Page 93 of Snake

But he rode away from her anyway.

Maybe he’d go back to his house when he was sure she was out of it.

Or maybe he wouldn’t come back at all.

Chapter Twenty-Two

“Gingersnap? You here?”

Autumn heard Pom’s voice coming from the front door of her condo and sighed. Again?

“GINGE?!” he yelled, his voice breaking from the effort.

“I’m here.” She pushed up from her desk chair and crossed to her open home-office door.

Her father was gliding toward her kitchen, his arms full of bags.

She had been home from Missouri for nearly a week, and one or both of her fathers had cooked up some reason or other to come to her house every day. They’d even spent time here together two evenings earlier, and had shared a meal with her. Together.

They were on high alert, but they didn’t need to be. Okay, yes, she’d spent the first day or two wrapped in a comforter on her sofa watching Carousel, Les Miz, Rent, Marley and Me, every version of A Star Is Born, and all the saddest episodes of Buffy and Angel, but since then she’d been more or less okay. She was back at work, at least remotely, and hadn’t cried over Cox in hours.

Every day was a little bit easier. She was okay. She was going to be just fine.

As she should be! Yes, her ten days in Signal Bend had been ... eventful. She had experienced the full range of human emotions and been kicked straight in the heart at the end, but it had been only ten days of her life—a life she’d planned with careful precision, and ten days in which she’d been making ridiculous, fantastical decisions that might have yanked her whole existence off track.

That probably would have, if Cox had continued to treat her like someone who mattered.

The thought brought a fresh wave of ache to her bruised heart, but her mind shouted down at it that they’d dodged a bullet. Very briefly, she’d thought she could fall in love with a dour, angry, hick biker from a nowhere town in the middle of Missouri. Momentarily, she’d thought she was falling in love. She’d even thought she was falling in love with Signal Bend, making friends, beginning to imagine what a life there would be. Sometimes, holding Cox while he slept, she’d even imagined buying that It’s a Wonderful Life house and reclaiming it from ruin to make it everything she wanted it to be, everything it should be.

Obviously, she’d experienced a form of derangement. Maybe crystal meth just floated in the air out there, giving unsuspecting visitors contact highs and turning them into love-addled zombies. No, not love. It couldn’t have been that.

But for a few days there, she’d been all in with Cox, and it had been about more than handling his mother’s arrangements and taking care of him in his furious grief. She’d felt them moving toward each other before his mother’s suicide, and felt that bond tightening speedily after it, like a cord being laced together and pulled taut.

In the midst of working with the Horde family to arrange Elaine Cox’s funeral and burial, Autumn had also begun to form ideas for her own plans, considering how to stay in Signal Bend much longer, as long as Cox needed her, as long as he wanted her. She’d even been sketching out a script for a conversation she might have with Chase, trying to establish a case that MWGP needed someone on site through the whole build.

But then Cox had announced that he didn’t need or want her, and he’d ridden off and left her standing outside his mother’s funeral alone. She’d waited for him at his house for the rest of that day, hoping he’d take back those crushing words, but he’d never come back.

Lilli Lunden had driven her to the St. Louis airport the next morning.

After Miles, she’d promised herself she would never, ever again look past even a single red flag. Yet Cox was covered in them, and she’d barely slowed down. And now here she was.

Autumn put her mental shoulder to those thoughts and shoved them into the dark. She would not allow ten days of her life to tear the rest of it apart.

“Hi, Pom. Why are you here again? What is all that?”

He set his armload of bags on her glass dining table, then spun and took two smaller bags, these plain white paper, to her marble countertop. “Remember? Today was the sample sale at Saks!”

“Oh. Right.” Autumn walked past the table and opened one of the bags on the counter: take-out cartons from Jasmine Thai, a favorite restaurant. It looked like a lot more food than she and Pops could consume in a single meal; obviously, he meant her to have lots of leftovers.

Pulling one of the cartons out of the bag, she opened it and discovered Pad Se Ew, one of her personal favorites. She closed the carton and pushed it away.

“The deals were so hot today, I might get arrested! Grand theft fashion!” Pom said, rifling through the bags on the table.

“If you keep feeding me like this, I’m going to get fat. It’s been almost a week, Pom. You don’t have to take care of me. I’m okay. I’m fine.”

Her father spun with a dramatic flourish and crossed his arms. Then he decided it wasn’t a sufficient gesture and instead threw one arm out to Vanna White the bags on the table.

“I just told you I brought you prezzies from the Saks spring and summer sample sale, and you, my own daughter, who has celebrated sample sales like national holidays with me since she was in fourth grade, walked right past the haul here. You are not okay. You are not fine.”

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