Page 68 of Grumpy Sunshine

“So are you.”He paused.“Did I get you sick?”

I shrugged and came into the room farther, altogether uncaring about who was also in my apartment.

“Your mother showed while I was dying in your bed,” he explained as he closed the door behind me.“Did you take any ibuprofen yet?”

“Popped some at work,” I admitted.“Who let her in?”

“A man,” he replied as he moved so that I could see the room.

My apartment wasn’t super huge, but it wasn’t small, either.

It might be a piece of shit, but it was on the larger side of a piece of shit.

I did have a tiny kitchen table, and it looked tinier when some large man with a beard and a scowl the size of Texas had my mom by the shirt collar across the top of it.

She also had a chair attached to her, which only made the scene all the more funny.

But the scowl disappeared from the man, and I nearly gasped aloud.

From the time that I could comprehend what compliments were, I’d been getting them about my brown eyes.

They were quite unique, according to friends.

My mom always liked to say that my eyes looked like I’d shit in a bottle of whiskey and left it out in the sun to percolate.

Everyone else said that my brown eyes seemed to be alive with fire.

And the man staring at me right now, his hand still securely wrapped around my mother’s collar, had the same eyes.

I felt my world shift as I stared.

This man…

“Holy shit,” I breathed.

The man let my mom go, and she toppled off the side of the table.

The chair, a sturdy thing that I’d gotten off an old lady going into a nursing home, didn’t break.

It did make her arms shift awkwardly, though, and I heard something snap.

Hopefully her wrist, because I really liked those chairs.

“Whoa,” Chevy said as he tried to catch me.

But let’s be honest, he was just as sick as I was, and we were both going down.

It was a man I hadn’t seen in the shadows that had both of us before I could blink.

I’m not sure how it happened but all of a sudden I found myself on the couch in my living room, staring at the man that was looking at me with so much concern that I didn’t know how to process it.

The silent man that’d been in the shadows stared at us, but outwardly didn’t show any signs of worry.

“Thanks.”Chevy ran a hand over his face.“Would’ve gone down.”

“What…” I cleared my throat.“What’s going on?”

I looked between the two men, then over to Chevy.

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