Amaya“Are you sure you’re all right?” I asked, for what felt like the thousandth time since we’d left the restaurant.“I’m fine,” Kristo assured me, but he had barely spoken a word to me since we’d left a few hours before. What was going on with him? Had I managed to piss him off in some way? Had I done something wrong? I felt like it had gone well, as well as could be expected, yet he was sitting there, hands on the wheel and gaze fixed dead ahead, looking as though someone had jammed a ramrod up his ass.“I liked your dad.” I tried to change tack. “And his wife. They seemed nice.”“Yeah, well, don’t get used to her,” Kristo remarked. “They’ll probably be broken up before we are.”“They seemed to really like each other,” I offered, but he didn’t respond. I sank back into the seat. I was already tired from the day we’d had, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to spend the rest of the evening trying to coax conversation out of him if he didn’t want to give it to me.We arrived back at th

Kristo“Fuck,” I muttered to myself as I yanked down the door at the side of the van. Could they have made this thing any harder to use if they’d set out especially to do so?“You all right there?” Amaya called to me as she wheeled her sister out of the home and toward the van I was trying to beat into submission. I nodded.“Yeah, it’ll be fine,” I assured her, kicking the ramp to make sure it wasn’t going to give out beneath her sister. “You ready?”“Yup,” Jolene called back to him, and she had a grin on her face that threatened to split it in two. I couldn’t help but smile back. I was supposed to be meeting with my family today, but I had begged off dinner with them once I realized it had been a couple of weeks, and I still hadn’t fulfilled my promise to take Jolene out for a day with the two of us. Amaya had been nervous, but she had agreed, and I was already looking forward to getting out of the city for a while. It had been a long week at work, and I hadn’t had a chance to see a

Amaya“Fuck,” I muttered as I fumbled with the new set of keys. I just wanted to get the fuck home, but I still had to figure out how to drive this thing.It had started off when my car had given up the ghost that morning after I arrived for work. I had intended to go out and grab some coffee for the rest of the staff, but the engine basically shuddered and died right there on the spot, finally done for. It had been threatening to break down for months, and I had never had the time or the money to get it fixed. I could have just called Kristo and asked him to lend us one of his cars, but the insurance company had given me a new one before it even crossed my mind, and I didn’t want to bother him.Then, of course, things had taken a turn into the even-worse when I’d had a confrontation with one of the younger librarians. She had picked up her job a little later than me, and it hadn’t been what she wanted.“Please, can you just give this a little time?” I had asked her, but she had shake

KristoI got to my feet and began to pace around the apartment. I was exhausted already, and the day had only just begun. I always ended up feeling the same way when I worked from home, antsy and as though there was a fly up my ass keeping me from getting settled.Stretching, I headed over to the window. Maybe I was just missing Amaya. I was used to having her around the apartment, but since I had started ducking work to avoid my sister, I’d been around the house a lot more by myself, and I was missing the hell out of her.I had been ducking out of the office as much as I could recently, hoping Cleo wouldn’t catch on to my game and figure out she was the reason I had barely spent a minute in there the last week or so. She had been haranguing me about getting Amaya out for a trip together, and the last thing I needed was my new wife heading out on the town with my sister and her friends. Cleo had given me a lot of talk about taking her out to a club, and I had a feeling she wasn’t talk

AmayaI brushed through the door and tried to push the remnants of the day to the back of my mind. But they were still fuming there right at the front, fizzing and filling my head.“Oh, thank fuck,” I murmured when I saw the beer sitting out on the table alongside a giant pizza. It smelled so good, it was all I could do not to dive into it headfirst. Kristo emerged from the kitchen right as I grabbed a bottle for myself, and I nearly downed the whole thing in one gulp.“Hey, hey.” He came to me and touched me on the arm. “Drinking too much was what got us into this mess in the first place, remember?”“Yeah, I remember,” I replied and put the bottle down. “Well, actually, I don’t. That’s kind of the problem.”“Oh, that’s a problem, huh?” he remarked, grinning. I took another sip of my beer, and he cracked a bottle open too. I could still feel the warmth and weight of his hand on my skin, and I let my mouth glide over the top of the beer bottle. If anything was going to get my mind off