Page 27 of Scr*wed By the Minotaur in Hallow's Cove
“Let me help with the shop,” he continued, his voice firmer, like he already knew I’d try to shut him down. “I mean it. You’re not doing this alone. Not the cleanup, not the house, not any of it. I can fix things—I’m good at it. It’s kind of the only thing I’ve ever been good at. Let me try.”
I opened my mouth to protest, maybe to tell him I didn’t want to be a charity case, or that he didn’t owe me anything just because we were—whatever we were. But the words wouldn’t stick. He was watching me with those honey-dark eyes, steady and stubborn, braced for resistance.
“Yeah,” I whispered, shifting onto my back so I could see him properly. “You can help.”
Rick didn’t say anything, just pulled me into his arms, holding me in the safety of his embrace.
We lay in the dark, the house humming gently around us. I felt the words forming before I even knew I’d say them. “I’m going to sell it,” I said, voice thin and shaky. “The house. It’s just… too much. I can’t do it all, not like this. I will use the money to fix up the store here and finish the Hallow’s Cove shop—really be able to start fresh.” I didn’t know if I was saying it for him or for myself, but as soon as I said it, the choking weight in my chest loosened by a fraction.
Rick nodded, quiet and certain. “You’ll make it work. I know you will. And if you need me to haul boxes, or get you an awesome deal on materials, or just… be there, I’m your man.” He grinned, sheepish and a little bashful. “And if you need something demoed? Hell, I’ll bring Randy and his whole crew. We’ll knock it out in a day.”
I turned to look at him, incredulous. “Seriously? You’d drive a crew all the way down here for this disaster?”
He shrugged, as if it was obvious. “I get a kick out of demolition. Plus, you should see the look on city contractors’ faces when a bunch of ogres and lizardmen stroll in like they own the place.”
I couldn’t help it—I laughed, the sound strange and new in this house. “God, I’d pay to see that.”
Rick’s arm tightened around me, the weight of it warm and steady. “So let me do it,” he said. “Let me help. Not just for you, but for your mom, too. We don’t leave things half-done in Hallow’s Cove. It’s the code.”
I pressed my face into his shoulder. “Okay,” I said. “We’ll do it your way. Tomorrow, we call Randy. And then we start over.”
“Hell yes,” Rick said, voice muffled by my hair. “We’ll level the place and build it back up to something even better. Just like the one in Hallow’s Cove.”
His optimism was absurd, almost reckless. I found myself wanting to believe it.
After a while, when the quiet had gotten heavy again—this time with the promise of sleep, not the threat of old ghosts—Rick yawned, long and loud, then poked me gently in the side. “So.”
“So?”
He shifted, propping himself on an elbow. “I’m not letting you get away with this, you know. You owe me a date.”
It took me a moment to catch on, then I remembered our pact to kick things off with an actual date. The idea of acting like itwas our first date, after everything we’d been through, made me chuckle.
“I usually like to go on several dates before I let someone witness me sobbing like a raccoon who lost its trash can.”
He huffed, nipping at my neck. “You have to set the bar low. Otherwise I get nervous and say dumb things, and then you’ll realize I’m not nearly as cool as I look.”
I snorted, rolling to face him properly. “You have literal horns. You could show up in a clown suit and I’d still think you’re cool.”
He blinked, like he didn’t quite believe me, but there was a lopsided, unguarded smile on his face I’d never seen before. It was like watching the sunrise find a window it hadn’t ever touched.
“Seriously,” I said, needing him to hear it. “You’re more than enough, Rick. Even on your worst day.”
He looked away, and for a second, I wondered if I’d pushed him too far into the open. But then he pulled me in, tucking my head under his chin, breathing me in like I was a bouquet that could only ever be beautiful, and not just a person who came with a damp house and unexpected emotional baggage. I let myself be held, let the quiet say what we couldn’t. Tomorrow would bring tools and noise and mess, but for now, we just existed—awkward, wrecked, but together.
Chapter fourteen
Lea
Thenextfewdayswere a whirlwind. True to his word, Rick called in a favor with Randy. He showed up that weekend with a crew of lizardmen, gorgons, and even what appeared to be a troll. They split up, half of them taking on the demo of the shop in town, the other half, perhaps the more careful half, started emptying out my childhood home.
I had tearfully sorted it with Rick and Britt—who had become comrades-in-arms, taking turns holding me together when I cried over a stuffed animal or a recipe box. By the time the crew came up, everything was organized by keep, donate, discard.
Britt had concocted a game plan with military precision. She’d color-coded the boxes, made a spreadsheet on her phone, and even drafted Randy’s troll to do the heavy lifting. There was something both hilarious and a little bit breathtaking about watching a literal mountain of a man in a neon vest gently cradle my old lava lamp as if it were a baby bird. Rick mostly directed traffic, though every so often he’d get impatient and carry half asofa by himself, horns nearly gouging the door frame on the way out.
The demo of the old shop was brutal but quick—like ripping off a bandage, if the bandage were forty years of shared memories and water damage. I let myself cry, but only when no one was watching. I figured I’d earned some dignity after the last week of public meltdowns. The new crew swept in, and by the end of Saturday, the shop was hollowed to its bones, every trace of my mother’s handwriting and dried flower arrangements swept into the dumpsters out front. I watched the whole thing, numb but not hopeless. I tried to imagine what it would look like when it was all rebuilt, when bright paint and new fixtures erased the stink of mold and loss. I could almost see it: a clean slate, blank as a sunrise.
Britt was a lifesaver. She kept the coffee coming and the snark dialed to a gentle hum. When the last shelf came down, she handed me a beer and said, “I know you’re grieving, but this is the part where you get to be a little bit excited, too.”
