Page 51 of Junk Magic

The suspicious expression didn’t change, probably because I was lying. I wondered if he could smell it, like I could smell his unease. It radiated off him in waves, as hot as the sun off the pavement, as confusing as my own emotions that kept tripping over themselves. His concern was welcome, but not—I didn’t need a babysitter! Annoying but not—how nice to have somebody in my life who gave a damn. Worrying—because if Cyrus was concerned, should I be, too?

Probably, but I was too busy getting distracted by a thousand different things, most of which were completely irrelevant to anything at all. But my brain was unused to this amount of sensory input, and had no way to sort it all out. And now that we were no longer moving, it felt like the neighborhood was folding in on me, an origami structure of pale blue, stucco and desert brown, trying to force all its varied sights and scents down my throat, all at once.

I could tell that Caleb had had corned beef for lunch—with Thai chilies and spicy horseradish mayo—making my nose twitch; that someone inside the house was making lemonade, probably with the soon-to-be-too-old lemons I’d bought for the purpose a week ago; that the guy with the Goldendoodle down the road had let his dog shit on my lawn again and not bothered to clean it up; and that someone else badly needed an oil change, the burning smell searing a fiery line though my senses, causing me to gasp and my eyes to water—

Until Cyrus abruptly bent over, arms full of pork, and kissed me. And for some reason, that simple touch brought me back to myself, like a dash of cold water in the face. He took his time, not caring any more than I did about the melting ice dampening our shirts, because they were already wet anyway. And then even more so when he grabbed me around the back, one armed, and dragged me into him, his mouth plundering mine, deepening the kiss until I forgot about everything else, until I forgot my own name.

“Better?” he asked me, after a moment, his breath in my face, mingling with my own.

“Better.” And this time, I meant it.

Cyrus nodded and headed through the front door, bearing what was left of our haul, and I stood there, staring after him like a lovesick teenager and not caring.

Caleb cleared his throat.

“Still in the honeymoon phase, huh?”

“Guess so.” Only I thought that term was bullshit. The stumbling, fumbling, constantly pissing someone off by not knowing their triggers phase was more like it. Cyrus and I had never had the honeymoon, both being too damaged to flow easily into a relationship of any kind. Even the I-just-want-to-hold-someone thing that we’d started out as. The sex had been great from the beginning, but the rest . . .

Was much better now.

I followed Caleb around the side of the house, after the kids, while he took the opportunity to insult my still newish house.

“This is not a xeriscape,” he informed me.

“You live in a condo,” I pointed out, a sprawling, uber chic, masculine steel and glass thing overlooking the Strip. His downstairs neighbor was a Saudi sheik’s younger son who was ‘discovering himself’; the gal above him, when she was in town, was a fairly well-known film star. Caleb did not do a lot of grubbing in the dirt.

“That doesn’t mean I don’t know how,” he informed me, when I pointed this out. “And xeriscapes have stuff in them “Cacti, fountains, attractive piles of rocks—”

“Is that the official name? Attractive piles of rocks?”

“—none of which did I find back there.”

“I have a cactus,” I said defensively.

“That sad thing in a pot on the back stoop? You do know you have to water them occasionally, right?”

“I water it!”

I was pretty sure.

“When? Last summer?”

“You know, houses don’t come together all at once. I’m still in the process of—” I began, and then stopped dead as my back yard came into view.

It was normally a boring bit of dirt with a small tree next to the neighbor’s fence on the far side. There was nothing else back there except for a tool shed which I had yet to stock with tools because it had acquired spiders. And a nice view of the desert from the rear and left of the house.

It was kind of minimalist, but I liked it. It was at the back corner of the subdivision, meaning that, unless somebody developed the land behind me, I could enjoy the feeling of living in wide open spaces but with all the advantages of the city. Eventually, I planned a few stone pathways, maybe some more cacti, possibly a fountain . . . and to fill in the large scars that had just been carved into my dirt.

“What did you do?” I demanded, turning on Caleb.

“No need to thank me,” he said, clapping my back.

“I wasn’t planning on it!”

“We’ll spread the dirt back out when we’re done. It’ll look the same—”

“It will not!”

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