“Just waiting for the other shoe to drop.”
“I came here looking for you and was alarmed when I saw the stuff in the driveway and that young man out front was holding this in his hands.” She handed me the wrinkled notice I had ripped off the front door.
“What young man?” I asked, sitting up and pulling my hood from my face.
She crouched next to me, still sweating from her neck, still holding the same clipboard she’d had the other day. “Your cousin, Jake, of course.” She said each word slowly like she was trying to tell me more than what she was really saying.
“My cousin? Jake? My cousin?” I must have sounded insane. I didn’t have any cousins, how would she get the impression that Jake was my…oh shit.
“What did you say to him?” I asked. Suddenly, I cared what he thought of me, though I didn’t know why it mattered.
“He just told me that you two stopped here to sort through some of your grandmother’s things and that you had come back here to make sure you didn’t miss anything,” Miss Thornton said.
“He said what?”
She huffed, like she shouldn’t be wasting her time on an idiot like me, like there was something I wasn’t getting in all this.
I wasn’t getting anything in any of it.
“I asked him about your Aunt Priscilla, and I was very sorry to hear that she had to leave town so suddenly.”
“Me too…” Maybe, I should just agree with everything she said. In the end, it wouldn’t matter anyway. She was here to take me away. I was about to tell her to save the paperwork, that I was going to opt-out the first chance I got. “Listen, you can take me if you have to, but it’ll be pointless, because if you do I’m just going to…” She was ignoring me. I was starting to get desperate. I was contemplating reaching for my knife in my boot and taking the next ten seconds to turn myself into a felon.
Miss Thornton said something that stopped me, mid-felony.
“I explained to your cousin that I was here to take you to a new foster home…” Here we go. “...but he told me it wouldn’t be necessary, because you’d be staying with him.”
What the fuck?
“I’m doing what?”
“I verified with Mr. Dunn that he has a residence, employment, the means to take care of you, and he meets the age qualification of twenty-one and over. It’s a shame I didn’t know sooner that you had a cousin. This paperwork could have been done days ago. I’d only have to remove you under emergency circumstances, and now that you have a relative here to care for you, there is no need for that.”
Residence? I thought. Employment? He was in town temporarily, wasn’t he?
Jake told her I could live with him?
She flipped a page on the clipboard, placed it on my lap and handed me a pen. “Here, sign this.”
“What is this?”
“Since you’re over the age of sixteen, you’re required to sign an agreement for your non-foster living arrangement.” I signed on the line where she was tapping her fat, sweaty finger, but before I handed her back her clipboard, I noticed the line above where I had just signed had another freshly inked signature on it.
Jacob Francis Dunn was signed in bold blue letters over a line that read Signature of Legal Guardian of Minor Child.
There was not a lot in this life that confused me. I understood that, aside from myself, people were pretty black and white for the most part. But that paper was definitely the most confusing thing I had ever encountered.
I was pretty sure that the man with the beautiful blue eyes, the temper and the big sexy bike—the very man who I had heard getting sucked off in a junkyard little more than twenty-four hours ago, mere moments before he put a gun to my head—had just adopted me.
CHAPTER EIGHT
WHEN I WALKED BACK TO THE FRONT YARD with Miss Thornton, Jake was leaning against his bike, smoking a cigarette. His eyes followed me, his face completely unreadable.
He nodded to Miss Thornton as she got into her little silver car and started the engine. Then he passed me the helmet and got off the bike so I could get on first, just like we had done earlier. I stood starting at him open-mouthed for what seemed like an eternity before he gave me a you coming? look.
I placed the helmet on my head and straddled the bike, grabbing the bar behind the seat. Jake got on after me, and we started down the road. After only a few minutes, we pulled into the parking lot at Dunn’s Automotive Repair. Jake parked the bike at the end a small dirt driveway on the side of the building. When I took off my helmet, I discovered that Miss Thornton had followed us and was now parked behind Jake’s bike.