Page 87 of Just Come Over
“It is if you’re not playing. And I’m going to buy you a dress. Maybe shoes as well.”
“If I wear high heels, that means it’s a hot date. With kissing.”
His mouth brushed over the side of her neck, and he said, “Then I’d better buy you some very high heels.”
It wasn’t even nine o’clock on Monday night, and Rhys’s eyes were closing. Too many time zones, and too much emotion. After the third time he’d started awake, he put down the book he was reading, headed for bed, and fell fathoms deep almost instantly.
He sat up in the dark, not knowing whether it had been minutes or hours, or what had woken him, and was rolling out of bed in almost the same motion. Whatever it was, he needed to be standing up to deal with it. Outside, the wind had risen, and he couldn’t hear anything over the ever-shifting rustle and moan that was palm fronds clacking against each other, tree branches rubbing together, and a hundred thousand leaves trembling and shaking.
He was at the doorway, then beyond it. Still nothing to see, and no change in the faint glow of the night light in the kitchen, butsomethinghad woken him.
Casey.
He was across the room and up the stairs on the thought. And there was that noise again, barely audible above the wind. Something wrong.
Into Casey’s room, and he heard it again. A hitch of breath. A whimper. A rustle that was the bunnies in their cage, and the glow of her pink crystal casting a dim pool of light near the door.
“Casey?” he asked. “What’s wrong? Feeling ill?”
“Th-there was a...” He couldn’t hear the rest, so he made his way across the castle rug to her bed, wincing when he stepped on one of the eighty-five surprises in the L.O.L. Surprise House with a bare foot. He was only wearing a pair of sleep pants, but that was OK, surely. She’d seen his chest before.
She was sitting up against the headboard of the white iron princess bed they’d picked out a few days before he’d left on the latest trip. It had a canopy top wrought in the shape of a pumpkin coach, and the iron of the headboard formed a butterfly. She’d loved it, it had cost too much, and he’d bought it for her anyway, along with white net curtains to hang at the head and foot, and a bedside table whose legs were more twists of butterflies. Zora would have said that it was important to match, and it all looked much better now. Like the bedroom of a little girl who was loved.
He sat down beside her on the ruffled white duvet, got his arm around her, and said, “Eh, monkey. What is it?”
“There was a...” Another hitch of her breath. “A very mean wolf.”
“Nah. Really? What did it do?”
“I can’t tell you. Or he might come back.”
“If you tell, he won’t come back. Telling takes away his power.”
He couldn’t see her expression that well, but he could see enough to know it was skeptical. “It does?”
“I promise. Tell me what happened.”
She was still crying some, and he lifted the edge of the sheet and wiped her face with it. Probably not what a mum would’ve done, because mums probably remembered to buy tissues. He wasn’t a mum, though, so there you were.
“I was in your car,” she finally said, “and you said to wait inside, and then you went away, and I didn’t want to wait anymore, because I was getting scared. And it was a very long time.”
“Which I wouldn’t have done. What, leave you in there alone? Nah. I’d take you with me.”
“Maybe it wasn’t a kid place, though. Maybe it was a grownup place.”
“I’m in the casino, gambling away my pay packet? Not happening.”
“Oh.”
“So where does the wolf come in?” he asked.
“I was waiting in the car, and then the car was driving, and you looked in the mirror and I saw your face, but it wasn’t you. It was a wolf, and he had gray hair and big teeth that were pointed. And he smiled really big, but it was a mean smile, and he was driving very fast.”
She was shaking some now, and he wrapped her up tighter in his arm and said, “Good thing I’m Maui, then, and I can ride on the wind and the waves and come through the car window and get him.”
“No, you can’t. Because you said you weren’t Maui, and anyway, Isaiah says Maui is only a story. He’s not really real.”
“He’s real in a dream. And I’d come anyway, even if I wasn’t Maui.”
