CHAPTER FOUR
It was late. It was way late. The diner had long since closed and I would normally have been home two hours earlier, but instead of letting the closers clean/shut down/lock up like I normally did, I let them all off early and did it myself.
It was easier to deal with all the thoughts buzzing through my brain when my hands were busy.
Diner…contest…Bash…diner…Lange…Lange and Bash… Oh, and I never did anything fun or dated anyone. All I did was work.
Well, maybe so, but that’s how the bills got paid and the diner stayed afloat. That’s how I paid myself and my employees, how Angel got those cute clothes and the phone that never left her hand. How I was saving for her college and paying for the home health nurse that I’d recently hired to help with my dad.
Who the hell had time for fun?
Plus—Charmed had never really been my biggest ally. Teenage pregnancy might slide under the radar and be forgotten in bigger cities, but little towns like mine had big memories and bigger hypocrites. Everyone liked me? Not quite. I’d gained respect through my management of the Blue Banana Grille, but somehow that managed to fade once I stepped outside those doors. Like once I walked into a club somewhere or went on those few and far between loser dates or just ran into someone I knew at the grocery store, I became that girl again. Allie Greene, Tainted One.
Dating was complicated. Girlfriends were sometimes even more so. It was easier to be sexless Allie Greene, the tough trailer-park girl that rose above and ran the Blue Banana. I didn’t need to find a man to validate me or go out with friends or do any of those things single women were expected to do. I just needed to keep doing what I’d always done. Run my business. Raise my daughter. Make sure my dad was okay. That was enough.
Straightening a napkin holder, I closed my eyes for one second of quiet, of peace—or no, probably not that. Not today. I lowered slowly into the chair as my brain went back to the rotating door.
Not my diner. Not my chair.
That damn contest.
With Bash as a partner.
Someone shoot me.
Once upon a time, every girl in school had a crush on Bash Anderson. He was the hottest thing on legs, with a smile to knock you on your ass and eyes that would go ahead and melt you right into the ground while you were down there. Kind of like now but with homework.
I wasn’t someone that Bash would give a second look back then, but in addition to helping his dad with one single beehive, he worked as a busboy at the diner when my dad was running things and I waited tables. We became friends in that way that people do when they can’t be in real life. When shallow social circles don’t allow the golden boy and the trailer-park girl to hang out in public or have lunch together in the school cafeteria. But at work, closing up late at night, those silly walls faded away. Words came easy to us, snarky personalities melded, dreams were confessed, and secrets unveiled. We both had mothers that had passed away when we were young, leaving big holes behind. Things weren’t all that golden over in the Anderson household, and where my home life was fine, the guy I was seeing from nearby Denning was a neurotic, controlling prick. I didn’t see that yet but Bash did. He became my secret best friend. My ally.
Then the stick turned blue, and my entire senior year became a blur of oh-my-god’s and tears and learning how to hurl quietly so my dad wouldn’t know. Then it was learning how to dress baggy so the school wouldn’t know. Then it was wanting to disappear completely when everyone knew, when my boyfriend decided to bail, and the only person to shoulder my tears was Bash. Through thick and thin and so much drama, he was the one constant that never wavered.
Now we were dancing all around each other because I was a fool. And he was wavering because…
Why the hell was he meeting with Landon Lange?
So, there I was. The boss, cleaning tables and washing dishes and mopping and prepping for the morning. That was something I hadn’t done in probably six or seven years. Even when my dad was there, I’d been managing the place since I was twenty-six, and hadn’t palmed a mop in years, but tonight was different. Tonight, I needed to do more than close the register and sit at my desk doing the paperwork. I needed to get my hands in the weeds of it. Get gritty. Get sweaty. Feel the work that built this place; that kept it going, that kept the people of Charmed coming day after day.
I ran my fingers along the scarred and dented table. If it could talk—if they all could talk, my God, the conversations they’d overheard. The secrets they could divulge. It was a friggin thought-gasm to even consider. The Blue Banana had been serving patrons since before I was born, all under the umbrella of the Greenes. Oliver and Maggie Greene, then he and I, and then just me. I hoped one day Angel, although she’d never shown interest in it. Honestly, that was okay; I just figured I’d lead the ship until I was too old and then pass it on to a deserving soul of my choosing.
This wasn’t my choosing.
This—I gripped the napkin holder until it felt like it had finger holds, and forced myself to let it go before the urge to hurl it across the room took over. This was unbelievable.
The dementia was a blessing right now. It kept me from marching over to that pathetic little trailer and telling my dad off in an enraged fit. I couldn’t be mad at the man he was now, sitting blissfully watching television, unaware and unaffected by anything going on around him. It would do no good to bring it up or ask him about it. He wouldn’t remember it, and if he tried to he’d just get confused and upset and it wasn’t worth all of that.
This was on me to figure out. A stain on the ceiling above table eleven caught my attention and told me that it was on me, too. I needed to call a maintenance guy out, but I had no idea what to say was going on. I’d been so distracted, I’d forgotten to ask Nick to go up on the roof and check it out before he left.
