Page 44 of A Queen and Her Knight

“Oh, Martin said some things the last time I spoke to him.” Rachel Dyer was suddenly very concerned with getting her wallet from her purse. “Everything I do is wrong now, let me see: he’s mad because I don’t trust the dragon and because I don’t approve of his choice of friends. He wasn’t making sense, believe you me. Drinking, and probably because of that Jessica Bartlett who has been trash her whole life. Almost nothing Martin said was clear. Started making accusations because I wouldn’t let him clean the gutters in the middle of a rainstorm, and—”

Kyle snorted a laugh so loud that Deborah let out a startled squeak.

“Excuse me?” Rachel Dyer turned on him as if she’d noticed someone was in line behind her after all.

Kyle shook his head. “I was gonna stay out of it, really. No matter what a piece of work you are, but—you don’t remember me, do you? Maybe you’d already shut the door before I got out of the car. Maybe you blocked it out like you apparently blocked out all the stuff your kiddidsay to you. Who knows? But I was there when you left your son in the freezing winter-in-Everlasting rain like hypothermia isn’t a thing. Okay? If you want to make yourself the victim to Annalee here, it’s not my business, but I don’t like people lying to my face.”

“Who do you think you are?” Rachel Dyer demanded, lifting her chin like she was about to call his manager. Kyle didn’thave a manager at the moment, but if he did, it would be either Schmitty or Forrester and he wondered how that would turn out for her.

Nonetheless, he reminded himself of what his ma would say about trying to be respectful to his elders, which was to try to be… at least at first.

“Well, I’m the guy who’s been in line behind you for way too long, first of all.” Kyle gestured to his groceries and rapidly thawing frozen pizza. “And secondly, I’m the deputy your neighbors called to come help your son when you wouldn’t.” His voice might have gone low and a little rough, but he was tired and it had been a long day. “I’m the one who got him warm, and the one who had to hear him say that his mom didn’t love him. Can you believe that?” Kyle turned to Annalee, who looked, to use an old expression, poleaxed. Kyle didn’t think he was supposed to out people, according to, like, every online discussion and also Schmitty, but it was a small town and everyone knew anyway. These two hadn’t said it but they’d been talking around it for the past ten minutes at least. “He tells me he came out to her and that she didn’t love him. Those words exactly:My mom doesn’t love me.”

It was inconvenient how clearly Kyle remembered those words. Out of the whole encounter, that’s what stayed with him aside from Martin trying to stick up for Forrester, as if Forrester needed protecting. Forrester looked like he was carved from a fucking sequoia and yeah, okay, he had feelings like anybody else, but if someone hurt him, he would make damn sure they were bleeding too.

Maybe Kyle remembered those details because Forrester was like that, and Martin was a skinny kid who’d cried in the back of Kyle’s car, and yet Martin had fought for him.

That was love, maybe. A truer love than whatever Kyle’s sister had gotten, or even Schmitty, for all his girlfriends in school.

Kyle pushed out a breath. “He said he told her about himself,” and he’d been so fucking scared even saying it to Kyle. So drunk he’d fallen over and still he’d been terrified. “And she closed the door and left him there on the verge of passing out. He probably would have drowned in a blocked street drain or frozen to death on the sidewalk if her neighbors hadn’t called me and then his friend hadn’t come to get him. Un-fuckin’-believable.” That was loud. Kyle shook his head again. “My sister got pregnant at eighteen and dumped at nineteen, yet my extremely Catholic mother took her in and turned my room into a nursery for the kiddo.” Kyle loved his niece but was also very happy that he’d already been out of the house by then. “My ma would never pull the shit that you did. Martin might be your kid but you sure as hell are not his mother.”

The back of his neck itched.

Kyle turned from Rachel Dyer’s reddening face to Annalee’s round eyes before spinning around toward the self-checkout lane, where Deborah, the store’s assistant manager, and—goddamn it—Schmitty, were standing together and staring at Kyle like he’d grown two heads and both of them were the Virgin Mary’s.

“Fuck off, Schmitty,” Kyle said preemptively. “I’m just trying to get my stuff and go home.”

“Forrester is going to kiss you on the mouth,” Schmitty called out, grinning like an elf—not a real elf. Like the ones in old movies who always seemed to be wearing tights and funny outfits.

“Forrester.” Rachel Dyer hissed at last. Kyle felt vaguely as if snakes should be insulted. Nothing malicious there; they were just snakes. Rachel Dyer was a lying bitch.

Kyle looked at her, then at Annalee, who was scanning Rachel Dyer’s items without looking up. Kyle liked to think she was embarrassed at getting caught believing obvious lies but it was probably just that the assistant manager was there.

He looked back to Rachel Dyer. “Your total is up.”

It was. She turned toward the card reader with a distracted frown.

Kyle risked a glance to Schmitty, who, of course, hadn’t moved an inch even though Deborah was finally scanning her groceries.

“Forrester kisses me on the mouth, I’m gonna punch him.” That was a shout directed at Schmitty. Kyle suspected hitting Forrester would be like punching granite, but he’d do it. He turned back to Rachel Dyer and Annalee, both of them hurriedly packing Rachel’s things into a canvas bag. “I’d leave him alone if I were you,” he said, voice lower so only the two of them would hear. “Forrester. Or his boy.” He kind of enjoyed how Rachel Dyer flinched at that. “It wasn’t my business until you made it my business. Still isn’t, really. But I’d steer clear of Cuppa altogether. If your son wants to talk to you,” Kyle couldn’t imagine why, “he knows where you are. But if you go in to his workplace and cause a scene, they’d have every right to demand you leave.”

Or have her removed. He left it unsaid like one of Schmitty paperback werewolf detectives would have. Weres apparently used body language instead of words sometimes, if the book author was correct, anyway. There was a wolf in Everlasting now, but Kyle wasn’t about to walk into Cuppa to ask him werewolf questions. Zarrin Xu went in there. Forrester went inthere. That scowling barista Joe was in there. They weren’t like whatever the hell Rachel Dyer was implying, but Kyle wasn’t taking any chances. He’d walk in there and walk back out with a limp wrist or something.

And yeah, he wasn’t even worried about what Schmitty would say about that. It was whatForresterwould say about that, which would be an ice-cool, “If all it takes to make you wanna fuck men is to walk into a coffee shop, then I don’t think the coffee shop is the problem, Kyle.” With his eyes bluer than the bay and his hair looking like Superman’s.

Fuck that guy.

Kyle was about to blame every weird thought on Schmitty, his late night, and his hunger, when Annalee whispered something to Rachel Dyer and then came around to begin scanning Kyle’s groceries.

Fucking finally.

He was gonna go home, eat his fucking pizza, wash his blueberries with lemon juice and water so they wouldn’t get moldy, watch some porn—of fuckingwomen, fuck off, Forrester—and then go to bed and forget all about this.

“Wait, Schmitty!” he called out before Schmitty could head off to buy whatever it was he came in for. “Do you have the next book in the series on you? I wanna know who the killer is!”

The End

Love Is Stored in the Purple Carrots

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