Page 53 of Roar & Lizzy: A Forever Kind of Love

Chapter 19

Coco sprayed the wateron the outside of the front window. Lizzy stood in the living room, pointing out spots on the glass that she'd missed when cleaning. So much of their time away from work was spent keeping up the rental house.

Their landlord lived in a different state, but the property manager liked to drive by for monthly inspections. They never knew when they'd be checked up on or precisely what was required of them, but she couldn't complain. Any concerns like when the dishwasher quit working were fixed the next day.

Besides, someday if she had to move, she'd get the cleaning deposit back if they left the house in the same condition as prior to them renting. She and Coco took it as a personal challenge. Three hundred bucks split two ways could go toward their next down payment if they decided to rent somewhere else.

She pointed to one more spot. Coco climbed on the chair and scrubbed the area, then stood back and sprayed the soap suds off the glass.

Lizzy gave her two thumbs up and went outside to bring in the chair. "It must be the traffic on the street that creates all the dust on the front side of the house."

"I'm just glad we're done with that chore for the next few months." Coco rolled up the hose. "Anything else we need to do?"

"I don't think so," she said.

After Roar left that morning, she'd tried to keep busy. Without him here to assure her everything would stay the same between them, she'd grown nervous about going to work tomorrow.

It would kill her if he acted differently toward her or pretended nothing had happened. She wasn't expecting a forever kind of love but what happened between them wasn't just sex. Not to her.

She closed the garage door and went inside with Coco. "Did Gus call you for another date?"

Coco picked up the dirty clothes in the hallway and dropped the articles in the basket. "No, and I doubt if he will. Even if I pegged him wrong and he asked, I'm going to stop things from going further. I just found myself disappointed in the date. Not that he's not a nice guy, he is. All through dinner, I kept waiting to feel that attraction or some kind of connection to his life where I could care about him, but it wasn't there."

She had the exact opposite experience with Roar, instead of being indifferent, she found herself thinking about him all the time and wanting to be a part of his life so that she could be around him. That's where the doubts seeped in. Roar ran a motorcycle club.

At first, she thought the club was all about riding motorcycles around. A common interest group where there were people who liked doing the same thing. But, seeing inside the clubhouse showed her a different side of the club.

They were family. For how dysfunctional they all were, they had order and respect. That bond came before anything. She'd even bet The Fire Ring was only a side business that Slag MC controlled. That made her wonder if all she'd ever heard about bikers on the news and in movies was true and they were doing something else in the confines of the clubhouse.

To support that many people took a lot of money. More money than the bar brought in.

"You're not saying anything." Coco studied Lizzy. "Still thinking about what happened between you and Roar?"

"More worried than anything. My life is pretty darn perfect working at The Fire Ring. The wages, the hours, my coworkers—now that Kelli is gone. Last night, visiting the clubhouse, I wonder how much of an importance the bar is to Roar. The motorcycle club is definitely his top priority." She pulled the bowl of fruit out of the fridge. "And, yeah, I don't want anything to change between him and I because we had sex."

"But, do you want things to grow between you both?"

She pulled off the lid to the bowl. "I do. But it all comes down to my job, and I hate that I have to put that first in my life. I don't know. Maybe I'm projecting my problems onto Roar. He is a good boss, and the bar is doing great."

"Sorry to say it..." Coco smiled sympathetically. "You do sound like you're looking for problems that aren't there. You're so scared of not paying off your debts and keeping a roof over your head, you can't focus on you."

"Well..." She grabbed two bowls out of the cupboard. "I can thank my mother for that. You remember what she did for a living."

When her mom was still alive, she was in charge of foreclosures through a community bank. From a young age, she heard stories of families having to leave their homes, some of them ending up homeless, all because of not being able to make their payments or getting in over their heads in debt. That led to her mother sharing heartbreaking stories that turned out to be life lessons to prepare her for adulthood.

Sometimes, when she allowed herself to think about everything, she wondered if her mother somehow knew that she would die when Lizzy was twenty years old, and without a mother, she'd need to figure out how to survive on her own. That would explain why her mom raised her with common sense rather than letting her emotions control her decisions.

Even with all the knowledge, she'd failed after her mom passed away.

Health insurance was impossible to pay for, and she'd lost coverage under her mother's policy after her death. She'd never needed to go to the doctors, and some clinics ran on a sliding scale if she came down with the flu or nasty cold—not that she had, she was healthy, thank goodness.

In her worst-case scenario, she never planned for her appendix to burst or how much it would cost for an operation.

"Is there any Cool whip left?" asked Coco.

She opened the fridge and took out the white tub, passing it to Coco.

Studying her friend, she kept checking out her new hairstyle. Coco had her hair cut with the sides longer than the back and added blonde highlights around her face. She loved the look, and it was amazing how much the lighter color brightened her friend's face.

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