Page 21 of Housesitter

“...you,” Kel conceded.

“Thank you,” Ruby said tartly. “So listen to someone older and wiser, and keep your expectations in check. God knows, we both remember what happened the last time you got your hopes up. Don’t we?”

Kel grimaced and reached down to rub his knee at the reminder.

“Learning to walk again isn’t something you forget,” he said. “Don’t worry, Ruby. I learned my lesson.”

“Which was?” she prodded.

“The shit will always hit the fan,” he said. “Expect it, and it won’t get in your mouth.”

Ruby gave a short nod of approval. Then sighed as she looked at Kel’s face, and her expression softened.

“You know I don’t bust your balls just for fun?” she checked. “But you and me, kid, we’re the same. And it was shitty enough living through my mistakes once. I don’t want to see you making the same ones.”

“You don’t have to worry about that,” Kel said.

Ruby snorted. “I don’t?” she said. “I remember whistling after spending the night with someone. It didn’t end well. For anyone.”

She looked at him pointedly. Kel drained his coffee and walked over to give her a peck on one powdery cheek.

“Trust me, I know better than that,” he said. “I won’t make the same mistakes. I promise.”

Kel could still run.

It hurt like fuck, but he could still run.

At least he could when a pissed-off orphan with a sawed-off shotgun and whiskey breath was behind him.

Kel crossed the distance between Milligan’s and the fence fast enough that his old coach would actually have cracked a smile. He dodged behind the oversized wheel of Milligan’s rusty tractor and leaned back against it. Sweat itched the back of his neck as he tilted his head back against the sun-baked rubber and grimaced as he breathed through the pain in his legs.

“I told you to get the hell off my property,” Sandra Milligan yelled from the porch of the old farmhouse. There was the distinct schlick-click of another round being chambered into Milligan’s old gun. “And I can still see you.”

Kel had a beat to decide whether to duck or dodge. He went with duck. It was the right call. The blast from the shotgun took a fist-sized lump out of the tire just above his head and sprayed chunks of rubber across the ground and over the fence.

Milligan’s old sow, pink and bored, with a belly to the mud, grunted in annoyance as it bounced off her back.

“Oh, you think you have it bad,” Kel muttered at the animal as he shook tire out of his hair. The sow gave him a bored look, flicked a mud-caked ear, and turned to wade to the other side of her pen.

Kel gingerly leaned forward and risked a look around the side of the tractor.

Sandra Milligan didn’t look much like her dad. Too polished. Too much hair. Now that she’d tried to shoot him, though, Kel could see the resemblance.

It was around the jaw.

“Yeah, well,” Kel yelled back at Sandra. “My health insurance isn’t great, but my car insurance is even worse. So…”

It was a joke.

Apparently it wasn’t a good one.

Sandra cracked the gun open over her arm, smoke wisping from the barrel, and fumbled two shells out of the pocket of her blazer.

“Fucking vulture,” she muttered, then pitched her voice to carry again. “You’ve got to the count of five to get off my property, or I’m mailing you back to the bank in a fucking flask.”

OK.

That was both a window of opportunity and Sandra’s opening bid in the negotiation. Kel could work with that.