Page 19 of Fast and Dirty

She shakes her head, holding her arms out slightly when Agnes pops up at her side.

“You’re going to stay with me,” she announces, placing agrandmotherly arm snugly around Kira’s waist. Kira looks from me to her but before she can respond, Jackson inserts himself in the conversation.

“Is this the driver of the Rolls?”

“Hi,” Kira says to him, her head whipping to him then back to me.

“She ran away from her wedding,” Agnes fills in.

“Whoa,” I see Jackson’s head jerk back in my peripheral and I notice Razor and a couple other workers’s tools have gone silent.

“Back off, Jack-Wagon,” Agnes warns Jackson. “Or I’m not babysitting on your next date night.”

His lips fold together in a thin line before he obliges, and Kira takes in a breath of the air he just cleared. “Honey, you’re staying with me,” Agnes repeats to her. “You can lay low at my place until you figure this whole shit-show out.”

Kira looks to her, astonished. “I can?”

“I’ve got a big house with empty rooms since my kids and then grandkids moved out. If you can help out around the place, run an occasional errand for me, and you don’t mind underground gambling and debauchery, I’d love to have you.”

Kira lets out a nervous giggle, but honestly, I wouldn’t write Agnes’s antics off as joking, necessarily. “Okay,” she finally says quietly.

“Go grab whatever things you have, I’ll go home and get a room ready,” Agnes concludes, sliding her grasshopper shades back down on her face and turns to stride back towards her horribly parked vehicle. “Get back to work, Razor,” she scolds when she walks past him. “Your guns aren’t bulging enough.” At her age, things like sexual harassment falls under the umbrella of things she couldn’t give two shits about.

“She had to have been a model at one point.” Kira watches wistfully after her. “Man, can she lead with her hips.” She shakes her head with a sigh before turningback to me. “I’m not doing something stupid, am I?” She looks up at me, her blue eyes trepidatious and I have a sudden urge to pull her to me, but I catch myself.

“No, no. Not stupid, princess. You’ll be safe there. She’s harmless. Mostly.”

“Good,” she breathes out. “I’m not sure I’m doing the right thing, but I just can’t go back to Chicago, at least not right away.”

“Take it from me,” I tell her, with a tenderness in my voice I don’t recognize. “There’s no place like this town to lay low.” I feel my heartrate ratchet up. I overshared. But then again, she pretty much opened her closet door within the hour we met and let several skeletons come screaming out.

“Okay.” She widens her bright eyes, looking nervously optimistic, and with Agnes out of sight, Jackson of course, chooses this moment to make a reappearance at my side before Kira’s next words. “Is your apartment open? I guess I better head up and grab my things.”

At the same time I see Jackson’s stupid face snap in the direction of mine, I take Kira gently by the arm and steer her in the direction of the office. “Let me grab you the key,” I mutter in her ear.

Once I’ve retrieved my keys from the top drawer I hand them to her and she offers Jackson a smile as they pass each other through the door. He slams it shut behind him and immediately crosses his arms.

“Start explaining, buddy.”

I do my best to look unfazed, and give him a cool look. “I’ve got nothing to explain.”

“New girl,” he ticks off one finger at a time. “Car broke down after running from her wedding. Her shit’s upstairs in your apartment.”

“Hey, watch yourself!” I scold, holding a finger up at him. “You know I take this place and my work seriously, and I’m nothing but fucking professional!”

Kira’s wedding dress would argue…

“Yeah, put the pieces together and you’ve got a stranded woman who had no place to go, and I - the guy that towed her car, and the only face she’d met, let her crash at my place. Like I said, nothing to explain. Now get your ass back to work, fucker.” I smirk as I place a toothpick between my lips and point in the direction of the garage; hoping the humor in my voice will distract him.

He gives me a smart grin and a headshake that say he’s not buying an ounce of my shit but he’s letting it go.

I waste no time opening the office back up and striding back out to work; picking up where I left off on the routine maintenance on the sedan which happens to belong to one of Agnes’s many grown grandkids. It’s around forty minutes later when I finish and realize Kira hasn’t made a reappearance. After writing up the invoice and calling the owner to let them know they can come get their car, I make my way up the stairs to make sure she’s all good. Only I’m ill-prepared for what I find.

Kira

I gathermy few toiletries from the bathroom, dropping them on West’s bed and grab my yoga pants from the chair I’d draped them over. I’ll have to wash them when I get to Agnes’s house because there’s nothing else in my ridiculous luggage that I’m eager to wear while laying low. When I pick them up, I see Wests’s t-shirt that I’d borrowed and look longingly at it before I turn to put the comfy pants in my suitcase. My eyes find it again when I look over my shoulder, deliberating if it would be okay to wear it again.

When I shucked it off this morning, I was thinking that it wasgross to continue wearing a shirt I got drunk in and slept in, but fuck, it was comfortable. And to be honest, I like the way I looked in it. So foreign, but so natural, like the way I was always meant to look and feel - like someone who doesn’t take life too seriously.

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