The Co-op

Chapter Three

CHAPTER THREE

L A RYNN

A few things I take stock of as Elyse and I spend an additional ten minutes looking for a parking spot:

First, clearly Deacon and I are in no place for sarcasm. My remark about him being an ass quickly turned into something a little too real and left me a bit too chapped.

Secondly, in the near decade since I last saw him, I made the unfortunate error of forgetting how it feels to be in his proximity. I’ve grown so accustomed to being as tall as the men around me, or taller. The sheer size of him makes me jittery, uneasy in a way. That advice we all got as kids before a nature-related activity pops into my mind: If you see a bear, act bigger than it. Be bigger than the bear.

And it just fucking figures he’d look the same, somehow. The same, but woefully better. I’ve successfully avoided most pictures, conveniently avoided holidays when I knew he’d be spending them with our grandmothers. And the only times I’ve (drunkenly) looked him up over the years, his accounts have been private. But all the things that needled me so thoroughly before are still there in all their glory. The same dark eyes that trap you, the kind that make you curious enough to get closer.

Nope, now’s not the time to slip down that particular mental spiral.

After Elyse and I pull into a spot three blocks away, we narrow down and prioritize the things I need to bring up and start making the trek back to the building in a frustrated daze.

By the time we amble up to the corner of First Street, I’m sufficiently irritable and my various packs keep slipping down my sweaty shoulders.

“Oh, you’re shitting me,” I growl when I see Deacon leaning against the open doorway of the perfectly vehicle-free garage.

“Thought you’d changed your mind and gone back home,” he says. I bite back the urge to tell him that this is just as much my home. Mostly because it doesn’t feel entirely true.

He makes no move to help either of us, but he does proceed to talk some more. “I’ll keep it open and let you guys park here for the night.”

That kicks up the embers of my temper again. “ Let? We don’t need you to let us do anything, Deacon,” I say. “Except get upstairs and get settled before you and I are forced to interact much more.” I know I shouldn’t give him this sort of power over me, but I need to get my bearings, somehow.

“Even so, before you go—”

“Nah-ah. Settled first.”

“That’s fine, but —”

“Bye for now.” I avoid meeting his gaze for too long and wheel past him with my luggage, Elyse following behind. It’s clear I need a minute to pee and collect myself before I can attempt a grown-up conversation with him.

“Rynn,” Elyse whispers when we make it inside the hallway. “I think I should remind you that you need him to be agreeable, so maybe a little kindness wouldn’t kill you?”

“I know,” I groan back. “I just—need a minute.”

We slip past the laundry area and head toward the stairs, luggage wheels rolling noisily over the tile. Everything, down to the washer and dryer, looks exactly the same, but something is… off. I decide I’ll put my finger on it later and start trudging up the stairs, my bag knocking painfully into my heels with each step.

It feels so much more open than before, somehow. The window across from the landing looks out to the now-setting sun over the ocean, the pier jutting from its center.

And, almost as if I can’t help myself, I pause, suddenly hopeful. Grateful that my grandmothers left me this piece of them, deserving of it or not. It’s a foundation for me to build my own life on, a soft place to land for a time. I’m nearly penniless, completely directionless, and barely speaking to my parents. But I have Elyse, and I have this shelter by the sea.

Elyse has pushed past me during my musing, so I snap to and catch up, frowning when I see the look on her face. “Rynn…”

“Hey, Larry,” Deacon says to my right.

I look that way now and—

“What the fuck?! How the hell did you get up here?” I shout. I do a double take when Elyse catches my eye with her dramatically widened ones.

“Poltergeist,” she whispers in mock terror.

“I’m adept at scaling the balcony,” he drawls, and I feel my face go hot. He knows how to scale that balcony because of how often I snuck him in that way when I was nineteen.

“I also installed a fire escape,” he adds, vaguely bored and tilted against the skeleton of a wall that once held a mishmash of art. I recall the ceramic key hooks Helena made during her pottery stint and almost let a laugh escape, remembering Grandma rolling her eyes at Hel because “Could we be any more cliché than coastal grandmother lesbians who garden and throw clay?”

And now they’re gone. Left this world mere months apart from one another.

A sharp ache burns through my throat and I will it to harden into frustration, aim it back at Deacon instead. The emotional whiplash has me flailing for those bearings I needed to find and coming up empty.

I look beyond him and see the majority of my grandmother’s original place. Or at least what’s left of it. It appears to be freshly primed in the intact areas, patched up in others. But… there are scant few cabinets, no appliances—well, aside from a minifridge and an oven. The bare minimum as far as furniture goes… and more of the walls are gone than standing. There’s not even insulation in some.

“Where are the rest of the walls, Deacon?”

His brows inch down. “You wouldn’t respond. I tried to tell you what happened, six months ago.”

Shame twists in my chest. I didn’t consider how ignoring him would look, until now. How it’d make me look exactly like the selfish brat he always made me out to be. But both of our grandmothers were gone. The worst had already happened. I figured it couldn’t be important and wanted to avoid anything that brought it all up again. He also could have laid it out in an email. “What happened?” I ask again.

