Page 163 of Rules of Association

When I asked him why he was even going through the trouble of doing any of it, his simple answer was, “Because you love it, and you know how I feel about you.”

Um, no I didn’t…But I sure as hell knew how I felt about him afterthat. To mask the bleeding my heart was doing all over the place, I had rolled my sleeves up and got to work too.

Over the next few hours, we organized his stack of old deconstructed laptops, argued over if he should just throw away the permanently tangled ball of wires or not, and ran to the store to get a ton of plastic storage bins and buildable garage shelves to store everything in.

It was around then that it dawned on me to ask him about the shelter in which he promptly answered with a hiss.

“What?” I’d asked.

“It’s not looking so hot,” he’d started. “You’re not going to like it Cee.”

And here we were. I tried to resist the urge to tell him to‘spit it out’as I listened, but I think the look I cut him might have done the job for me. He took the hint.

“The SWWS isn’t a government run entity. It never was. It was put into practice as a lobbying effort from the mayor, whose campaign catered largely toward women. His whole thing was geared towards women’s voices and choice. Seaside is small, and the city never got approved for solely a woman’s shelter especially when there’s one in Providence not two whole hours away. So the shelter is privately owned and funded as a nonprofit running off of donations and sponsors alone, no city funding,” he explained.

“And? What the hell does any of that mean, Con?”

“Mayor Collins was renounced of his title and position for the misallocation of campaign funding last year,” Con said grimly. “He’s got no reason to keep the shelter open and every reason to liquidate.”

“It can’t be because of underfunding like Nina and Chris said, right? That doesn’t make any sense.”

“You’re right, it’s not. Or at least it’s notreally,” he said. “From the outside looking in, they’ve been overpaying bills and vendors. Racking up huge invoices for stuff that doesn’t make any logical sense.”

I felt my ears getting hot and my heart starting to beat hard and angry. Agitated, I hefted the next box up and slid it onto the shelf myself.

“I don’t understand,” I grumbled.

“It’s fraud, honey,” he said. “Or at least that’s what I’m suspecting. Those businesses they’ve been paying crazy money to are all owned by Collins or people close to him. Some of them are part of the board, but most of them are a part of his old party. They’re pretty crooked.

“To anyone who doesn’t have a clue, he’s just paying off his expenses and cutting his losses with Seaside. But he’s actually funneling his money out and sacking the whole damn operation.” He at least had the intuition to sound remorseful. Gingerly he added, “I wouldn’t be surprised if they were lying about Providence too. It doesn’t seem like they’re planning to keep the shelter going at all, let alone in this city or the next one. They’re just taking all the money they can get from it until they let it crumble.”

Three more boxes were hefted onto the shelves by the time he’d finished that statement. I was basically throwing them now. Enjoying the slight sweat I was working up and the burning distraction my muscles were giving me from the slightly sickening, mostly pissed off feeling growing inside of me.

The next bin was either too heavy or the shelf was too high because when I went to lift it, I couldn’t get it past shoulder level. Storage bin tipping me off balance, I probably would have fallen on my ass if it weren’t for the big body that materialized behind me.

Con caught the storage bin on either side, covering my hands and then wiggling the thing out from my grasp like it was a box of kitchenware rather than the heaviest box of computer scraps I’d ever held. Leaning forward he reached up to slide the box onto the shelf, his warm front pressing into my back as he did.

Sighing, I did something I knew I shouldn’t, not if I actually wanted to stop breaking my own rule. I leaned backward into his warm body, letting my weight and my worries sink into him. He would hold me up, I knew he would. And if this resulted in another appearance of the handsy, mouthy,touchyConnor that was so frequently around lately, then so be it.

I was already fighting my ass off not to rage at everything happening to a place I loved. I didn’t have the strength to fight whatever this feeling was between me and Connor too.

Sensing my surrender, Connor wrapped big arms around my shoulders and squeezed me to him. I felt his lips press gently into the top of my head as he rocked me slightly in his arms. Not exactly the kind of touching I had imagined but just as welcome. His comfort was all I’d wanted.

Him. Always him.

“If you’re not careful, you’ll break everything in here with your little tantrum,” he murmured into my hair.

“I’m okay with that,” I said. “Then you can throw me away with the rest of it, where I belong.”

“Oh no!” he said, suddenly pressing a palm to my forehead. “Call the doctor, I think your arrogance is broken.”

I elbowed him in the stomach and he shook with laughter, loosening his grip on me and turning me around in his arms. When his eyes landed on me, they weren’t as grim as I thought they would be and I don’t know why, but that lifted my heart.

Now instead of miserable, I was just depressed.

Lowering myself to the cold garage floor, I laid back. The bite of the cool cement against my back was punishment for being so stupid.

Twice. This was twice now I’d gotten money “misallocated” right from under my fucking nose. My family still hadn’t found out about the first one, but the family accountant handled all of our taxes, and Ox handled the family accountant. I was sick just thinking about the lashing I’d get when he found out about this.

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