Page 32 of Rock Chick Bonus Tracks

She smelled like home.

So he cuddled into her side and allowed her to scratch behind his ears while she babbled at him words he’d never understand.

Vance came back, and Boo had to skedaddle as he helped her up and to the bathroom.

Vance returned alone, and Boo noted it was going to be more of this lazing about they’d been doing, which Boo wholeheartedly supported.

To share this, while Jules showered, when Vance got dressed and laid back down on the bed, Boo joined him, and there were no limits to this playground, so he settled right in on his chest, shut his eyes, and the instant Vance’s strong fingers started to give him a neck massage, he started purring.

“Home,” Vance murmured.

Boo didn’t know what that meant either.

But he knew two things.

One, it was directed at Boo.

And two, Vance really,reallymeant it.

Vance

When he pulled into Shirleen’s driveway and idled, and neither of the boys moved, he knew something was up.

He turned to Roam in the front seat, who was looking around the back at Sniff.

After school, they’d come to the office and done their homework in the surveillance room, which happened a lot these days, then they’d done some surveillance in the surveillance room.

Twenty minutes ago, Shirleen texted,If you don’t have my boys home in twenty minutes, I won’t be responsible for what I do.

She was down with surveillance. She was down with the fact that Monty, or Mace, and sometimes even Luke would go over their homework to make sure they got shit right.

But they had a weekday curfew of nine o’clock, and right then, it was ten past.

“Talk to me,” he ordered.

Roam’s steady gaze came to him, but as usual, it was Sniff who talked.

“We want you to teach us how to drive.”

Vance looked over his shoulder at Sniff. “I thought Shirleen was teaching you how to drive.”

“Yeah, she is. Like a grandma,” Sniff replied.

He couldn’t imagine Shirleen did anything like a grandma, including drive, so this was surprising.

“She’s probably just going cautious,” he suggested.

Roam chimed in. “We drive every Saturday with her. Sniff for an hour and a half, me for an hour and a half. We’ve been doing this for six weeks. And she doesn’t let us go over thirty in a forty, we haven’t parked the car in a parking lot, much less parallel, and we haven’t been on the highway. We just drive around for three hours, pulling up in her driveway halfway through to switch out drivers. We’re real good at reversing out of the driveway and driving, and that’s it. When we ask her if we can do more, she tells us we’re not ready. But we are. We’re real fuckin’ ready.”

Jesus.

She was teaching them to drive like a grandma.

And they were both turning sixteen soon, and like any teenager, they wanted the freedom of a driver’s license.

“I’ll talk to Shirleen.”

He said that.

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