He stands up from the wall and walks our way, bringing with him the full awareness of a grown man at ease in his body.

I’m forced to acknowledge it, now—just how very much he is a man in comparison to the boy I spent a summer with, even if he’d been twenty. From the five o’clock shadow dusting his sharpened jaw, to the nose with a slight bump that only makes it more masculine, and the wide mouth that I know cracks into an impossibly wider smile, down to the shoulders and arms and legs that have filled out… immensely. He was an athlete before. At six foot four it was to be expected. Brown hair with a slight curl, a tiny bit overgrown and arranged artfully in a way that’s just fucked-up enough to look like he’s not trying. Or like it was mussed by someone’s hands clenching it while he eagerly buried his face between her thighs, inky-dark eyes either peering up between them in smug satisfaction, or closed in his own enjoyment. It’s all too easy for me to picture.

And even back when we were teens he dressed like someone’s uncle on vacation—a look that’s somehow managed to become a style these days. He’s wearing an unbuttoned red shirt dotted in tiny redwoods slung loosely over a plain white tank top that clings to him. I spy the Santa Sea Campground logo and quietly snort. Another thing that’s stayed the same, though now I know that he owns the place rather than just works at it. The ensemble’s completed by dirty blue jeans and work boots. A smattering of chest hair peeks up from the neck of his top, something I notice when he reaches up to scratch at a spot there, along with an octopus tattooed on his hand—both new. But gone are the vestiges of lanky limbs, replaced by ropes of broad muscle and even more assuredness.

“A fire,” he says. “Faulty wiring. I tried telling them for years, when things kept going wrong. I think there were too many corners cut when they did their original reno, Rynn.” His gentler tone throws me off.

“She never said anything to me,” I explain, trying to keep the plea out of my voice. “I didn’t know anything was even going wrong.” The times that I visited, I don’t remember anything other than the odd switch not working, or outlets that would trip easier than others.

But, I see this turn over in his expression. I’ve managed to say the wrong thing—again. Shit.

“Well, I guess you wouldn’t know much about the current state of things, either, would you?” he sneers. “Since you didn’t bother to get back to me. Since you couldn’t even call me when her wife, who loved you like her own granddaughter, died.”

A knot of guilt tightens in my gut, but Elyse cuts in to save me from responding.

“Excuse me,” she says, “but where can we put her shit?” She swipes exasperatedly through the air with her free hand.

“The Dream Inn is a block away,” he offers.

My head twists back in his direction with the menace of a haunted doll. “I still own fifty percent of this,” I remind him, gesturing to the disaster zone around us. “I’m not going to a hotel.”

His chin dips, dark gaze lazily sliding its way up from my feet to my face. I resist the urge to adjust my shirt or hair or perform any other nonsensical tick under his assessment.

He narrows his eyes. “I was understandably concerned about Sal living here after the fire incident, in addition to the plumbing issues—”

“ Plumbing issues?”

“—so, I’ve been staying here.” He points in a circle around him.

“As in, full-time?!” It comes out a whine.

His jaw clenches, a vein pulses in his forehead, and a thrill shocks through me—a feeling I chase with disgust. I need manageable, proportionate, and sensible emotions these days. Ones that I can fathom and digest. The last thing I need is to get excited or, heaven forbid, aroused over getting someone else worked up. Even when it comes to attraction, I prefer something approachable that I can still separate from, not the kind that overtakes me without warning. I’ve learned that it is totally okay to have healthy feelings for others from a safe distance, where I have more control over my reactions. That way, it’s a lot less miserable when they end.

His eyes flick to a spot on my neck like he can still see a hickey he left there years ago, and I reach up and wipe at it. Shit again .

“It’s been a full-time job,” he gruffly states.

“Where’d her furniture go? Did everything get destroyed?” I ask, voice hitching.

His expression stutters and softens at the emotion I didn’t catch. “A lot of it, yeah. What wasn’t is in the garage under storage blankets.”

Elyse shoulders past me. “Does your couch fold out?” she asks him.

He frowns sharply. “Uhhh…” A disbelieving laugh before he turns back to me. “You really can’t stay here. Seriously. I am living here. There are almost no walls.”

I gust out an angry laugh back. “Or what? You gonna threaten me with the cops now?”

“Sure! Lawyer already told me I could sue for your half of ownership since you haven’t contributed on the expenses,” he says, shrugging and jutting out his lip in an expression that’s meant to look casual or carefree, but comes off petulant instead. “Bet I could get you evicted pretty easily.” He finishes with a condescending smile.

“This is California, Deacon. Even squatters have rights.”

“Squatting on something doesn’t mean you control it, Princess,” he sneers. “Especially when you treat it like you don’t care in the first place.”

A breath punches out of me. Was that supposed to be a dig at how I treated him? No, can’t be. That would mean he gave a shit and that is the sort of thinking that had me searching for more meaning between the lines and landing on the wrong side of heartbreak before.