This morning, my biggest headache was worrying about Bash. That feeling of loss, that I was missing something necessary. Bash, my rock, the only one I could talk to about all this crap, who I was suddenly stumbling around like a silly school girl. Now, more than ever, I needed us to be normal again and I didn’t know how to get that.
He’d always been there for me. Nearly sixteen years ago, he was my miracle the night I went into labor a month early, alone in the storeroom, doubled up on the floor and screaming as a tiny human was demanding her way into the world. Bash was my angel as he delivered Angel Elizabeth Greene before the paramedics and my dad could get there.
No one else ever knew that. No one at school. Not Carmen, my only other friend from the park. Not anyone. Nobody knew that Bash Anderson had probably saved both our lives, then held my hand all the way to the hospital saying, “I’ve got you, Al.” And he did. He argued with the nurses when they only let family see the baby, telling them he was family.
He didn’t tell, and neither did I. I just became the girl who had a baby in high school, who got knocked up by some loser who left us behind. Bash became Uncle Bash, he loved my daughter fiercely, and all was good.
Then there was the night. It seemed a million years ago now, but lately it had become like a source document in my head. Angel was almost one, and we were living in a tiny little apartment my dad made for us over the garage. I’d just put her to bed when Bash came over with a fifth of whiskey, two paper cups, and some news. He’d signed up for the marines. He was leaving.
He had to go, he had to get out of Charmed and get away from his dad, and while I understood that, all I could see was no Bash in our lives. I was crushed, we killed the bottle, ended up in a three-minute wild thing on my couch, and then he was gone with an awkward goodbye.
That was fifteen years ago, before he left for six years and I became jaded, before he came back a little less lighthearted, a lot more guarded. Before we both grew up and never spoke of that drunken night again, deciding without words that we were what we were: friends. Family of a sort. Something much more important that neither of us could afford to lose.
It worked for us. All these years, it was good and it worked, and then I went and stirred that shit up.
Damn it.
Now, I needed him. Nobody understood my ties to this place like he did. No one else could understand the need to hold on to something that houses your soul. Bash did. And now—now we were awkward and weird and he was consorting with the damn enemy.
I looked up at the ceiling again, at the spreading stain, and forced my anger to spread throughout my body. I was no weakling. I knew where the ladder was, and I could get on the roof and take care of my own business. I didn’t need a man to do it for me. It was still my damn diner—sort of. Forty-nine percent of it, anyway, belonged to my father. I went to the storeroom, grabbed a flashlight, and headed out the back door to where an aluminum ladder lay horizontal against the building on two hooks. I hoisted it and trekked around to the side of the building, leaning it up against the roofline and peering up into the darkness.
The shakes began.
No. Screw that. I took three deep breaths and shook out my hands.
I’d managed most of my life to be pretty tough, but anything requiring me to leave the ground for more than a few feet stripped me of the role. My irrational fear of heights could be pretty inconvenient when trying to do normal things like jumping off the high dive or riding a Ferris wheel. Not to mention stupid things like—oh—climbing up on the diner roof to prove a point.
I could put on a badass front, but the trembling of the anxiety attack always gave me away. I was too pissed off tonight to let that win, however. Shakes or no shakes, I was getting up on my roof.
The squeak of the rungs as I made it up each step echoed in my head. No big thing. I glanced down and shut my eyes immediately, gripping the ladder tighter with clammy hands.
Don’t look down, idiot.
It was dark, and it was only maybe sixteen feet or so, but looking down for me was always the game changer. Didn’t matter if it was six feet or sixty, up went down, right went left, and panic took over.
“Keep going,” I whispered, feeling the cold sweat break out over my body. “People do this shit all the time. It’s not climbing Mount Everest.”
And yet, reaching the roofline sure as hell felt that way. My breathing grew shallower, and it felt like there was nothing underneath my feet as I looked out over the flat concrete top of the diner. Or at least about five feet of it before it disappeared into shadow. The flashlight hung around my neck, but I’d have to let go of the ladder to mess with that and my hands weren’t having it.
“How the hell do I get from here to there?” I asked the air.
I’d never been up there. My dad certainly knew better than to ever deal with me having a nervous breakdown on top of the diner, so I’d never had to contemplate the logistics of ladder to roof. Did I assume that handles magically sprung from the top? Rails morphed on either side so that one could just keep walking up and traverse the space without fear?
I don’t know what or how I thought it was going to happen up there, but standing at the top hyperventilating on trembling legs I could no longer feel probably wasn’t the best time to figure it out.
“Okay,” I breathed, sliding my hands one at a time from the ladder to the rough concrete of the roof’s surface without ever breaking contact because empty air would send me plummeting to my death. I pictured normal people doing this. Roofers did this all the time and didn’t die. Contractors did this. Maintenance guys like the one I should have called did this. “Okay. You can do this, too.”
I took one more step up, putting more than half my body above the roofline and forcing confidence through my blood—when my equilibrium shifted. And so did the ladder.
It was just a little shift. Metal scraping against concrete. To me, however, it felt like the entire world came out from under me, and all the panic I was trying to tamp down came rushing up in a tsunami-sized wave.
