Page 20 of Rent a Bad Boy

When she’s comfortable, she won’t shut up. She’ll talk about the chickens, her classes, and whatever else is bouncing around in her head.

When she goes silent, it means her brain is starting to spiral. Based on the way she’s chewing her thumbnail again, the scenarios she’s come up with so far aren’t great.

I pull into my driveway and cut the engine. She leans forward and looks through the windshield at the house. Around five expressions wash over her face in three seconds.

Finally, she asks, “This is your house?”

“Yeah.”

“Your house.” She looks at me, then back at the house. “Like, the whole thing?”

“The whole thing.”

“Do you share it with anyone?”

“No. It’s all mine.”

She’s doing the math in her head. College student plus scholarship that only covers tuition plus whatever she thinks I make doing whatever she thinks I do equals this still doesn’t add up.

She’s right. It doesn’t add up with the information she has. I’m not giving her the rest of it today. She doesn’t need to know the down payment came from fourteen months of bare-knuckle fighting in warehouses and parking garages. She doesn’t need to know every piece of furniture inside was paid for with somebody else’s blood on my hands. That the reason I bought a place instead of renting is because nobody can take a house away from you the way a landlord can take an apartment. I spent enough of my childhood getting moved around to know I never wanted to feel that again.

She doesn’t need to know any of that. Not yet.

“How can you...” She trails off, confused.

“Are you coming inside, or are you going to sit in the truck and ask me about my real estate situation?”

That gets a small, nervous laugh out of her. She unbuckles her seatbelt and follows me up the walkway. I notice her attention on the bushes along the path, which I planted myself last spring because the yard looked bare and it bothered me. I don’t tell her that either. There’s a version of me that plants bushes and makes his bed. I even keep a clean kitchen.

Then there’s the version of me that breaks people’s faces for cash and levels my opponents on the football field. I’ve gotten very good at making sure nobody sees both at the same time.

Inside, her eyes move across the living room. She’s trying to understand me by trying to understand my space.

It won’t give her much. I keep it clean because chaos reminds me of growing up. I keep it minimal because I’ve never had enough stuff to fill a house, and I don’t see the point of pretending. But what’s here is taken care of. The couch doesn’t have stains. The kitchen counter is wiped down. The floors are swept. I don’t need much, but what I have, I maintain. That’s a lesson I taught myself a long time ago, when the only things I owned were a duffel bag and a pair of cleats, and I treated them like they were made of gold because nobody was going to replace them if I didn’t.

She’s nervous. I don’t need her to tell me. I see it in the way she’s wrapped her arms around herself and the way her eyes keep moving. Her whole posture tells me she’s waiting for permission to exist in my space.

“This is really nice.” She looks up at me with a weak smile that doesn’t last very long. “It really is.”

“Thank you. Is that why you’re so nervous?”

“I’m not nervous.” Somebody should tell that to her voice, which just jumped two octaves. “I’m observing.”

“You’re nervous.”

“Fine. Maybe a little.” She tightens her arms around herself like she’s afraid she’s going to fall apart. “I’ve never been to a guy’s house before. Alone. With no reason.”

Something hot and dangerous uncoils in my belly as I close the distance between us. “You have a reason.”

“Do I?” She’s chewing her lip again, but she doesn’t back away, does she?

“We don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do,” I tell her.

I see it in her eyes when she looks up at me. She’s not afraid of me. She’s afraid of wanting this, which is different. I probably understand it better than she thinks I do.

“I want to,” she whispers. I swear to God, her face looks like it’s going to burst into flames. Even her ears are red. “I just... I’m a little worried. You’re too big to fit inside me.”

Jesus fucking Christ. I have to work very hard not to react to that. I mean, what guy doesn’t want to hear it? And she’s probably not wrong—just looking at us side by side would make a person wonder how I’d fit all of me into something as tiny as her.