Page 1 of Coach
CHAPTER ONE
Este
“Well, that’s… certainly a color.” I stared down at the open can of paint I’d nabbed for nothing on one of those free town groups. The gifter had been cleaning out their parents’ place, and all signs pointed to ‘packrats,’ judging by the random junk piled to the ceiling in teetering rows in the open garage when I’d stopped by to grab the random paint cans and spare tile they found lying around. Thanks to all that mess, the color swatch had gotten scraped off this particular can, so it had been a complete gamble at what color I was getting.
Eggplant purple.
It didn’t exactly go with my vision for my new place. But, hey, beggars couldn’t be choosers. And free was free. So, something was getting the eggplant treatment.
“What do you think?” I asked, looking over at the black-and-white dog staring at me from her giant saucer of a bed in the corner of the room.
Trix had been a lucky find in a specific area of an overcrowded shelter. Deemed ‘aggressive,’ she’d been sittingthere without a home for two years before I—someone very interested in an aggressive dog—stumbled across her.
She was a beautiful black-and-white purebred Akita with the softest, fluffiest coat ever, making nighttime snuggles all the more comforting. But since our move to California, she was also the reason my electric bill threatened to bankrupt me, since she was definitely a dog meant for colder climates.
“I know. You’re sick of all the home improvement projects,” I said as she stared at me. “But I am determined to make this place feel like home.”
It was the first time we’d stopped moving around from one short-term rental to the next since I’d adopted her. Since well before then.
Something about this town felt right, though.
I couldn’t put a finger on it. I’d been to many small towns in my travels. But as I drove down the main street in Shady Valley, something clicked.
Maybe it was the beauty of the Death Valley mountains. Or the coziness of the main strip of stores—even if some weren’t operational. Perhaps it was how, as I drove, I saw many people standing on the sidewalk talking to one another. Or on their front lawns having friendly discussions.
Sure, there was a moody prison staring down at the town—all barbed wire and bright security lights at night. But this wasn’t the 1950s anymore, when prisoners were routinely sneaking out of their cells and escaping to nearby towns to steal money, clothes, or a car. Modern prisons were pretty secure.
Besides, a local prison likely meant a pretty strong police force and a general population heavy with corrections officers.
Both of those things were comforting to me.
When I secured a spot at the shady motel for a night so I could explore the local real estate and job market, I discovered something else. Because the town was in the middle of nowhere,because there wasn’t much chance of upward mobility career-wise, and because no one wanted to live so close to an active prison, the local housing market was slow and cheap.
Hell, I didn’t even have an activejobwhen I asked about the duplex that I now called home. But I had the first, last, and security, and that was all the landlord cared about.
Surprisingly, the job had been easier to come by than I’d anticipated.
I hadn’t actively been seeking employment at the place, actually. I’d just stopped to try to look in the window of the closed pool hall when a brick from the step wobbled and fell out beneath my foot.
I just so happened to have the supplies in my trunk—thanks to needing to fix the bricks on the duplex’s front porch—so I took it upon myself to fix the step.
I was just relishing a job well done when a shadow fell over me.
“You like this kind of work?” a deep, smooth voice asked in a thick Russian accent. I whipped my head around to see a tall man in an all-black suit (in the middle of the day) towering over me in all his dark-haired, wide-jawed, brown-eyed beauty.
“I, uh, yeah. I, you know, probably should have asked first. But it fell out under my foot, so I sort of felt responsible. And, well, it was a safety concern.”
“But you like it? You… fix things?”
“I mean, I’m no master craftsman or anything, but I know a thing or two.” I knew more than that, but it was a bad habit of mine to play down what I was capable of.
“What about cleaning?”
“What about it?” I asked. Feeling at a disadvantage in that position, I moved to stand, but still found myself craning my head up to look at him.
“When you’re not fixing things, do you care to clean?”
“I mean, we all have to clean, right?” Except, judging by the man’s gold watch and cufflinks that probably cost more than my rent—for the year—maybe he didn’t. He wasn’t the kind of man I could picture on his hands and knees cleaning out the lower cabinets or swishing a wand around a toilet bowl. He was the kind of man who had ‘people for that.’
