Page 117 of LOT 62

“What?” I barked at him for interrupting me. Again.

“Have you seen this shit?” he asked, thrusting a wad of papers at me.

I climbed out from under the busted sink and looked at the papers he held out. “Uh, yeah.”

“What the hell is this charge? Who pays that much for something?”

I wiped my hands on a towel and refrained from rolling my eyes. “It’s called house insurance, Madd. We pay that shit now.”

“No,” he scoffed. “No fucking way. Return it.”

Okay, couldn’t hold back the eye-roll any longer. “You’re the one who wanted to buy this piece of shit house. This is the price we have to pay.”

“But this much?” He jabbed his finger against the monthly amount before raising his hand to show off our place. “For this shit shack?”

I grabbed a can of lemonade from the fridge—at least it worked—handed him his own, and then went outside. He followed. Like a puppy.

“You know we pay truck insurance too, right?”

“What? Since when?” He grabbed my shoulder. “Where are you getting all this money from?”

Maddox was stupid. I mean, I spent so long being the dumb one in our relationship that it felt damn good to be the smart one now. He could work on a farm and repair things outside just fine, but when it came to money, running a house, budgeting, or any basic adult responsibility, he failed. Hard. He even bought name-brand things at the grocery store without a coupon, and now he wanted to bitch at me about insurance? Fuck him.

“We work, dipshit,” I reminded him, sitting on the slanted front porch.

“You’re telling me we work this hard just to pay insurance we’ll probably never need? That’s rookie league, Devon. Take it back. Cancel it.”

Idiot. “We can’t have a mortgage without house insurance. Get over it or sell this hunk of junk.”

Maddox sat down on the step of our front porch. It broke, and he landed on his ass one step down. He uttered a million curses, but he didn’t get up.

We moved into this shithole a few months ago. It was small, barely standing, decrepit, and half-rotted in most places, but goddammit, it was ours. We had the mortgage and the insurance to prove it. Maddox had fixed up some of the outside things, and I’d been working on the inside things—a deal we made once we realized we sucked at working on the same projects together—and it was sort of coming around. Our water heater didn’t work, so cold showers were the new norm. The sink leaked, the shower drain was clogged, the roof leaked in three different places, and the septic tank needed pumping, but look at the view!

Maddox had originally wanted to live on a houseboat, but we ended up doing so much better. This hovel might sink over time, but at least it wouldn’t drown us in anything but debt. We bought a shitty little shack on the beach a few minutes outside Garron. We were real citizens of the community now. We had no neighbours, no streetlights, and no power half the time, but it was home.

“Dogs cost money, too,” I reminded him.

Maddox glared at me, and my skin goosebumped at the intensity of it. “I’m getting a dog, Devon. If you get insurance, I get a dog.”

I grinned, sipping my drink. Maddox still worked on the farm with Pete, and the two of them had found out one of the farm dogs was pregnant. She gave birth a few months ago, and Maddox fell in love with one of the pups, so I guess it was ours now. He was a mutt, but all the best ones were.We were mutts.

“When do we get him?” I asked.

“Next week. He’ll be ten weeks then. He’s so fucking chill, Dev.”

Maddox bragged about this dog non-stop. He’d take him to work during the day and bring him home at night so he never had to be alone out here. If this dog was going to be our baby, Maddox was already the world’s best dad.

“Do you want an actual kid?” I asked him, not really hoping for one answer over the other.

Maddox shrugged. Typical. “Learn to cook something and I’ll think about it.”

“Learn to pay a bill and I’ll learn to cook, asshole,” I countered.

Maddox finished his drink and tossed the can on the porch. “Fine, but you better learn to cook something fast because I’m fighting for a BBQ at fight night tomorrow.”

Of course he was. He’d been gunning for one ever since someone put up a BBQ over a year ago. “We can’t afford meat.”

Maddox pointed to the ocean. “Fuck ton of food in there. Get fishing.”

---