors d’oeuvres and bowls of cashews and nobody passes out in my bed or pukes in the backyard anymore.
These days I’m also the owner of a used bookstore located on Broadway (not the Broadway in NYC, the other Broadway, in Denver, Colorado, US of A).
My grandmother left me the store when she died. It would seem a rather staid profession, owning a bookstore. You’d think I wore tortoise-shell glasses and had my hair back in a bun. This isn’t true about my bookstore or me, by any stretch of the imagination.
You see, my grandmother was a hellion, she’d raised a hellion in my Mom, Katherine, and she and Dad carefully oversaw raising the third-generation hellion that was me.
My bookstore is on the southeast corner of Broadway and Bayaud. Not the greatest neighborhood, not the worst. In the times of my grandmother, the ‘hood had been in decline, now it’s on an upswing.
My inheritance came with half a duplex one block down on Bayaud in the Baker Historical District. I live in the east side of the duplex, a gay couple live in a west side, another gay couple live east of me and another behind me. This is why Baker is safe, it’s populated mainly by gay couples, DINKS, hippies and Mexicans. When I, a single white female who looks like (and is) a rock ‘n’ roll groupie of the highest order, moved in, they all called each other and said “there goes the neighborhood”.
My bookstore is named Fortnum’s. There was no reason for this except Gram had gone to Fortnum and Mason’s in London the year before she opened it and she thought it sounded high brow.
There’s nothing high brow about Fortnum’s.
In the day (that was Gram’s day), it was a hippie hang out and still, in a way, is. Harley boys often came there too, don’t ask me why. Now, it’s also filled with preppies, yuppies and DINKS trying to be trendy and boarders and goths because it is trendy.
It has a bunch of mismatched shelves, stuffed full of all sorts of used books and tables piled high with vinyl records. It’s a rabbits warren of organized disorganization, every once in awhile punctuated by a fluffy, overstuffed chair. Most people come in, find a book, read in a chair and leave without buying the book, maybe coming back the next day to pick it up again and read some more.
With the shop, I also inherited Gram’s two employees which, shall we say, diplomatically, are just as eccentric as she was.