As with everything I did with Mike, it came naturally.

Chapter Eight

Way Past Curfew

“Have you lost your mind?”

“Jerra, honey, Mike’s gonna be here in a couple of minutes.”

Suffice it to say, I shouldn’t have taken my girl Jerra’s call while in the midst of preparing to meet Mike’s kids and go out to dinner. And I definitely shouldn’t have shared that I’d driven myself and my babies up to my childhood home and then approximately three and a half hours later reconciled with the guy I fell for who broke my heart, both happening in the expanse of two weeks.

She was not as happy as Rhonda was when I told her Mike and me hooked up that morning after the boys went off to school. Rhonda was kind of a prude but definitely a romantic and clearly Darrin had shared his dreams about Mike and me with his wife. So I left out all the juicy stuff and definitely the Mike being a dick stuff. And I told her the whole thing cautiously because she’d just lost her husband and I didn’t want to rub my new relationship in her face however crazy it might be (not that I told her the crazy parts).

I also didn’t share with her I knew she gave Mike the diaries or that Mike shared them with me. I probably would never go there. It shocked the shit out of me she had the gumption to take them to Mike in the first place. She was delicate always, now extremely. I was there to try to patch her up, not shatter her.

But she was ecstatic about what I did tell her, like, off the wall, whacked out ecstatic. I’d been around her three times since Darrin died and she hadn’t been even close to that animated any of those times. Or, actually, pretty much any time I saw her in the twenty years she’d been with my brother.

I thought this was good.

Jerra, who had had several drunken orgies with me since Mike broke up with me, was understandably the opposite. She’d been riding my high that we hooked up then she rode my uncertainty when he closed me down then she plummeted with me when I lost him. She’d then commiserated with me when Fin called to let me in on what was going down and I had no choice but to put my life on hold and haul my ass up to Indiana to sort out Rhonda’s shit, help Fin with the land and prepare to go head-to-head with my bitchface sister. All of this on a farm that was a hop, skip and a jump from Mike Haines’s back gate.

Now she thought I was crazy.

“Hunter! Get this! Dusty has been back up in Hoosierland for about a day and she’s hooked up again with that f**kin’ Mike guy!” I heard her shout.

“Jerra, please, I have to get ready,” I told her, sitting on the bed, holding my phone between my ear and shoulder and yanking on my kickass fawn suede cowboy boot. They were boots that I bought six years ago to wear on my babies but I loved them so much they never saw a stirrup. They might not have ridden the range but they did see a lot of barroom dance floors.

“You’re f**king shittin’ me!” I heard Hunter shout back.

“I wish I was but no!” Jerra shouted to Hunter.

“Can you guys have your conversation when I’m not freaking out about meeting the two teenage kids of my on-again, off-again boyfriend? This being his title even though I’ve been with him in person for approximately thirty-two hours and who, incidentally, has not once introduced one of his women to his kids.”

Jerra’s attention came back to me and I knew this when she asked sharply, “You’re freaking out?”

“Uh…yeah,” I answered.

“You never freak out.”

“Honey, hello? I’ve been in love with this guy since I was twelve. And he’s never introduced his kids to any of his women,” I stressed. “And I think I told you how hot he is.”

“Yeah, in detail,” she agreed.

“Ergo, he’s had a lot of women.”

“Wow, that’s kinda big,” she muttered, I fell back on the bed in exasperation and she went on, “Right, just at least tell me he had a good excuse for being a huge jackass.”

“I can’t seeing as he didn’t have a good excuse, he had a bunch of them. I can’t even enumerate them. What I can say is that for a hot guy, he not only has awesome command of his hot parts, he also has awesome command of the English language. He used it and it worked on me. Mainly because he meant every word.”

“He’d have to,” she kept muttering.

Right, I had to give her something.

So I did.

“He told me every sign he was getting from me was that I was his dream.”

Jerra perked up. “Oo, that’s good. What else?”

My eyes went to the digital display of the alarm clock Rhonda had next to the bed in the guest room and my heart spiked as I shot to sitting on the bed. “Jerra! I can’t! He’s going to be here in five minutes and I have only one boot on.”

“Oh, he’ll be late. They always are.”

“Mike won’t.”

“He will. They always are. The hotter, the later. Hunter was always at least half an hour late for every date. No other man would I put up with that but because Hunter was pretty and Little Hunter was big and pretty and Big Hunter knows how to use him, I put up with it.”

I didn’t need for Jerra to start waxing poetic about “Little Hunter”. I knew all about “Little Hunter” and Big Hunter’s Olympic-class skills using “him”. If she started, she could go on for hours. I knew this because she’d done it. Often.

Instead, I skirted that topic and informed her, “He was never late for a date with Debbie.”

And I knew this because, back in the day, I paid close attention.

“Euw, that’s just weird,” Jerra mumbled.

“It was twenty-five years ago.”

“No, I mean that he’d date Debbie.”

I was with her on that one.

“Back then, she didn’t dress like a scary lesbian and have one of those blue tooth thingie-ma-bobbies surgically attached to her ear,” I explained. I knew Jerra knew what I was talking about since Debbie had been down to my house in Texas (once), Jerra met her and it didn’t go well. Not the visit and not Debbie’s meeting with Jerra. Then again, this was Debbie. She’d rub the Pope the wrong way even if he was in a great mood. “She was actually really pretty.”

“Beauty comes from within, sister,” she reminded me.

She was right about that too.

“Right, then he was a teenage boy, she was really pretty and she put out,” I told her.

“That explains it,” she murmured.