Page 21 of Cruz

“Don’t try the coffee,” Cruz advises. He’s starting to stack mats. He’s lined them up with insane precision.

“It’s like battery acid,” Liam warns. “Worse. It’s usually Odin making it, and he likes it strong and black, emphasis on strong. If you poured that into a fuel tank and tuned the rest of the vehicle just right, you could run it for miles on that stuff.”

“Good to know you’re not cheating on my desserts and my coffee.”

Even Cruz snorts at that, though he tries to cover it by grabbing the last remaining mat and carrying the whole stack across the room.

“I’ll make you an apology dinner tonight. For all of this. You shouldn’t have to cook for us on your day off. Tomorrow, instead of going into the garage, I’ll help you with whatever you need repaired in the cafe.”

“My goodness. You should cause utter chaos more often.”

Liam’s eyes widen, but when he catches my lips twitching, he laughs. Behind him, with his back to us, I swear I even hear a chuckle from Cruz.

Chapter 9

Cruz

“Am I risking food poisoning?”

Liam and Sloane’s heads both jerk up. Liam waves his fork in the air menacingly at me. He’s known me long enough that it’s no longer a novelty to hear me communicate. Sloane, on the other hand, looks like aliens just landed right in the middle of her small wood table.

The whole thing is heaped with pots on hot pads. There’s barely enough room for our three plates and our glasses of juice. I haven’t had peach juice since I was a kid. Made from crystals. Since Liam made it to go with dinner, it’s so sweet and thick you could stand a spoon up in the sugar powder that settles in the bottom.

He rolls his eyes. “You hardly ever say shit all, and this is what you pull out? Nice, Cruz. The meatballs were cooked from frozen. All you have to do is heat them up. You can’t poison someone with spaghetti and sauce from a jar. And the corn was also from a bag in the freezer, so yeah. No.”

I think that anything’s possible where there is a will, but I don’t say so. Also, I’m sure Sloane didn’t use frozen meatballs yesterday. She didn’t even comment about having the same meal two nights in a row. Maybe this is their regular. There could have been sauce left over to use up.

“Are you just salty because you went downstairs to help Mom with the plumbing and she showed you up by doing all of it herself?” Liam knows exactly how it went down, likely from his own experience. “Don’t take it personally,” he goes on, reading my thoughts. “She won’t let anyone touch her plumbing.”

Holy fuck, does he not even realize what that sounds like? It takes a massive amount of effort to keep my face from getting hot. There’s a not so short list of things that don’t normally happen to me and going red anywhere is one of them, but alas. Here we fucking are. Here we’ve been at all day.

“It was impressive, wasn’t it? By it, I mean my mom.”

Sloane reaches across the table and swats Liam lightly on the shoulder “Stop it. All I had to do was tighten a pipe on the sink and put some parts into the toilet tank. It was hardly an achievement and I didn’t need help. Anyone can do it.”

“Doubtful,” Liam grunts, spearing a meatball off the mountain he’s made on his plate.

“No, anyone can do it,” Sloane insists. “With the internet teaching people how to do things, anyone can do basic plumbing.”

“I maintain that it’s because you’re amazing.”

Sloane reaches for the parmesan and shakes a thick layer of her mini mountain of pasta, meatballs, and corn. She didn’t use any sauce. Either she knows something I don’t, or she doesn’t like it. “You don’t have to suck up anymore. I’ve already made a decision, or at least, decided that I want to talk to you.”

Liam jams three meatballs in his mouth and talks around them. “Uh-oh.”

“It’s not that.” Sloane pushes food around on her plate. She does look up a little while later, after sorting through her thoughts. “I was thinking about how we used to solve problems by looking for the middle ground.”

“Here we go with Mom’s philosophy. Or, not hers really. More like something Ancient Rome or Ancient Greece.”

I make a noise in my throat that Liam correctly interprets as me telling him to shut it because Sloane looks like she wants to give him some kind of leeway or credit, or some shit that he doesn’t deserve. The fact that she’s sitting her, calm as can be, after yesterday and today, makes her pretty fucking cool. Not that Liam doesn’t think so. I know how much he admires his mom. I’ve never failed to be a little bit jealous of people who can truly say that their parents are their heroes.

I was a fucking SEAL, and even if I enjoyed communicating with others, which I don’t, I still probably would have very little to say to my mom or dad. I could always write, or text, but I don’t do that either.

“You don’t have to stay here tomorrow,” Sloane says. “There’s not much we can do in a day. Major renovations would take more time. Even painting would be a bigger job. Changing the décor out is about it, but I’m happy with it the way it is. I wouldn’t mind seeing where you work.”

Liam’s fork clatters from his hand and he hurries to pick it up. “The garage?”

I tentatively try a meatball. It’s not half bad. The sauce is fine. The corn is surprisingly delicious. The spaghetti is almost the perfect level of al dente. Honestly, I’d give Liam a ten because I’m not a fussy fucker, and even if I was, he’d get a solid nine.