“Shit!” I yelped, lunging forward as the ladder wiggled again.
The flashlight banged against the roof and broke from the lanyard around my neck, clattering off into the dark. Half of me sprawled over the concrete and brick, while everything from my ass down hung off the building. Okay, really, I was hanging over the ladder, but to truly go with the deep-seated terror coursing through my veins, I was hanging off the building by an invisible thread, like something in the movies. Probably ten stories up instead of one.
“Fuck!” I screamed, reaching out at a snail’s pace to find something to grab onto. I didn’t want to move too quickly. Plummeting, and all that. My phone was in my pocket, but there was no way I could get my hand down there. Tears sprang to my eyes as the anxiety-ridden paralysis washed over me. “Oh my God, please get me off this building. I promise I won’t ever touch this ladder again, just—” There was a click from below.
“Who’s up there?”
Relief mixed with mortification flooded my brain.
“You like messing with me, don’t you God?” I whispered through my tears.
“I see you,” Bash said, his voice harsh. “Identify.”
“It’s me,” I said, my forehead pressed against the rough cold of the concrete. “Allie.”
There was a pause and another click as what was likely a nine-millimeter un-chambering a bullet.
“What the hell?” Bash said. “What are you doing?”
“Laying here trying not to die,” I said. “You?”
“Jesus,” I heard him mutter, just before the ladder moved again and rapid creaks sounded as he sprinted up.
I felt the jolts as the ladder bumped me, and I sucked in a breath.
“Don’t!” I yelled in a cracked voice. “It’ll pull me down!”
“You aren’t going anywhere,” he said, suddenly right below me. “I’ve got you.”
I’ve got you.
He had no idea how good those words were.
“I can’t move,” I said, my eyes filling with hot tears of frustration and embarrassment.
His hands on my ankles startled me, but the slow movements as they moved to my calves quickly calmed my blood.
“I’m putting your feet back on the rungs, Allie,” Bash said. “Do you feel that?” His hands moved back down to my feet, pushing down on my toes, shoving the balls of my feet against the metal.
“Yes.”
“Okay, just stay like that,” he said. “I’m coming up higher behind you.”
Like I had a choice. I felt the ladder move a little as he came up another rung and his hands slid slowly up my jeans to just above the backs of my knees. If I weren’t so terrified, or mortified beyond measure, I might have been turned on.
“Take one more step down,” he said. “I’m right here.”
I shut my eyes. “So my ass is basically in your face.”
I felt him laugh. “Yeah, it’s rough to be me.” He reached up slowly and took hold of my hips. “Come on, I’ve got you.”
“Yeah, so you keep saying,” I said, trying to calm my trembling hands and stem back the tears. “But who has you?”
“Come on,” he repeated. “You just need to stop thinking about where you are, and concentrate on feeling the rungs under your feet. Just get standing upright again and get off the building, then it’s a piece of cake.”
“Oh hell, that’s all?” I said under my breath. “Damn, you’re a genius.”
“Hey, I can leave—”
“No!” I yelped. “Just—it’s just not that simple. It’s—”
“I get it, Allie,” Bash said, letting the pause that followed fill the space. “But you’re going to have to trust me. I’ve got you. I won’t let you fall.”
I blew out a breath and flexed my fingers. “Shit, shit, shit.”
“I’ll count to three.”
“Do you have insurance?”
“Medical or life?” he asked.
“Both?”
“We aren’t falling off this ladder,” Bash said. “We’re adults and we know how to use our feet.”
My eyes popped open. Was that a slam? I was pretty sure that was a slam.
“You—you think I’m just being a wuss here?” I kicked at where I felt he was, but then panicked when I couldn’t find the rung again.
“You’re trying to kick me off the ladder?” he asked, shoving my foot back into place.
“Just—” I swallowed hard. “Just get down and hold it still so it doesn’t move,” I said. “I’ll make it down.”
He did. Thank God. Sort of—because now I was up there by myself again, and that hadn’t worked so well the last time. Hell if I was going to cave this time, however. Not with his cocky-assed smart- (and sexy) mouth patronizing me with we know how to use our feet.
It was chilly out and I hadn’t worn a jacket over my jeans and T-shirt, but I was sweating from head to toe and my heart was about to come bouncing right up my throat. What the hell was I thinking?
One inch at a time, I thought. Slowly, methodically, I pushed back in tiny increments until I could theoretically stand up on the ladder, and then I inched some more till I was sliding my body down to the next rung like a sloth.
“There’s a technique I’ve never seen,” Bash said, closer than I thought he was.
“I thought you were on the ground,” I said, finding a foothold.
“Just keep going,” he said. “Don’t worry about me.”
Sliding was working. I could not explain why slithering down slightly spread-eagled with no real grip to speak of was less scary than stepping the traditional way, but it was. It was faster. More productive. Until—
“Oh!” I screamed as my grip-that-really-wasn’t slid off track and my calm sliding concept turned into a spasmic moment of grope and flail. Landing hard and ungraceful, straddling Bash’s torso.