So, even though his statement is wrong (and inadmissible in court), I bite down on the proverbial wooden spoon to hold back any boiling retorts, and swallow my bravado. “You called me and I’m here now,” I quietly reply. We’ve gotten closer at some point, and I catch a whiff of him. Clean sweat, salt air, then something minty, like laundry detergent or bodywash that’s always named after a tree. There’s a preternatural warmth under all of it, too, like his skin knows how to steal it from campfire. It’s the same scent from seven years ago, and I am mortified that I remember it. He’s the first to break eye contact, running a palm down his face as he turns around and surveys the room.

“I can’t afford it,” he concedes when he spins back. “Sal’s rent barely covers the taxes, and I’ve already dumped, like, over fifty grand into it, which you owe me for, by the way.”

I can’t help it, I look around the desolate space. “Fifty grand, where ?!” I cry.

The conversation continues in a similar pattern as Deacon walks us through exactly what damage was sustained and where, as well as what he’s repaired. We take two steps forward, then one step back when one of us adopts a tone or makes a remark the other doesn’t like. Having Elyse here as a buffer keeps us moving through it, I think, but I’m sure her patience is wearing thin.

“What is it you need from me, exactly?” I eventually say to Deacon, interrupting as he gesticulates to yet another empty place that should have a wall. The water damage from the sprinklers took more out than the fire itself did, it seems. “We have to sell it, I guess?” My voice sounds more hollowed out than this entire floor.

He studies his feet, then palms the back of his neck and looks up from under his brow at me. “The problem is, they put it in a trust to try and protect us from capital gains and all that, but they also did their first renovation unpermitted. Which means that insurance didn’t cover shit. Found that out when I had to get everything cleaned up and certified as safe to live in for Sally downstairs. Don’t even think I’m legally allowed to be living up here, but…” He lets his cheeks fill with air before blowing it all out in a long, defeated breath. “If we were splitting everything down the middle? If we could get even on what I’ve already spent on new permits and repairs? And if you could front the funds to finish it? Then we could rent it out. We could afford it if we were also collecting rent, and if we were splitting the expenses together.”

Frustration is a corkscrew tightening my shoulders. “Deacon, I don’t have the money to fix all of this,” I tell him. “I was already planning on selling my car to get by for a while. Now I know I need to sell it to pay you back.”

He rolls his eyes . This meatball in the body of a man. Ass .

“What?!” I screech.

He gives me a dull look. “I don’t believe you, that’s what.”

My teeth grind and I feel my jaw twitch. “Deacon,” Elyse starts to say, but I put my hand on her arm to stop her. He just snorts a quiet laugh through his nose and shakes his head at me.

“Come on, Lar. I heard the grands talk about you having a trust fund before,” he says. “You don’t think it’s worth dipping into? For this place? For them ?” He spans a big muscled arm wide, and it’s the first time I notice Helena’s urn on the counter. I trap a gasp between my teeth and he presses on. “Even if you end up spending more than I already have, I’d be fine letting you collect all the rent or whatever until we were squared.”

“How generous.” An un generous and unhelpful remark on my part, but I’m angry and embarrassed that I can’t do any of what he’s asked. I rip the bandage off and explain. “I don’t have access to my trust fund anymore, Deacon. I haven’t for one year, three months, and two days, since I told my dad I was dropping out of law school.”

Surprise sweeps across his features and makes him stand straighter. The three of us fall into a stilted, uncomfortable silence.

“Rynn,” Elyse says too gently. Like she knows I’m in a fragile state. Not in front of him, I think. Please. “I should get back to the shop. I’ve got June manning things,” she says. I nod and force a stiff smile. June is Jensen’s twin, and Elyse’s other best friend. I also met her the summer before college, but we never got close. “She was supposed to be off a few hours ago now, so…” She grimaces.

“Go, go,” I urge. “I’m fine.”

“You guys are good?” she confirms, eyes ping-ponging between us with her brows raised.

“Yeah,” Deacon and I say in unison. Our gazes snag and our expressions mirror each other, mouths both tipping into frowns. I turn back to Elyse. “Totally,” we say again. Fucking hell.

“We’re fine . Really,” I tell her.

She hands my keys back to me and hugs both of us goodbye, tells me we’ll chat later. I walk her through the doorless doorway and watch her go, all the way down the stairs and out of the main entrance.

And then I turn back to Deacon, very much alone.

After four awkward, silent beats and the burning need to do something with my hands, I grab and carry my grandmother’s urn over to the counter where I set it next to Hel’s. I feel Deacon step closer at my back, studying them alongside me.

“I guess we gotta sell the place as is,” he says. He sounds as tired as I feel, all of a sudden.

“I guess we do,” I agree, throat thick.

His sigh is strong enough to ruffle my hair, and I have to swipe it back behind my ear in annoyance. “Wanna go for a walk and figure out the details?” he asks. “I’m starving.”

My stomach chooses this moment to make a noise. I sigh back, trying to sound aloof when I reply. “Sure.”