Page 4 of Imagine Me and You

“Ew, no.”

“See, I think I could get on board with a hairless cat. The kind of pet that doesn’t leave pieces of itself all over your house.”

She smiled, that impish smile that took him straight back to high school. And made his heart and body react just like the boy he’d been, not the man he was. The man who had decided, years ago, that Samantha was his friend and nothing more, in spite of occasional lapses in sanity.

Like when she stuck her hand into a bowl of popcorn that happened to be positioned on his lap.

“Yeah sure, but it’s a cat. So it would probably bring pieces of other animals into the house for you to find.”

The idea disturbed him, which was doubtless what she intended.

“The dog doesn’t do that, right?”

She cocked her head to the side, her smile widening. “Not usually.”

“If it brings a rat into the house, I’m throwing it out into the barn.”

“The rat?”

“The dog.”

“The dog isn’t anit. She is a she and she has a name. As you well know, since I have owned her for five years and you’ve been in my life for every single day of those five years.”

“Fine. If Poppy brings a rat into my house, I won’t hesitate to kick her furry, purebred behind out to the barn. How about that?”

“You would let her in your barn?”

She had him there. “The stable. In a stall.”

“What if she barked and scared your horses?”

“Samantha, you’re making the image of you in a storage unit not seem that bad. I’m sorry,” he said before she even had a chance to react to his jackassedness. “That was uncalled for and I don’t want you sleeping in a storage unit on a nest of baby mice.”

“Jace, I know you worship at the altar of bleach and disinfectant spray. I have a certified kitchen and a food handler’s card, plus, I passed my last health inspection with a score of ninety-nine. So I don’t think you really have to worry. I shall not desecrate the temple of cleanliness.”

“I’m not that crazy, Sam. I’ll deal.”

“Darling, Jace, I’ve known you since we were sixteen. Youarethat crazy.”

“It’s better to care about being clean than to be attached to your dirt.”

He cringed, knowing they were having a shared memory. Of his childhood home, the piles of things, his mother ’s over-attachment to all of it. Her inability to throw one damn thing away.

For a while it had spilled over into his room. Until he’d reclaimed it. Until he’d thrown out every piece of garbage and disinfected every corner and told her anything that crossed the threshold was going in the dumpster. He had to have a haven, or he would have really gone insane.

But he’d had his bedroom. He’d had the store and Mrs. Brown. And he’d had Sam.

His room and the store had provided escape. Mrs. Brown had provided the tough love, the guidance, the financial help when he’d wanted to start his beef ranch.

Sam had provided the smiles. The laughter. Sam made everything feel a little bit lighter. A little more colorful.

It was just ungrateful to begrudge her or Poppy a place in his home. Of course, his opinion on that would likely continue to fluctuate depending on how messy the dog proved to be.

“All right, yeah,” he said. “I’m that crazy. But I like to have control over my house and I know you understand that.”

Samantha did understand that. She remembered what Jace’s house had been like. She’d known him for more than a year before he’d let her inside, and when he had, his humiliation had been palpable. It was the only time she’d seen her friend near tears—that moment he’d let her walk through the rubble that was his childhood home.

Through the trash his mother treasured more than she had her husband who’d left and her son who was slowly going insane living in it.

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