“Go. Now. There’s still the restraining order against you. You can’t be here,” I said, using that no-nonsense voice I’d practiced on the boys countless times.
Pink bloomed across her cheeks, and it reminded me of the expression on her face the first time she’d tried to see Josh when he was a year and a half. He’d started crying, sobbing actually, and she’d been so embarrassed, I had felt terrible for her. Then again, no one had made her disappear. No one had made her say and do the things that led to my brother filing a restraining order against her for Josh’s sake.
“Diana, please. It’s been so long—”
“If you want to see Josh, it’s not going to be like this. You can’t just show up here. You need to go. Now.”
Yeah, the rose color deepened and her eyes darted away. “Diana—”
“Anita, now,” I insisted, knowing damn well there was still an hour left until Josh got home from batting practice.
She groaned, her hands going up to the sides of her head as she swallowed hard. “Would you listen to me for a minute? That’s all I need.”
“No. I want you to go. Right now. I’ll give you my e-mail address. Contact me that way. I don’t want to talk to you, and I don’t want to see you, but we can message each other.” You’d figure she’d gotten a clue the last two times she’d called and I’d either hung up on her or ignored it. I wanted to have whatever she said in writing just in case.
Her mouth—that mouth that had called my beloved nephew a mistake once upon a time—opened, but it wasn’t her voice that came out.
“Pretty sure she’s telling you to fuck off.”
Something tickled at the back of my throat. Relief? I turned to look over my shoulder to spot Dallas stepping onto the sidewalk toward my house. And despite the fact that I wanted to yell at her and tell her all the ways she’d hurt my Josh, I couldn’t help but take in the scene called my neighbor.
And it wasn’t because he was dirty and sweaty and his shirt was clinging to him like a wet T-shirt.
Mostly.
Because, Jesus Christ, it was like my brain forgot who was standing next to me for all of the fifteen or thirty seconds that I watched this damn near stranger walk over. Unless Anita was blind, she was taking in the same thing I was. I knew what she saw. That “fuck off” face. The powerful upper body. Old, worn-in jeans with stains all over them, and scuffed, paint-stained, black work boots. The shirt he had on must have shrunk at some point because the sleeves barely covered his shoulders, highlighting the dark ink that covered his biceps, but I made myself look at his face before I got caught.
“You gonna get going or do I need to walk you to your car?” Dallas asked as he stopped right beside me, his shoulder inches away from my head, completely surprising me. I wasn’t going to deny a gift when it was given to me, even though it was from someone I didn’t know how I could repay.
“I just want to talk,” the woman, who had given my brother so much hell, said.
“Pretty sure she doesn’t wanna talk to you. Am I right?”
I was still looking at Dallas when I said in a distracted voice, “Yes.”
My neighbor shrugged, his attention laser-focused on the woman a few feet away. “You heard her. Get gone.”
“I just need a damn minute, Diana—”
Somehow, the use of my name managed to get me to lift my eyes to meet hers. “Don’t make me call the cops. Please. I told you, get your life together, Anita. Don’t show up to my house unexpected. This isn’t the way to do this.”
My neighbor had turned his head to look at me for the first time, slow, slow, slowly when I first said the c-o-p-s word. I turned my body so that, out of the corner of my eye, I could see him blink. A muscle in that sharp cheekbone of his twitched. His nostrils flared just enough to be noticeable.
“The cops?” the man who lived across the street asked in a calm, cool voice. And Dallas—I could have hugged him right then, kissed him even—lifted one of those big, callused hands of his and pointed it along with his head to the side. “Leave.” One word and only one word was necessary. “Now.” One more word cemented that harsh command.
As if sensing her impending demise at the fact I was about to tell someone bigger than both of us that she was breaking the law, Anita made a short, sharp noise in her throat. “Forget it. I’m leaving.”
I didn’t watch her hightail it and neither did Dallas; he was too busy staring a hole straight into my eyes. A part of me regretted starting this staring thing with him, but it was too late now. If he wanted to do it, we could do it.
It was the sound of a car starting nearby that snapped us both out of the world we had built up around us. Dallas turned to look at something over my shoulder, his expression darkening for the first time, lines forming horizontally across his forehead as he glared at what I could only assume was Anita’s car taking off. It was a black Chevy. I wouldn’t forget it.
Just like that, those murky eyes flicked down to mine, and my neighbor’s expression changed from a disturbed one to a worried one that pinched his facial features together. “You all right?”
All I could do was nod, too quickly, but there wasn’t a doubt in my head that my anxiety was written all over me. Anita had no legal claim to Josh. I knew that. She wouldn’t be able to just take him. I could share. I really could. But only if there was some way for me to know she wouldn’t hurt him like she had countless times before. And only if he wanted.
I made myself let out a breath, then another one, and finally nodded. I knew I was good. And if maybe I wasn’t completely all right, I would be eventually. “I’m fine.”
“Okay.” A small frown framed my neighbor’s mouth. “Lemme take that,” he said, even as his hands went to mine.
I shook my head. “It’s fine. I got it.”
The downturned corners of his mouth went flat. Dallas blinked, those eyes of his sliding from one of mine to the other as if he was trying to measure something. Maybe he was. My stubbornness. “I’ll take it,” he finally said slowly, carefully grabbing ahold of the grocery bag handles, wrapping them around his own wrists as his gaze stayed on me.
I couldn’t even find it in me to keep protesting, to tell him I could take the bags on my own and let him know he’d done enough, that I didn’t need his help. He didn’t need to come into my house and feel all weird or make up some other thing in his head about me stalking him. But I didn’t have the fight. I just followed after him, stiff, stiff, stiff. I unlocked the door and watched as he went in while I grabbed the rest of the bags from the car and followed after him.
I was fine. She was never coming to my house again, and if she did, it would be years from now. This was how it always worked with her. She’d show up and years would pass before we ever saw her again.
Dallas was in the kitchen taking things out of the bags when I found him. My heart thudded a little and my stomach was still unsettled. “You really don’t have to do that. I can do it.”