Chapter 96

... Four months later...

So, Emma got settled in with Brent. She did visit about once a week or so and we had plenty of fun together (Brent included occasionally, ) just not as frequently as when she’d lived twenty feet away. Ah well. She also spoke to Jess (and, less frequently, to me) on the phone nearly daily.

Mike, for his part, was the perfect neighbor. Jess thought him shockingly quiet and low-key for an eighteen-year-old living on his own for the first time. No parties, no loud music, no TV blasting, not even loud talking after 8 pm. Whenever Jess was coming home with groceries, Mike always seemed to see her car and would come running out to help her.

We had no way of knowing that he’d taken Emma’s comment about being a “good neighbor” very, VERY seriously. He was so excited to be out of his parent’s house that he wasn’t going to do anything that might jeopardize it. Emma had really only said it as an inside joke, but it was no joke to Mike. He wasn’t sure how serious she was but with her subsidizing the vast majority of his rent, he was not going to take any chances at all. His quiet nature was ironic because Jess and I were rather noisy neighbors as was established way back in chapter one.

We met Liz a few weeks after Mike moved in. He was very nervous around us when she was there so we kept things rated PG for his behalf. Maybe he was afraid Jess would just whip a dildo out of her pocket at any minute or something. Not entirely an unfounded fear.

She was a nice enough girl and we could tell Mike really liked her. We, of course, knew the whole story about Mike, Liz, and Emma in the break-room, so we knew that Liz had a kinky streak too, but we liked Mike, so we tried not to stress him out when she was there. And then we noted that she was staying over more and more frequently as of late. Good for him.

It was early winter, between Thanksgiving and Christmas, when Emma called.

“Hey, I have some pretty big news to share with you guys,” she said.

“Really? What’s up?” Jess asked.

“I can’t tell you, it’s a secret. I have to show you. I’m going to text you an address. Can you and Aaron be there at 4 pm?” Emma asked.

“4? Sure, that should be ok. We’ll see you then!”

Later that afternoon, Jess and I arrived at the address provided. It turned out to be a storefront downtown. The faded paint where the old signage was told us that it had, in a previous lifetime, been “Albert’s Hardware”.

The building was brick with a full-length glass front; we couldn’t see anything inside because all the windows were covered in brown craft paper. Waiting outside when we arrived were Liz and Mike. We parked on the street behind Liz’s Altima and got out.