Read Online Out of the Blues by Mercy Celeste - Free Book Online Page B

you’re a walking stereotype?”
    I found the switch and flooded the kitchen and the back porch with light. He was looking at me in a way that made me wonder if I was safe with him. My life or my ass virginity.
    “I don’t know.” I was back to the person I was this morning when he sat down at my table at Starbucks. Monosyllabic, brain-dead, unable to say boo to a goose. “Why would anyone say boo to a goose, anyway?”
    “Hell if I know. Can we go inside? Or are we going to take a piss off the porch and then make a run through the rain for the car and drive back to the hotel…because right now, man, one or the other. Let’s just do something.”
    I couldn’t fault that logic. Plus he’d ignored my stammering craziness. I opened the door and walked into a memory.
    Chapter Nine
     
    Kilby makes himself at home.
    The kitchen was something straight out of another century. The last one, mid-century if I had to lay odds on it. The white round top fridge hummed along merrily in the corner. The table was one of those aluminum and Formica deals that I grew up seeing in old people’s houses. Not that I minded. I actually liked the tables. If they didn’t cost a fortune and were easier to find I’d have gotten one for my apartment when I was enlisted. I didn't need one now. The farmhouse had everything. This one didn’t have everything, but it had what I expected to find in an old place left to time.
    “Wonder if there’s anything in the fridge?” Mason walked into the place slowly. He was looking around as much as I was. Maybe I should question whether or not he was supposed to be here. Maybe I should wonder if the sheriff’s department would be rolling up outside after we tripped some hidden alarm system.
    The fridge rattled when he opened it. “Beer, soda, water, but no food.” He took out a beer and looked at the label. “From a year ago. Probably horse piss by now.”
    “Probably.” I took the bottle from him and hooked the top on the old bottle opener screwed into the wall beside the fridge. It was flat, but I didn’t care.
    He took a cola and did the same. “What?”
    “Nothing,” I said looking around at the dust on the counters. “Seems like a strange place for a rich kid to grow up.”
    “It was,” he said, a smile playing across his lips. “I hated being here the first six months or so after Arden dumped us all and ran off. Cody was hiding out from something and…Cody Gillette, he was our stepfather. Hell, he wasn’t but around twenty years older than we were and he was probably the only real adult in our lives…anyway, he stayed so we’d have something normal I guess. He never said much about it all, either way.”
    Mason rambled along in the old house, walking down hallways and flipping switches as he went. He knew where he was going and I followed because I was too tired and the flat beer seemed to say this was a good idea.
    The living room was a hodge-podge of old furniture. The sofa looked like an antique until you noticed that it had no legs. Mason walked over to one of those old stereo systems that was hidden in a large cabinet. He flipped up the lid and static crackled in the room. He laughed. The sound was heartbreaking. I heard the scrape of a needle on vinyl and music floated softly around the room.
    Bluesy rock with Cody Gillette’s voice reached out to seduce me back to my teens when I’d been so young and stupid. I got laid the first time listening to this song on the radio. He was that same guy from bible school. We parked out in the hayfield I’d worked in that afternoon helping bale. I let him fuck me over the tailgate of my step-daddy’s truck and I never saw him again.
    I was pretty sure there was no alcohol left in this bottle of beer, but I sure as hell felt lightheaded as Mason swayed to the music, his willow lean body more graceful than any man I’d ever been with. His hair fought the loose bun he’d pulled it into. He looked so young and I wanted to go over and