Page 49 of Hell to Pay

I rolled my eyes. He was going to all this trouble to do something nice for Lilah but he could barely bring himself to speak two words to her.

“Cool,” Lilah said. “I’m going to change.”

“Yeah, um, I’ll change too,” Matt said. “And take a shower now that I have clean clothes, if that’s okay.”

Jude smiled at him. “Make yourself at home, dude. There’s a gym in the basement. A sauna and hot tub too. And you can feel free to use the gaming system in the living room.”

“Thanks,” Matt said.

I waited until they were gone to speak again. “Think he knows who we are?”

“I fucking hope not,” Jude said.

“Poor kid.” I didn’t know if I was talking about what had happened with his mom or the fact that two out of the three of us were fucking Lilah and the third wished he was.

My insulin alarm beeped on my phone and I pressed the button to turn it off.

“You haven’t told her yet, have you?” Jude asked.

I knew he was talking about my diabetes. “Need-to-know, bro.”

“You don’t think she needs to know?” Jude asked. “That she wants to know?”

“I think she has enough on her plate,” I said.

Rafe used silicone tongs to lift a corn tortilla out of the oil and set it on a stack of waiting paper towels. “She’s going to be pissed if she finds out you kept it from her.”

I didn’t say anything. The truth was we were all in a kind of limbo with Lilah, bracing for the possibility that she’d leave, wondering how much of our real lives we should share — our work, our families, my diabetes.

Wondering how long she’d stay. Hoping it was forever.

34

LILAH

I couldn’t rememberthe last time Rafe had cooked a meal. Was it because he was trying to be nice to Matt? Make him feel welcome?

I didn’t want to read too much into it. Jude and Nolan had promised it was okay if Matt stayed at the house and Rafe hadn’t objected, which was an improvement from when I’d landed on their doorstep I guess.

We ate outside on the deck, the sun sinking in the west. It was almost June and the days were getting longer and warmer. The mountains were in bloom around us, trees budding and birds singing. The grass around the house had turned green, edged and mowed every week by a guy who wore Hawaiian shirts and towed a riding mower behind a giant truck.

The crickets were just starting to chirp for the night, fireflies rising from the long grass at the edge of the clearing. Every now and then a bat swooped down to eat a mosquito, then disappeared into the twilight sky.

I tried to make conversation by asking Matt about school and encouraging the guys to talk about the adventure stuff that I thought might appeal to Matt.

Not that Matt had ever been on an adventure, but I thought he might like to have one someday, and he did seem interested in Rafe’s stories about jumping out of planes in the military and the time Jude had hit his head on a rock while kayaking and was carried downriver half a mile before Nolan and Rafe found him.

I’d spent the whole day with Matt, coaxing conversation out of him while we wandered the aisles at Walmart looking for jeans, T-shirts, underwear, and socks. Luckily for my bank account, all the guest bedrooms in the Bastards’ house were stocked with toiletries even though I’d never seen any evidence that they ever had guests.

Now Matt seemed to warm up, asking questions and even laughing a little now and then. I wondered if it was weird for him, being in the company of three big men after growing up with just me and my mom. My worry about Matt had always been about my mom’s religious fanaticism, but now I wondered if he’d been lonely for male company too.

By the time Jude broke out the ice cream, Matt seemed almost comfortable. We stood around the island while Jude dished from cartons of Chunky Monkey and Tonight Dough.

“You could come with us if you want,” he said, handing Matt a bowl with a scoop of each.

Matt picked up a spoon. “With you where?”

“Kayaking,” Jude said. “We were going to put the boats in the water tomorrow.”

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